Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s objections against the possibility of a science of aesthetics were influential on different sides of the analytic/continental divide. Heidegger’s anti-scientism leads him to an alētheic view of artworks which precedes and exceeds any possible aesthetic reduction. Wittgenstein also rejects the relevance of causal…[Read more]

Genevieve Lloyd argues that when we follow Spinoza in understanding reason as a part of nature, we gain new insights into the human condition. Specifically, we gain a new political insight: we should respond to cultural difference with a pluralist ethos. This is because there is no pure universal reason; human minds find their reason shaped…[Read more]

Students often have difficulty connecting theoretical and text-based scholarship to the real world. When teaching in Asia, this disconnection is exacerbated by the European/American focus of many canonical texts, whereas students’ own experiences are primarily Asian. However, in my discipline of political philosophy, this problem receives little…[Read more]

According to a recent interpretive orthodoxy, Spinoza is a profoundly democratic theorist of state authority. I reject this orthodoxy. To be sure, for Spinoza, a political order succeeds in proportion as it harnesses the power of the people within it. However, Spinoza shows that political inclusion is only one possible strategy to this end;…[Read more]

At the centre of Powers’ (2019) China and England is an extraordinary forgotten episode in the history of political ideas. There was a time when English radicals critiqued the corruption and injustice of the English political system by contrasting it with the superior example of China. There was a time when they advocated adopting a Chinese…[Read more]

The book draws on the political writings of Hobbes and Spinoza to establish a conceptual framework for understanding the genesis, risks, and promise of popular power.
It makes an original contribution at the intersection of early modern philosophy and democratic theory.

This paper addresses a curious pattern of interlocking relationships. This pattern unfolds in a fixed form of ever-changing content, or what is often described as a ‘standing wave’. I will attribute this pattern to the interactive nervous system that synchronizes the periodic effects of four, neurological functions. These functions connect a par…[Read more]

The essay is an analytical critique of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act by deconstructing it in regards to a wide range of legal (national and international), political and moral issues. I argue how the CAA finds itself at odds with some of the founding principles of our democracy, and also fails to serve as a citizenship law under accepted customs…[Read more]

These slides talk about open educational resources generally (what they are, why they are valuable), and also some ways to find OER for philosophy courses.

Slides for a guest lecture on Foucault for Humanities 101, a free course at the University of British Columbia Vancouver for members of the community. These slides talk about Foucault’s view of power and resistance, panopticism, visibility, and the self.

I was intrigued by the title of this book. Finally, I thought, the Western academia has come to terms with the incorporeality of the individual soul as presented in Indian philosophy. Richard Swinburne’s introduction dispelled my delusions. He proposes that individuals are not bodies but are souls and implies that these souls have properties and t…[Read more]

This book challenges an assumption at the heart of contemporary theoretical debates: that it is impossible to reason through history. Steele believes that two influential schools of contemporary thought “hide from history”: liberal philosophies of public reason as espoused by such figures as Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum and stru…[Read more]

Althusser’s thinking about education and law stands out for two reasons. First, whereas most accounts of school law fall under a broadly liberal category, Althusser’s—like most Marxists’—emphasizes school law as repressive, ideological, and reproductive of capitalism. Second, what distinguishes Althusser among Marxists generally is his landmark…[Read more]

This project recovers what we call a “Marxist Feminist eye” in critical educational research. We begin by tracing the roots of this project, discussing the gender disparity present in the traditionally-cited literature of critical pedagogy. Next, we share a brief history of Marxist Feminist work, looking at educational research by Mad…[Read more]

el 29 de enero de 2016, en el marco de un congreso dedicado al pensamiento de alain badiou (badiou and the presence of philosophy. crossing the french-german border) celebrado en la universidad de las artes de berlín (udk), tuvo lugar un coloquio entre el propio badiou y jean-luc nancy cuyo contenido aparece publicado ahora por la editorial…[Read more]

Spanish Abstract: Partiendo de un madrigal de William Drummond of Hawthornden, comentamos el papel estructurador que desempeñan en la generación y gestión de la realidad los marcos interaccionales de referencia definidos por Goffman, en tanto que instrumentos de gestión de la atención colectiva. Es la capacidad de la mente humana para comb…[Read more]

Review of: Neoplatonism after Derrida. Parallelograms. By Stephen Gersh. Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2006. Pp. xv + 223. $147.00 (cloth). ISBN 9789004151550.

Review: (M.) Martijn Proclus on Nature. Philosophy of Nature and its Methods in Proclus’ Commentary on Plato’s Timaeus. Leiden: Brill, 2010. Pp. x + 360. £105. 978900-4181915 The Journal of Hellenic Studies, 2012

Neoplatonism after Derrida is a significant study of the history of philosophy, and covers ground rarely explored before, in an extremely thorough, fruitful, and persuasive manner. However, it poses serious interpretive problems for the reader. It presents an extremely detailed and complex analysis of both Neoplatonism and Derridean…[Read more]