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298This report is the product of the Arts-and-Humanities Research Council’s Connected Communities programme. The specific project being undertaken at the University of Liverpool is entitled Philosophy of Religion and Religious Communities: Defining Beliefs and Symbols. The aim of the Liverpool project as a whole is to consider the contribution philosophy of religion can make to recent debates surrounding legal cases alleging religious discrimination. Its orienting question runs, ‘when, if ever, is …Read more
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24Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg (edited book)Palgrave Macmillan. 2020.Interrogating Modernity returns to Hans Blumenberg's epochal The Legitimacy of the Modern Age as a springboard to interrogate questions of modernity, secularisation, technology and political legitimacy in the fields of political theology, history of ideas, political theory, art theory, history of philosophy, theology and sociology. That is, the twelve essays in this volume return to Blumenberg's work to think once more about how and why we should value the modern. Written by a group of leading i…Read more
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Two Poems by F.W.J. SchellingClio: A Journal of Literature, History, and the Philosophy of History 43 (2): 177-196. 2014.
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22Naturalism and symbolismAngelaki 21 (4): 91-109. 2016.I argue that Schelling’s construction of symbolic language is to be understood as an application of Naturphilosophie; indeed, more generally, that the concept of the symbol theorised anew in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Germany was predominantly a naturphilosophische concept, and its transfer into the discourses of aesthetics and ultimately linguistics was one instance of a broader project to understand aesthetic phenomena through the explanatory framework of naturalism. That is…Read more
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34Schelling on IndividuationComparative and Continental Philosophy 8 (3): 329-344. 2016.This paper traces Schelling’s discussions of individuation from the 1799 Erster Entwurf eines Systems der Naturphilosophie to the 1802 dialogue, Bruno. It argues that the Erster Entwurf is unable to solve what Schelling there calls “the highest problem of the philosophy of nature,” because nature as pure productivity necessarily tends to annihilate all individuality. It is only in 1801 and 1802, the years that mark Schelling’s construction of an Identitätssystem, that a solution emerges. This so…Read more
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72Post-Established Harmony: Kant and Analogy ReconsideredSophia 52 (2): 235-258. 2013.This essay is a response to John Milbank’s comparison of Kant and Aquinas’ theories of analogy in ‘A Critique of the Theology of Right’. A critique of Milbank’s essay forms the point of departure for my reconstruction of Kant’s actual theory of analogy. I show that the usual focus on the Prolegomena for this end is insufficient; in fact, the full extent of Kant’s theory of analogy only becomes clear in the Critique of Judgment. I also consider the significance of the Analogies of Experience in t…Read more
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21The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century PhilosophyBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 20 (4). 2012.British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Volume 20, Issue 4, Page 849-852, July 2012
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39Purely Practical Reason: Normative Epistemology from Leibniz to MaimonEpoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (2): 395-419. 2014.In this paper, I contend that a crucial historical precedent for contemporary interest in virtue epistemology is to be found in Leibniz-Wolffian rationalism. For philosophers from Wolff to Lessing, epistemology was thoroughly normative; that is, the task of epistemology was not to describe knowledge, but set rules for the amelioration of knowledge. Such a normative stance was transferred into cognate disciplines, such as aesthetics, as well. I further argue that after Kant’s Copernican revolutio…Read more
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23The lever as instrument of reason: technological constructions of knowledge around 1800: by Jocelyn Holland, London, Bloomsbury, 2019, pp. 208 + vi, £96.00 (hb), ISBN: 9781501346057British Journal for the History of Philosophy 28 (4): 851-853. 2020.Volume 28, Issue 4, July 2020, Page 851-853.
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28Schelling’s afterlives: introductionInternational Journal of Philosophy and Theology 80 (1-2): 2-7. 2019.ABSTRACTIn this editorial introduction, we set out the contexts, aims and contents of this special issue on Schelling’s influence on later religious and theological thought, as well as the rationale behind its genesis.
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10The Schelling-Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801: Nature and IdentityEdinburgh University Press. 2020.Berger and Whistler provide a ground-breaking account of Schelling's first controversy with his critic A.C.A. Eschenmayer in 1801, which focused on the philosophy of nature. They argue that key Schellingian concepts, such as identity, potency and abstraction, were first forged in his early debate with Eschenmayer.
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24How Speak of Eternity?Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (2): 343-365. 2018.The aim of this essay is to investigate the stylistic idiosyncrasies of Part V of Spinoza’s Ethics by focusing on the experience of the reader encountering this text: what is missed in most accounts, I argue, is the rhetorical effect of Spinoza’s language on a reader approaching the end of the book. The reader experiences hermeneutic anxiety upon encountering a God who loves, rejoices and glories in a relatively traditional manner after the iconoclastic dismantling of the traditional attributes …Read more
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29Anachronism in Recent Moral PhilosophyPhilosophy and Rhetoric 50 (3): 247-271. 2017.In this article, I examine a distinctive position in moral philosophy that, following Bernard Williams, I label “postanalytic”. In one of his final essays, “What Might Philosophy Become?”, Williams sets out a program for extending moral philosophy beyond its traditional “limits” in a way that will transform it into an embodied, historical, and political form of reflective practice.1 This programmatic intent has been shared by a number of moral philosophers since, some of whom are expressly influ…Read more
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39Howie’s Between Feminism and Materialism and the Critical History of ReligionsSophia 53 (2): 183-192. 2014.This essay traces the notion of abstraction through the works of Gillian Howie as a means of thinking through the nature of critique within philosophy of religion. In particular, it argues that Howie’s recovery of a more productive conception of abstraction in her late Between Feminism and Materialism is closely linked to the resurgence of real abstraction in recent Marxist theory. From these shifts, one can derive both an enriched conception of religion as real abstraction and a method of criti…Read more
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36Gilles Deleuze and MetaphysicsLexington Books. 2014.This collection examines an aspect of Gilles Deleuze’s thought that has largely been neglected; whether or not Deleuze was a metaphysician. Answering this question may reveal the problematic nature of so-called postmodernism and the critique it leveled at the first philosophy, and it may help readers to better understand philosophy’s fate
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67Kant’s imitatio ChristiInternational Journal for Philosophy of Religion 67 (1). 2010.This article retrieves Kant's imitatio Christi as a viable alternative to the recent construal of mimesis as a universal human desire, in particular to Ward's reformulation of the imitatio Christi in such terms (in which the human condition is defined by an intrinsic desire for God as other). Kant's writings participate in a very different debate on imitation (one sceptical of its ethical value), and this plays out as a continual ambivalence towards the concept in his work. Kant's imitatio Chris…Read more
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12After the postsecular and the postmodern: new essays in continental philosophy of religion (edited book)Cambridge Scholars Press. 2010.Continental philosophy of religion has been dominated for two decades by "postsecular" and "postmodern" thought. This volume brings together a vanguard of scholars to ask what comes after the postsecular and the postmodern that is, what is Continental philosophy of religion now? Against the subjugation of philosophy to theology, After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion argues that philosophy of religion must either liberate itself from theologica…Read more
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Diotima's Children By Frederick BeiserAmerican Society for Aesthetics Graduate E-Journal 2 (2): 15-16. 2010.
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Royal Holloway University of LondonProfessor
Areas of Specialization
19th Century French Philosophy |
19th Century German Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy, Miscellaneous |