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8Retuning Orpheus' Lyre: The classical heritage's antidotes to cultural pessimismAustralian Humanist, The 120 10. 2016.Sharpe, Matthew Let me begin with words from a different, more optimistic time: 'For it may be truly affirmed to the honour of these times, and in a virtuous emulation with antiquity, that this great building of the world had never throughlights made in it, till the age of us and our fathers. For although they had knowledge of the antipodes,... yet that might be by demonstration, and not in fact; and if by travel, it requireth the voyage but of half the globe. But to circle the earth, as the hea…Read more
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37Publicizing the Essentially Private: Leo Strauss’s Platonic AristophanesSymposium 18 (2): 3-32. 2014.Political philosopher Leo Strauss’s extensive engagements with Aristophanes’s comedies represent a remarkable perspective in debates concerning the political and wider meaning of Aristophanes’s plays. Yet they have attracted nearly no critical response. This paper argues that for Strauss, Aristophanes was a very serious, philosophically-minded author who wrote esoterically, using the comic form to convey his conception of man, and his answer to the Socraticquestion of the best form of life. Part…Read more
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56The Aesthetics of Ideology, or ‘The Critique of Ideological Judgment’ in Eagleton and ZizekPolitical Theory 34 (1): 95-120. 2006.The notions of ‘ideology’ and ‘critique of ideology’ have been criticised in manyways. This essay examines theworks of two contemporary theorists who defend this theoretical category. Interestingly, both do this through pivotal recourse to categories drawn from modern aesthetic theory, and in particular Kant's third Critique. In thisway, they reanimate a theoretical concern with the intersection of politics and aesthetics that goes as far back as Plato. The essay's conclusion reflects on this “a…Read more
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30Not for personal gratification, or for contention, or to look down on others, or for convenience, reputation, or powerJournal of Early Modern Studies 4 (2): 37-68. 2015.This paper examines the apology for the life of the mind Francis Bacon gives in Book I of his 1605 text The Advancement of Learning. Like recent work on Bacon led by the ground-breaking studies of Corneanu, Harrison and Gaukroger, I argue that Bacon’s conception and defence of intellectual inquiry in this extraordinary text is framed by reference to the classical model, which had conceived and justified philosophising as a way of life or means to the care of the inquirer’s soul or psyche. In par…Read more
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Crisis and Reconfigurations: 100 years of European Thinking After World War 1 (edited book)Springer. forthcoming.
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44Killing the father, Parmenides: On Lacan’s anti-philosophyContinental Philosophy Review 52 (1): 51-74. 2015.This paper examines the historical claims about philosophy, dating back to Parmenides, that we argue underlie Jacques Lacan’s polemical provocations in the mid-1970s that his position was an “anti-philosophie”. Following an introduction surveying the existing literature on the subject, in part ii, we systematically present the account of classical philosophy Lacan has in mind when he declares psychoanalysis to be an antiphilosophy after 1975, assembling his claims about the history of ideas in S…Read more
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20Camus, Philosophe: To Return to Our BeginningsBrill. 2015.In _Camus, Philosophe: To Return to our Beginnings_ Matthew Sharpe reads Camus as a _philosophe_ in the classical and enlightenment lineages, arguing that his defense of _mesure_ singles him out amidst 20th century French thought and makes him of renewed relevance today.
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52Slavoj Zizek is one of the most provocative and important thinkers writing in contemporary philosophy. This book is an engaged debate with Zizek. It contains a series of specially commissioned critical essays from an impressive collection of contributors covering the full extent of his oeuvre. Essays examine Zizek on cultural theory, film studies, ethics, political theory, social theory, Kant and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the spirit of Zizek‘s own interventions, these essays critically interro…Read more
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Aesthetics: On Levinas’ ShadowColloquy 9 29-46. 2005.Emmanuel Levinas aesthetics has been critically discussed much less than other components of his philosophy. In one way, this is not surprising, given Levinas wider post-war project. Nevertheless, in the late 1940s, the very time his influential later philosophy was taking shape, Levinas published a series of papers on literary criticism, and on the nature of art. istents and Existence, the text where Levinas first announces his project of leaving the climate of Heideggers thought, contains…Read more
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1On The Grounding Of Moral Value, Or Is A Post-kantian, Post-christian Morality Possible?Minerva 5 118-137. 2001.This paper stages a consideration of Slavoj Zizek’s recent texts discussing the Christian ethics of agape. Iread Zizek’s ‘turn’ to Christian ethics as not a violation of his earlier Kantianism, but as an attempt toovercome two related problems which haunt Kantian deontological moral philosophy. The first is theproblem that Kant severs morality too totally from the realm of ‘pathological’ inclination, and does notoffer us a realistic depiction of moral psychology. The second is that the formal em…Read more
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This paper stages an argument in five premises:1. That the insight to which post-structuralist ethics responds—which is that there is an 'unmistakableparticularity of concrete persons or social groups'—leads theorists who base their moral theory upon itinto a problematic parallel to that charted by Kant in his analysis of the sublime.2. That Kant's analysis of the sublime divides its experience into what I call two 'moments', the secondof which involves a reflexive move which the post-structural…Read more
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“then We Will Fight Them In The Shadows!”: Seven Parataxic Views, On Žižek’s StyleInternational Journal of Žižek Studies 4 (2). 2010.
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9Understanding PsychoanalysisRoutledge. 2008."Understanding Psychoanalysis" presents a broad introduction to the key concepts and developments in psychoanalysis and its impact on modern thought. Charting pivotal moments in the theorization and reception of psychoanalysis, the book provides a comprehensive account of the concerns and development of Freud's work, as well as his most prominent successors, Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan.The work of these leading psychoanalytic theorists has greatly influenced thinking across other disciplines…Read more
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1Stoic virtue ethicsIn S. van Hooft, N. Athanassoulis, J. Kawall, J. Oakley & L. van Zyl (eds.), The handbook of virtue ethics, Acumen Publishing. 2014.
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46How It's Not the Chrisippus You Read: On Cooper, Hadot, Epictetus, and Stoicism as a Way of LifePhilosophy Today 58 (3): 367-392. 2014.This article challenges John M. Cooper’s reading of ancient Stoicism as a way of life, one which sets its back against Pierre Hadot’s notion that Stoicism could have philosophically advocated regimens of non-cognitive practices of the kind documented by Hadot. Part 1 examines Arrian’s Discourses, following A. A. Long in seeing in this text Arrian’s portrait of Epictetus as a philosophical persona: one bringing together the different virtues of Socrates, Diogenes, and Zeno. Part 2 then examines E…Read more
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17Georgics of the Mind and the Architecture of Fortune: Francis Bacon's Therapeutic EthicsPhilosophical Papers 43 (1): 89-121. 2014.No abstract
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6Toula Nicolocapoulos, The Radical Critique of Liberalism: In Memory of a Vision (review)Critical Horizons 10 (3): 430-435. 2009.
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3Hadot, PierreIn James Fieser & Bradley Dowden (eds.), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, . 2011.
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8Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)In James Fieser & Bradley Dowden (eds.), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, . pp. 1--14. 2011.
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13Do Universals have a Reference? On the Critical Theory of Herbert MarcusePhilosophy Today 46 (2): 193-208. 2002.
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26Camus' Askesis : reading Camus in light of the Carnets (and his L'Impromptu des philosophes)Philosophical Practice 8 (1): 1149-1164. 2013.
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13Of diabolical evil, and related matters : on Slavoj Žižek's reading of Kant's practical philosophyInternational Journal of Žižek Studies 3 (3): 1-23. 2009.
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17Maistre avec de Sade: Zizek contra de maistreInternational Journal of Žižek Studies 1 (4): 1-24. 2007.It is possible to argue that the first world is presently living through a period of radical global reaction against the social democratic consensus of the twentieth century. In this context, the use of Slavoj Zizek's Lacnaian theory of ideology to critique the traditions of thought which inform this reaction becomes a vital task. In this paper, I use Zizek's Lacanian theory of ideology to critically analyse de Maistre's remarkable work: particularly his 'Considerations on France'. Zizek's empha…Read more
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20Kant, or the crack in the universal : Slavoj Zizek's politicising the transcendental turnInternational Journal of Žižek Studies 2 (2): 1-20. 2008.This paper examines Slavoj Zizek’s reading of Immanuel Kant. Its undergirding argument is that Zizek’s work as a whole- up to and including his politically radical statements, which have become more and more prominent since 1997- is conceivable as a project in the rereading of the Kantian ‘Copernican Revolution’ via Lacanian psychoanalysis. Critics now agree that Zizek’s orienting aim is to write a philosophy of politics, as more recent texts, like The Ticklish Subject make clear. (Kay, 2003; Sh…Read more
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27“Critchley is Žižek” : in defence of critical political philosophyCritical Horizons 10 (2): 180-196. 2009.In an ironically Žižekian manner, this paper argues that Simon Critchley and Slavoj Žižek's apparent political disagreement (ludic reformist versus strident revolutionary) conceal a common set of preconditions and presuppositions. These presuppositions can be summed by the slogan “the forgetting of political philosophy”, which more specifically means the forgetting of the difference between philosophy and political life, and the reflective need to find mediations between the two. Critchley's tur…Read more
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107Critique as technology of the selfFoucault Studies 2 97-116. 2005.This inquiry is situated at the intersection of two enigmas. The first is the enigma of the status of Kant's practice of critique, which has been the subject of heated debate since shortly after the publication of the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. The second enigma is that of Foucault's apparent later 'turn' to Kant, and the label of 'critique', to describe his own theoretical practice. I argue that Kant's practice of 'critique' should be read, after Foucault, as a distinctly mod…Read more
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7Zizek's communism and in defence of lost causesInternational Journal of Žižek Studies 4 (2): 1-7. 2010.
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64Is neoliberalism a Liberalism, or a strange kind of bird? On Hayek and our discontentsCritical Horizons 10 (1): 76-98. 2009.This paper examines the theoretical ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, arguably the key progenitor of the global economic orthodoxy of the past two decades. It assesses Hayek's thought as he presents it: namely as a form of liberalism. Section I argues that Hayek's thought, if liberal, is hostile to participatory democracy. Section II then argues the more radical thesis that neoliberalism is also in truth an illiberal doctrine. Founded not in any social contract doctrine, but a form of constructivism…Read more
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56Changing Aristotle's mind and world : critical notes on McDowell's AristotlePhilosophy Study 2 (11): 804-821. 2012.Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is central to John McDowell’s classic Mind and World. In Lectures IV and V of that work, McDowell makes three claims concerning Aristotle’s ethics: first, that Aristotle did not base his ethics on an externalist, naturalistic basis (including a theory of human nature); second, that attempts to read him as an ethical naturalist are a modern anachronism, generated by the supposed need to ground all viable philosophical claims on claims analogous to the natural scienc…Read more
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Deakin UniversityRegular Faculty
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Areas of Specialization
Social and Political Philosophy |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |