e popular idea, especially among the young, is that religion and spirituality are things of the old age. We generally think that spirituality is a post-retirement plan; something which has to be enjoyed with the gratuity, provident fund, and pension that you get after retirement. This is not true. Spirituality is something we need when we are…[Read more]

Spanish abstract: Notas, debates y comentarios con ocasión del congreso The “Holocaust Metaphor” (La ́Metáfora del Holocausto ́), en la Facultad de Filosofía y Letras de la Universidad de Zaragoza (a finales de mayo de 2013). _________________________________________________________________________

English abstract: Notes, debates and comm…[Read more]

This is the syllabus for an introductory course on Marx and critical theory that I taught at Binghamton University in the spring semester, 2020. It revises and expands an earlier iteration of the course that I had taught in spring, 2018, also at Binghamton University.

This is a review of the book “Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, Jeffrey J. Kripal, University of Chicago Press, 1995” . “Kali’s child” fell well short of a proof that Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences were actually “profoundly, provocatively, scandalously erotic”. To reconstruct the autobiogr…[Read more]

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]