-
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
-
24Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason Reviewed by (review)Philosophy in Review 25 (5): 343-346. 2005.
-
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
-
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
-
Herman Rapaport, Later Derrida: Reading the Recent Work (review)Philosophy in Review 24 47-49. 2004.
-
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.
-
2478Deleuze 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
-
Paul Patton and John Protevi, eds., Between Deleuze and Derrida (review)Philosophy in Review 23 399-402. 2003.
-
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
-
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
-
19John Llewelyn, Appositions of Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas Reviewed byPhilosophy in Review 23 (1): 44-46. 2003.
-
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 ...
-
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
-
Jacques Derrida, Eyes of the University: Right to Philosophy 2 (review)Philosophy in Review 25 343-346. 2005.
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
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
-
82Kirby, Merleau-Ponty, and the Question of an Embodied DeconstructionContretemps (3): 133-47. 2002.In Telling Flesh: the Substance 0f the C0rporeul, Vicki Kirby suggests, among other things, that it is not in the interests of feminism to propound what she describes as an ‘inessentialist’ position in regards to embodiment. While she objects to undifferentiating biological givens that might, for example, attempt to construe women as confined to a nurturing role, she also does not want to simplistically insist that embodiment has nothing to do with subjectivity. To pose the problem in terms more…Read more
-
39Merleau-Ponty: Key ConceptsRoutledge. 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
-
139Time, Philosophy and ChronopathologiesParrhesia (15): 64-80. 2012.This essay is an elaboration on some central themes and arguments from my recent book, Chronopathologies: Time and Politics in Deleuze, Derrida, Phenomenology and Analytic Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield 2012). There is hence an element of generality to this essay that the book itself is better able to justify. But a short programmatic piece has its own virtues, especially for those of us who are time poor (which is pretty much everyone in contemporary academia). Moreover, it adds a dimension…Read more
-
60Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics: Complementary Anti-theoretical Methodological and Ethical Trajectories?In K. Hermberg P. Gyllenhammer, Kevin Hermberg & Paul Gyllenhammer (eds.), Phenomenology and Virtue Ethics: Issues inPhenomenology and Hermeneutics, Continuum. 2013.In this paper, I argue that the negative injunctions against certain ways of conceiving of the ethico-political that we can draw explicitly from the methodological strictures of phenomenology are also consistent with some of the core more positive dimensions of contemporary virtue ethics (especially at the more anti-theoretical end of the virtue ethical spectrum), and that central aspects of virtue ethics are consistent with most of the explicit reflections on ethical matters proffered by canoni…Read more
-
210Introduction: Post-analytic and meta-continental philosophyIn James Williams, Edwin Mares, James Chase & Jack Reynolds (eds.), Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides, Continuum. 2010.This chapter sketches some of the difficulties involved in defining analytic and continental philosophy, but begins to elaborate an argument for the centrality of methodology to the 'divide'.
-
157Sadism and Masochism: A Symptomatology of Analytic and Continental PhilosophyParrhesia 1 (1): 15. 2006.There has recently been a plethora of attempts to understand the key differences that separate the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy, often involving either painstaking descriptions of the divergent argumentative techniques and methodologies that concern them, or comparatively examining in detail the work of certain major theorists in both traditions (e.g. Rawls and Derrida, Lewis and Deleuze). While partly drawing on these two approaches, in this particular essay I instead propo…Read more
-
62Derrida, friendship and the transcendental priority of the ‘untimely’Philosophy and Social Criticism 36 (6): 663-676. 2010.This article examines Derrida’s insistence on the contretemps that breaks open time, paying particular attention to Politics of Friendship and the way in which this book envisages the ‘untimely’ as both interrupting, and making possible, friendship. Although I suggest that Derrida’s temporal deconstruction of the Aristotelian distinction between utility and ‘perfect’ friendships is convincing, I also argue that Derrida’s own account of friendship is itself touched by time, in the peculiar sense …Read more
-
61Philosophy’s Shame: Reflections on an Ambivalent/Ambiviolent Relationship with ScienceSophia 55 (1): 55-70. 2016.In this paper, I take inspiration from some themes in Ann Murphy’s recent book, Violence and the Philosophical Imaginary, especially her argument that philosophy’s identity and relation to itself depends on an intimate relationship with that which is designated as not itself, the latter of which is a potential source of shame that calls for some form of response. I argue that this shame is particularly acute in regard to the natural sciences, which have gone on in various ways to distance themse…Read more
-
210Negotiating the Non-negotiable: Rawls, Derrida, and the Intertwining of Political Calculation and 'Ultra-politics'Theory and Event 9 (3): 15. 2006.I examine the relationship that obtains between the work of Derrida and Rawls, not least because of the conviction that Derrida (and post-structuralism more generally) offers certain invaluable things to political thought that analytic political philosophy would do well to take account of, particularly as concerns the relation between time and politics. In Derrida’s case, his emphasis on the radical difference of the future, the ‘to come’, serves as a guardrail against political absolutisms of a…Read more
Geelong, Victoria, Australia
Areas of Specialization
Metaphilosophy |
Continental Philosophy |
Perception |
Philosophy of Science, Miscellaneous |
Perception and Phenomenology |
PhilPapers Editorships
20th Century Philosophy |