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25Militant conversion in a prison of the mind: Malcolm X and Spinoza on domination and freedomContemporary Political Theory 23 (1): 66-87. 2024._The Autobiography of Malcolm X_ highlights the eponymous subject’s conversion from aimless rage and criminality to a form of militant study while in prison, a conversion dedicated to understanding the societal foundations of power and racial inequality. Central to this understanding is the idea that new philosophical perspectives and ‘thought-patterns’ are necessary to reprogramme dominant or ‘brainwashed’ mindsets towards organising political resistance. In this article, I explore Malcolm X’s …Read more
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5Death, a Surreptitious FriendshipAngelaki 25 (6): 3-18. 2020.This article explores the friendship of Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille through a close reading of their thought on death and dying. An intellectual and personal friendship, both conceived of death as an “impossible” space and “limit-experience” that not only constituted human subjectivity, but could also puncture it, leading to joy through deindividuation. This could only occur indirectly – for Bataille, via the sacrifice, eroticism, drunkenness or laughter – and for Blanchot, via literat…Read more
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16Mogens Lærke, Spinoza and the Freedom of PhilosophizingDanish Yearbook of Philosophy 55 (1): 76-77. 2021.
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12Review of David Ridley, The Method of Democracy. John Dewey’s Theory of Col (review)European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 14 (1). 2022.In its 2021 report on the state of world democracies, the US-based thinktank Freedom House declared that democracy was “under siege,” with worrying signs of retreat and resurgent authoritarianism across the world. In this book, a former university lecturer and trade unionist and now journalist and Green New Deal organiser takes up the problem of democracy as fundamental for understanding the opportunities and challenges facing the Left. In the wake of pessimism and right-wing populism, Ridley...
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12Spinoza and the Politics of FreedomEdinburgh University Press. 2020.Combining careful historical and textual analysis with comparisons across past and present political theory, this book re-establishes Spinoza as a collectivist philosopher.
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13Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza: by Alexandre Matheron, edited by Filippo Del Lucchese, David Maruzzella and Gil Morejón, translated by David Maruzzella and Gil Morejón, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2020, pp. xxi+396, £85.00 (hb), £29.99 (ebook), ISBN: 9781474440103 (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (6): 1201-1204. 2021.In a discussion of Victor Delbos, the doyen of early twentieth-century French Spinozism, Alexandre Matheron recalls with fondness a remark once made by his former doctoral sponsor, and fellow Spino...
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23Politics, Ontology and Knowledge in Spinoza: by Alexandre Matheron, edited by Filippo Del Lucchese, David Maruzzella and Gil Morejón, translated by David Maruzzella and Gil Morejón, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2020, pp. xxi+396, £85.00 (hb), £29.99 (ebook), ISBN: 9781474440103British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (6): 1201-1204. 2021.In a discussion of Victor Delbos, the doyen of early twentieth-century French Spinozism, Alexandre Matheron recalls with fondness a remark once made by his former doctoral sponsor, and fellow Spino...
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11Spinoza: then and now: by Antonio Negri and translated by Ed Emery, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2020, pp. 243 + xiii, £17.99 (pb), ISBN: 9781509503513 (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (3): 565-568. 2021.Scribbled into the margins of Lev Vygotsky's personal copy of Spinoza's Ethics, we find this extraordinary note: “From the great creations of Spinoza, as from distant stars, light reaches us after...
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16Spinoza: then and now Spinoza: then and now, by Antonio Negri and translated by Ed Emery, Cambridge, Polity Press, 2020, pp. 243 + xiii, £17.99 (pb), ISBN: 9781509503513 (review)British Journal for the History of Philosophy 29 (3): 565-568. 2021.Scribbled into the margins of Lev Vygotsky's personal copy of Spinoza's Ethics, we find this extraordinary note: “From the great creations of Spinoza, as from distant stars, light reaches us after...
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15The reasonable republic? Statecraft, affects, and the highest good in Spinoza’s late Tractatus PoliticusHistory of European Ideas 45 (5): 645-660. 2019.In his final, incomplete Tractatus Politicus (1677), Spinoza’s account of human power and freedom shifts towards a new, teleological interest in the ‘highest good’ of the state in realising the freedom of its subjects. This development reflects, in part, the growing influence of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Dutch republicanism, and the Dutch post-Rampjaar context after 1672, with significant implications for his view of political power and freedom. It also reflects an expansion of his account of natu…Read more
Areas of Specialization
History of Western Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
History of Western Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |