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29Žižek, SlavojInternet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2016.Slavoj Žižek Slavoj Žižek is a Slovenian-born political philosopher and cultural critic. He was described by British literary theorist, Terry Eagleton, as the “most formidably brilliant” recent theorist to have emerged from Continental Europe. Žižek’s work is infamously idiosyncratic. It features striking dialectical reversals of received common sense; a ubiquitous sense of humor; … Continue reading Žižek, Slavoj →
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28Unifying, Comparative, Critical and Metacritical: Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche as Aristocratic RebelCritical Horizons 23 (3): 284-304. 2022.ABSTRACT This review essay responds critically to the English translation of Domenico Losurdo’s monumental Friedrich Nietzsche: Aristocratic Rebel. It sets out to clearly identify and examine Losurdo’s two tasks in Nietzsche: firstly, his reconstruction of Nietzsche’s intellectual itinerary, from his earliest works until his descent into madness, in the context of later nineteenth-century social, political, philosophical, and eugenic sources; and secondly, to “interpret the interpretations”, and…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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26A Good Person for a Crisis? On the Wisdom of the Stoic SageEidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 5 (1): 32-49. 2021.Is the Stoic sage a possible or desirable ideal for contemporary men and women, as we enter into difficult times? Is he, as Seneca presents him, the very best person for a crisis? In order to examine these questions, Part 1 begins from what Irene Liu calls the “standard” modern conceptions of the sage as either a kind of epistemically perfect, omniscient agent, or else someone in possession of a specific arsenal of theoretical knowledge, especially concerning the physical world. We contest this …Read more
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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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25Camus and the Virtues (with and beyond Sherman)Philosophy Today 61 (3): 679-708. 2017.Albert Camus can be meaningfully read as an agent-focussed virtue ethicist, as David Sherman has suggested. Yet moving far beyond Sherman’s version of this claim, we show here how Camus accepts what are four definitive parameters of the classical authors’ conception of the virtues—the last of which takes him beyond today’s recognised “virtue ethicists.” Firstly, he understands the virtues as lasting, beneficent dispositions to think, feel, and act in certain ways. Secondly, he conceives the virt…Read more
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24Of Cartesianism and Spiritual ExercisesPhilosophy Today 66 (3): 471-489. 2022.This article challenges the recurrent critique that Pierre Hadot’s identification of ancient philosophy with the practice of spiritual exercises introduces a non- or irrational dimension into metaphilosophy. The occasion to do this is provided by Kerem Eksen’s recent reading of Descartes’s Meditations as consisting of solely intellectual, rather than spiritual, exercises—since the latter, Eksen claims, involve extrarational means and ends. Part 2 presents an alternative account of the role of co…Read more
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23Hunting Plato's AgalmataThe European Legacy 14 (5): 535-547. 2009.In this essay I argue that to understand Plato's philosophy, we must understand why Plato presented this philosophy as dialogues: namely, works of literature. Plato's writing of philosophy corresponds to his understanding of philosophy as a transformative way of life, which must nevertheless present itself politically, to different types of people. As a model, I examine Lacan's famous reading of Plato's Symposium in his seminar of transference love in psychoanalysis. Unlike many other readings, …Read more
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22Do Not Forget to LiveProceedings of the XXIII World Congress of Philosophy 22 93-99. 2018.Pierre Hadot is famous for his work on ancient philosophy, and the notion that ancient philosophia was conceived in the Greek schools as a way of life, including existential practices to reshape students’ beliefs, desires, and actions. Yet his last published book before his death in 2010 was the study N’Oublie Pas de Vivre, on the oeuvre of the modern German thinker and litterateur, Goethe. Hadot’s work throughout refuses to make a sharp distinction between ancients and moderns, interested rathe…Read more
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21Into the Heart of Darkness Or: Alt-Stoicism? Actually, No…Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 2 (4): 106-113. 2018.
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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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20There Is Not Just a War: Recalling the Therapeutic Metaphor in Western MetaphilosophySophia 55 (1): 31-54. 2016.This paper offers a critical response to the claims of Sivin and Lloyd and Mattice to the effect that Greek and Roman philosophy was characterised by a predominance of combat metaphors. Drawing on Plato and Plutarch, as well as contemporary studies led by Nussbaum, I argue that a host of different metaphors was demonstrably used in the Greek tradition to describe philosophy and its subjects, led by the therapeutic or medicinal metaphor of philosophy as ‘therapy of desire’ or of desiderative opin…Read more
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19Brill's Companion to Camus: Camus among the Philosophers (edited book)BRILL. 2020.This book is the first English-language collection of essays by leading Camus scholars around the world to focus on Albert Camus’ place and status as a philosopher amongst philosophers, engaging with leading Western thinkers, and considering themes of enduring interest.
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19The Topics Transformed: Reframing the Baconian Prerogative InstancesJournal of the History of Philosophy 56 (3): 429-454. 2018.john c. briggs has commented that "The reading of Baconian texts resembles the Baconian reading of nature, for in both the interpreter must discover a clue to the labyrinth."1 This thought certainly applies to the Praerogatiuis Instantiarum and their precise role in Bacon's Novum Organum.2 These instances occupy thirty-one of the fifty-two sections of Novum Organum II, whereas only nine are devoted to the much better-known work of the tabulation of affirmative, negative and deviating instances, …Read more
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19A disturbance of vision on the Capitol: Philosophy and the Far-Right – Towards an interdisciplinary inquiryThesis Eleven 163 (1): 5-28. 2021.
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18Camus, 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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17Pressing Questions for the Philosophical Life in a Time of CrisisEidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 5 (2): 1-6. 2021.Preview: 2020, the year the coronavirus pandemic spread globally, marked the twenty-fifth year since the publication of Pierre Hadot’s work Philosophy as a Way of Life. In that time, what began as the research specialization of just a few scholars has become a growing area of philosophical and metaphilosophical inquiry, bringing together researchers from around the globe. Hadot’s key ideas of spiritual exercises, and the very idea of PWL, have been applied to a host of individual thinkers from a…Read more
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17Simplicius the Neoplatonist in Light of Contemporary Research. A Critical Review, written by Ilsetraut Hadot and With Contributions by Philippe Vallat. Translated from the French by Ian DrummondInternational Journal of the Platonic Tradition 16 (1): 98-100. 2022.
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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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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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14Home to men’s business and bosoms: philosophy and rhetoric in Francis Bacon’s EssayesBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 27 (3): 492-512. 2019.ABSTRACTThis article claims that today’s reading of Francis Bacon’s Essayes as a solely literary text turns upon philosophers’ having largely lost access to the renaissance culture which Bacon inherited, and the renaissance debates about the role of rhetoric in philosophy in which Bacon participated. The article has two parts. Building upon Ronald Cranes’ seminal contribution on the place of the Essayes in Bacon’s ‘great instauration’, Part 1 examines how the subjects of Bacon’s Essayes need to …Read more
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14Hadotian Considerations on Buddhist Spiritual Practices (review)Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 3 (4): 157-169. 2019.
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13Bibliopolitics: The History of Notation and the Birth of the Citational Academic SubjectFoucault Studies 25 146. 2018.The paper builds upon a growing body of critical research on the proliferating use of bibliometrics as a means to evaluate academic research, but brings to it a specifically Foucauldian, genealogical approach. The paper has three parts. Part 1 situates bibliometrics as a new technology of neoliberal, biopolitical governmentality, alongside the host of other ‘metrics’ that have emerged in the last two decades. Part 2 analyses bibliometrics’ antecedents in prior notational practices in the Western…Read more
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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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12“Bringin’ Sexy Back” (and With it, Women): Shusterman Beyond Foucault on the GreeksEidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 5 (4): 138-146. 2021.Richard Shusterman, Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages./ Like other contributors, I would like to begin by expressing my respect and admiration for the scale and scope of Richard Shusterman’s achievement in Ars Erotica. The Preface acknowledges “the vast amount of material” involved in this project of charting “the history of erotic theory in the world’s most influential premodern cultures,” with each chapter …Read more
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12Do Universals have a Reference? On the Critical Theory of Herbert MarcusePhilosophy Today 46 (2): 193-208. 2002.
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12The other Enlightenment: self-estrangement, race, and genderRowman & Littlefield. 2023.This post-colonial and feminist reading of the Enlightenment explores the proto-postmodernist practice of examining one's conclusions through the eyes of the Other. Self-estrangement to gain critical distance from one's taken-for-granted assumptions was central to the Enlightenment and remains vital for critical sociopolitical thinking today.
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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 |