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141Touched by Time: Some Critical Reflections on Derrida’s Engagement with Merleau-Ponty in Le ToucherSophia 47 (3): 311-25. 2008.The philosophical relationship that obtains between the work of Merleau-Ponty and Derrida has continued to intrigue and preoccupy many of us despite, or perhaps even partly because of, the fact that Derrida did not accord the work of Merleau-Ponty much attention during his remarkably prolific career. Two relatively recent books of Derrida’s have addressed this gap: Memoirs of the Blind and, more recently, On Touching. However, although Derrida proposes an “entire re-reading” of the later Merleau…Read more
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99Chronopathologies: The Politics of Time in Deleuze, Derrida, Analytic Philosophy and PhenomenologyLexington Books, Rowman and Littlefield. 2011.A battle over the politics of time is a major part of what is at stake in the differences between three competing currents of contemporary philosophy: analytic philosophy, post-structuralist philosophy, and phenomenological philosophy. Avowed or tacit philosophies of time define representatives of each of these groups and also guard against their potential interlocutors. However, by bringing the temporal differences between these philosophical trajectories to the fore, and showing both their met…Read more
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23Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 25 (5): 343-346. 2005.
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208Existentialism and Poststructuralism: Some Unfashionable ObservationsIn Felicity Joseph, Jack Reynolds & Ashley Woodward (eds.), Continuum Companion to Existentialism, Continuum. pp. 260. 2011.This chapter challenges the received doxa that the generation of ‘poststructuralist’ philosophers broke decisively with existentialism and rendered it out of date, a mere historical curiosity. Drawing on recent research in the area, it draws some lines of influence, and even argues for some surprising points of commonality, between existentialism and poststructuralism. At least some of the core philosophical ideas of poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze …Read more
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151The Master-slave dialectic and the 'sado-masochistic entity': Some ObjectionsAngelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 14 (3): 11-25. 2009.Hegel’s famous analyses of the ‘master-slave dialectic’, and the more general struggle for recognition which it is a part of, have been remarkably influential throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bound up with the dominance of this idea, however, has been a corresponding treatment of sadism and masochism as complicit projects that are mutually necessary for one another in a manner that is structurally isomorphic with the way in which master and slave depend on one another. In clini…Read more
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22Chickening Out and the Idea of Continental PhilosophyInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (2): 255-72. 2009.Despite its consistently mild tone, Simon Glendinning’s The Idea of Continental Philosophy is a provocative and uncompromising work. It is to be admired for this. Without “chickening out” (94), Glendinning purports to show that there can be no coherent philosophical understanding of continental philosophy as comprising any sort of distinct or unified tradition. Furthermore, he argues that the vast majority of us working in this so-called tradition actually know this at some level but shy away fr…Read more
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226Transcendental Arguments About Other Minds and IntersubjectivityPhilosophy Compass 6 (5): 300-311. 2011.This article describes some of the main arguments for the existence of other minds, and intersubjectivity more generally, that depend upon a transcendental justification. This means that our focus will be largely on ‘continental’ philosophy, not only because of the abiding interest in this tradition in thematising intersubjectivity, but also because transcendental reasoning is close to ubiquitous in continental philosophy. Neither point holds for analytic philosophy. As such, this essay will int…Read more
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141Merleau-Ponty: Key ConceptsAcumen Publishing. 2008.Having initially not had the attention of Sartre or Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty's work is arguably now more widely influential than either of his two contemporaries. "Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts" presents an accessible guide to the core ideas which structure Merleau-Ponty's thinking as well as to his influences and the value of his ideas to a wide range of disciplines. The first section of the book presents the context of Merleau-Ponty's thinking, the major debates of his time, particularly existen…Read more
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Jacques Taminiaux, The Metamorphoses of Phenomenological Reduction (review)Philosophy in Review 24 302-303. 2004.
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140Transcendental Priority and Deleuzian Normativity. A Reply to James WilliamsDeleuze and Guatarri Studies 2 (1): 101-108. 2008.I am grateful that someone whose work I greatly admire could be the philosopher to so eloquently and succinctly cut to the heart of the problem that I posed in the previous issue of Deleuze Studies. James Williams' critical reply leaves me, prima facie, confronted by a stark alternative: either I have misunderstood Deleuze, or I have illustrated problems and lacunae in Deleuze. I will suggest, however, that this is a false alternative, and that Williams' and my divergent accounts of The Logic of…Read more
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41Philosophy and/or politicsIn Matthew Sharpe, Rory Jeffs & Jack Reynolds (eds.), 100 years of European philosophy since the Great War: crisis and reconfigurations, Springer. pp. 215-232. 2017.In this chapter, I revisit the question of the philosophical significance of the Great War upon the trajectory of philosophy in the twentieth century. While accounts of this are very rare in philosophy, and this is itself symptomatic, those that are given are also strangely implausible. They usually assert one of two things: that the War had little or no philosophical significance because most of the major developments had already begun, or—at the opposite extreme—they maintain that nothing was …Read more
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24Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 25 (5): 343-346. 2005.
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100Reply to GlendinningInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (2). 2009.This "reply" continues the debate with Simon Glendinning regarding his book The Idea of Continental Philosophy, and pursues my claim that there is a distinctive 'temporal turn' associated with twentieth century continental philosophy. I also offer some family resemblance criteria for continental philosophy.
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Herman Rapaport, Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work (review)Philosophy in Review 24 47-49. 2004.
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2487Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and PhenomenologyJournal of the British Society of Phenomenology 37 (3): 228-51. 2006.This paper will seek firstly to understand Deleuze’s main challenges to phenomenology, particularly as they are expressed in The Logic of Sense and What is Philosophy?, although reference will also be made to Pure Immanence and Difference and Repetition. We will then turn to a discussion of one of the few passages in which Deleuze directly engages with Merleau-Ponty, which occurs in the chapter on art in What is Philosophy? In this text, he and Guattari offer a critique of what they call the “fi…Read more
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Paul Patton and John Protevi, eds., Between Deleuze and Derrida (review)Philosophy in Review 23 399-402. 2003.
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130Continuum Companion to Existentialism (edited book)Continuum. 2011.The Continuum Companion to Existentialism offers the definitive guide to a key area of modern European philosophy. The book covers the fundamental questions asked by existentialism, providing valuable guidance for students and researchers to some of the many important and enduring contributions of existentialist thinkers. Eighteen specially commissioned essays from an international team of experts explore existentialism’s relationship to philosophical method; ontology; politics; psychoanalysis; …Read more
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103Maurice Merleau-pontyInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2001.Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s work is commonly associated with the philosophical movement called existentialism and its intention to begin with an analysis of the concrete experiences, perceptions, and difficulties, of human existence. However, he never propounded quite the same extreme accounts of radical freedom, being-towards-death, anguished responsibility, and conflicting relations with others, for which existentialism became both famous and notorious in the 1940s and 1950s. Perhaps because of th…Read more
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81Understanding Derrida (edited book)Continuum. 2004.The essays cover language, metaphysics, the subject, politics, ethics, the decision, translation, religion, psychoanalysis, literature, art, and Derrida's ...
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116Throughout much of the twentieth century, the relationship between analytic and continental philosophy has been one of disinterest, caution or hostility. Recent debates in philosophy have highlighted some of the similarities between the two approaches and even envisaged a post-continental and post-analytic philosophy. Opening with a history of key encounters between philosophers of opposing camps since the late nineteenth century - from Frege and Husserl to Derrida and Searle - the book goes on …Read more
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19John Llewelyn, Appositions of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 23 (1): 44-46. 2003.
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94Direct Perception, Inter-subjectivity, and Social Cognition: Why Phenomenology is a Necessary but not Sufficient ConditionThe New Yearbook for Phenomenology and Phenomenological Research 333-354. 2015.In this paper I argue that many of the core phenomenological insights, including the emphasis on direct perception, are a necessary but not sufficient condition for an adequate account of inter-subjectivity today. I take it that an adequate account of inter-subjectivity must involve substantial interaction with empirical studies, notwithstanding the putative methodological differences between phenomenological description and scientific explanation. As such, I will need to explicate what kind of …Read more
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Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 (review)Philosophy in Review 25 343-346. 2005.
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117Existentialism, Philosophy ofIn Michael T. Gibbons (ed.), The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, Wiley-blackwell. 2014.This chapter examines the connections between French existentialism and politics. Fellow travellers like Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, and de Beauvoir saw themselves as engaging with two theoretical trajectories that for them dominated the mid-twentieth century intellectual milieu, one of which was ostensibly apolitical (phenomenology), the other of which involved a politicised understanding of philosophy (Marxism). Part of the motivation behind renewing phenomenology as existential phenomenology, as o…Read more
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155Continental Philosophy and Chickening Out: A Reply to Simon GlendinningInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (2): 255-72. 2009.This paper critically engages with Simon Glendinning’s The Idea of Continental Philosophy. Glendinning purports to show that there can be no coherent philosophical understanding of continental philosophy as comprising any sort of distinct or unified tradition. In this paper, however, I raise some questions about the largely unilateral direction in which his account of the motives for the divide is pursued: analytic philosophy is envisaged as pathologically projecting the internal and unavoidabl…Read more
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244Common sense and philosophical methodology: Some metaphilosophical reflections on analytic philosophy and DeleuzePhilosophical Forum 41 (3): 231-258. 2010.On the question of precisely what role common sense (or related datum like folk psychology, trust in pre-theoretic/intuitive judgments, etc.) should have in reigning in the possible excesses of our philosophical methods, the so-called ‘continental’ answer to this question, for the vast majority, would be “as little as possible”, whereas the analytic answer for the vast majority would be “a reasonably central one”. While this difference at the level of both rhetoric and meta-philosophy is sometim…Read more
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83Phenomenology and Science (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2016.This book investigates the complex, sometimes fraught relationship between phenomenology and the natural sciences. The contributors attempt to subvert and complicate the divide that has historically tended to characterize the relationship between the two fields. Phenomenology has traditionally been understood as methodologically distinct from scientific practice, and thus removed from any claim that philosophy is strictly continuous with science. There is some substance to this thinking, which h…Read more
Geelong, Victoria, Australia
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Metaphilosophy |
Continental Philosophy |
Perception |
Philosophy of Science, Miscellaneous |
Perception and Phenomenology |
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20th Century Philosophy |