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In one of his last texts, Foucault defined his philosophical enterprise as an?analysis of the conditions in which certain relations between subject and object are formed or modified, insofar as they are constitutive of a possible knowledge,? or again as?the manner in which the emergence of games of truth constituted, for a particular time and place and certain individuals, the historical a priori of a possible experience.? Despite its eclipse during the genealogical period, the notion of the his…Read more
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7Early Heidegger's Appropriation of KantIn Hubert L. Dreyfus & Mark A. Wrathall (eds.), A Companion to Heidegger, Wiley-blackwell. 2005.
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6AffectivityIn Hubert L. Dreyfus & Mark A. Wrathall (eds.), A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism, Wiley-blackwell. 2006.
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68Hope, Powerlessness, and AgencyMidwest Studies in Philosophy 41 (1): 175-201. 2017.Hope is hard to characterise because of the exceptional diversity of its applications, to the point that one may wonder whether there is continuity between ordinary cases of hope and what is often called 'hope against hope'. In this paper, I shall follow the relatively small but growing literature on hope and examine propositional hopes, i.e. hopes of the form 'hoping that p', with a particular focus on recent work by Philip Pettit and Adrienne Martin. I shall do this first by identifying a sign…Read more
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18XIV—Two Puzzles in The Early Christian Constitution Of The Self: Reflections on Agency in Foucault’s Interpretation of CassianProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 120 (3): 329-347. 2021.I tease out two early Christian puzzles about agency: (a) agential control: how can agents self-constitute if their primary experience of themselves is not one of control, as in Greek antiquity, but of relative powerlessness? And (b) ethical expertise: how can agents constitute themselves as ethical agents if they cannot trust themselves to recognize, and act in the light of, the good? I argue, first, that Foucault saw the importance of these puzzles and focused on extreme obedience as affording…Read more
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25XIV—Two Puzzles in The Early Christian Constitution Of The Self: Reflections on Agency in Foucault’s Interpretation of CassianProceedings of the Aristotelian Society 120 (3): 329-347. 2021.I tease out two early Christian puzzles about agency: (a) agential control: how can agents self-constitute if their primary experience of themselves is not one of control, as in Greek antiquity, but of relative powerlessness? And (b) ethical expertise: how can agents constitute themselves as ethical agents if they cannot trust themselves to recognize, and act in the light of, the good? I argue, first, that Foucault saw the importance of these puzzles and focused on extreme obedience as affording…Read more
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14‘The doing is everything’: a middle-voiced reading of agency in NietzscheTandf: Inquiry 1-23. forthcoming..
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39‘The doing is everything’: a middle-voiced reading of agency in NietzscheInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (1): 42-64. 2020.ABSTRACTNietzsche's famous claim, ‘das Thun ist Alles’, is usually translated as ‘the deed is everything’. I argue that it is better rendered as ‘the doing is everything’. Accordingly, I propose a processual reading of agency in GM 1 13 which draws both on Nietzsche's reflections on grammar, and on the Greek middle voice, to displace the opposition between deeds and events, agents and patients by introducing the notion of middle-voiced ‘doings’. The relevant question then is not ‘is this a doing…Read more
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18Nietzsche's Metaphysics in the Birth of TragedyEuropean Journal of Philosophy 14 (3): 373-403. 2006.
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74The death of man : Foucault and anti-humanismIn Christopher Falzon (ed.), Foucault and Philosophy, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 118--42. 2010.This chapter contains sections titled: References.
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301Nietzsche and Amor FatiEuropean Journal of Philosophy 19 (2): 224-261. 2011.Abstract: This paper identifies two central paradoxes threatening the notion of amor fati [love of fate]: it requires us to love a potentially repellent object (as fate entails significant negativity for us) and this, in the knowledge that our love will not modify our fate. Thus such love may seem impossible or pointless. I analyse the distinction between two different sorts of love (eros and agape) and the type of valuation they involve (in the first case, the object is loved because we value i…Read more
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78Since fully covering such a topic in the short space imparted to this paper is an impossible task, I have chosen to focus on three philosophers: Nietzsche, Heidegger and Sartre. Of the three, only the latter was undoubtedly an existentialist ⎯ Heidegger explicitly rejected the categorisation (in the Letter on Humanism), and there is disagreement among commentators about Nietzsche’s status1. However, they have two major common points which justify my focusing on them: firstly, they uphold the pri…Read more
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80Review: Foucault, Introduction à l'Anthropologie (Published in One Volume with Foucault's Translation of Emmanuel Kant's Anthropologie d'Un Point De Vue Pragmatique) (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2009 (3). 2009.
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70Hope is hard to characterise because of the exceptional diversity of its applications, to the point that one may wonder whether there is continuity between ordinary cases of hope and what is often called 'hope against hope'. In this paper, I shall follow the relatively small but growing literature on hope and examine propositional hopes, i.e. hopes of the form 'hoping that p', with a particular focus on recent work by Philip Pettit and Adrienne Martin. I shall do this first by identifying a sign…Read more
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98Most commentators assume that the affirmation of life can be defined univocally, as an act the success of which can be assessed by means of the test of the eternal return in GS341; and, that the affirmation of life is synonymous with what Nietzsche calls amor fati, and thus singlehandedly encapsulates Nietzsche’s ethical ideal. I take issue with both assumptions and develop an alternative view. I argue that for Nietzsche there are two ways to affirm life ethically. The first is unreflective and …Read more
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Early Foucault and transcendental historyIn Alexander Lyon Macfie (ed.), The philosophy of history: talks given at the Institute of Historical Research, London, 2000-2006, Palgrave-macmillan. 2006.
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112Being and Time, Heidegger praises Kant as “the first and only person who has gone any stretch of the way towards investigating the dimension of temporality or has even let himself be drawn hither by the coercion of the phenomena themselves” (SZ: 23).1 Kant was, before Husserl (and perhaps, in Heidegger's mind, more than him), a true phenomenologist in the sense that the need to curtail the pretension of dogmatic metaphysics to overstep the boundaries of sensible experience led him to focus on ph…Read more
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54What Heidegger means by “freedom” in Being and Time is somewhat mysterious: while the notion crops up repeatedly in the book, there is no dedicated section or study, and the concept is repeatedly connected to a new and opaque idea – that of the “choice to choose oneself.” Yet the specificity of Being and Time’s approach to freedom becomes apparent when the book is compared to other texts of the same period, in particular The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic, The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphys…Read more
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90The analytic of finitude and the history of subjectivityIn Gary Gutting (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, Cambridge University Press. 1994.In one of his last texts, Foucault defined his philosophical enterprise as an “analysis of the conditions in which certain relations between subject and object are formed or modified, insofar as they are constitutive of a possible knowledge”1, or again as “the manner in which the emergence of games of truth constituted, for a particular time and place and certain individuals, the historical a priori of a possible experience”2. Despite its eclipse during the genealogical period, the notion of the…Read more
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77Is early Foucault a historian? History, history and the analytic of finitudePhilosophy and Social Criticism 31 (5-6): 585-608. 2005.There has been and still is much debate in the literature as to whether Foucault is (or not) a historian (as opposed to being a philosopher). When he became famous through the publication of The Order of Things, in 1966, many historians of ideas immediately attacked him for the alleged inaccuracy or mistaken character of his analyses1. At the same time, the French philosophical establishment rejected him for being too historical in his approach, to the extent that when the first large Foucault C…Read more
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69Phenomenology and anthropology in Foucault's “introduction to Binswanger's dream and existence “: A mirror image of the order of things?History and Theory 55 (4): 7-22. 2016.In this article, I examine the relation between phenomenology and anthropology by placing Foucault's first published piece, “Introduction to Binswanger's Dream and Existence“ in dialectical tension with The Order of Things. I argue that the early work, which so far hasn't received much critical attention, is of particular interest because, whereas OT is notoriously critical of anthropological confusions in general, and of “Man” as an empirico‐transcendental double in particular, IB views “existe…Read more
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118Foucault, normativity and critique as a practice of the selfContinental Philosophy Review 49 (1): 85-101. 2016.In this paper I distinguish between two main critical questions: ‘how possible’ questions, which look for enabling conditions and raise issues of epistemic normativity; and ‘whether permissible’ questions, which relate to conditions of legitimacy and ethical normativity. I examine the interplay of both types of questions in Foucault’s work and argue that this helps us to understand both the function of the historical a priori in the archeological period and the subsequent accusations of crypto-n…Read more
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