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40What Happens to Kant's Race Theory in the 1790s? A New Anthropological Interpretation of Radical EvilPhilosophers' Imprint. forthcoming.This paper addresses the much-debated question about the fate of Kant's race theory in the 1790s by examining his use of the concepts of “germs” [Keime] and “predispositions” [Anlagen] in the Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason of 1793. Following the well-received “anthropological interpretation” of the essay on radical evil that draws productive analogies with his philosophy of history, it proposes a “new anthropological interpretation” that focuses on concepts borrowed from his philosoph…Read more
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1Force, Drive, Desire: A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2020. 2020.
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167Gandhi and Philosophy: Hypophysics and the Comparison between Caste and RacePositions Politics: Episteme 4. 2021.
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The Revenge of Nature? On the Coronavirus and Natural EvilIn Divya Dwivedi (ed.), Virality of Evil: Philosophy in the Time of a Pandemic, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. pp. 139-146. 2021.
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9Philosophy is Dead – Long Live Philosophy!Philosophy World Democracy 12. 2022.Continental philosophy is in crisis. With the last few decades spent mainly on a “great figures” approach, this tradition is having to come to terms with the fact that most of its luminaries have now passed away. Derrida’s death in 2004 sent shockwaves through the community and seems to have functioned as marker for the generation before my own (I was not yet an undergraduate when it happened). For the rest of us, 2021 will have been a huge year as it marked the loss of Jean-Luc Nancy, one of th…Read more
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195Rethinking Democracy in KurdistanPhilosophy World Democracy 12. 2022.The Kurdish movement has revitalised the idea of democracy. Under the most difficult of circumstances – squeezed between ISIS on one side and the Turkish armed forces on the other – a radical form of democracy has been implemented that has inspired many both inside and outside the region. Introducing the special issue “Rethinking Democracy in Kurdistan”, this article explores the ingenious challenge to the nation-state system posed by this new democratic theory and practice, focusing on the pris…Read more
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24How is an Illusion of Reason Possible? The Division of Nothing in the_ _ _Critique of Pure Reason_Kant Studien 114 (3): 493-512. 2023.This paper develops a new interpretation of the “table of nothing” that appears at the end of the transcendental aesthetic in the Critique of Pure Reason. In contrast to previous interpretations, which have taken it to be part of Kant’s account of the failures of reason, this paper argues that it should be understood as proffering Kant’s positive account of the objects he will be concerned with in the transcendental dialectic, namely objects that, properly understood, are nothing. I examine the …Read more
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4John Harfouch, Another Mind-Body Problem: A History of Racial Non-Being (review)Critical Philosophy of Race 9 (1): 159-165. 2021.
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23An ethics of temptation: Schelling's contribution to the freedom controversyEuropean Journal of Philosophy 29 (4): 731-745. 2020.European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 4, Page 731-745, December 2021.
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16“Clinging Stubbornly to the Antithesis of Assumptions”: On the Difference Between Hegel’s and Spinoza’s Systems of PhilosophyResearch in Phenomenology 51 (3): 351-371. 2021.This essay re-examines Hegel’s critique of Spinoza’s Ethics, focusing on the question of method. Are the axioms and definitions unmotivated presuppositions that make the attainment of absolute knowledge impossible in principle, as Hegel charges? This essay develops a new reading of the Ethics to defend it from this critique. I argue that Hegel reads Spinoza as if his system were constructed only according to the mathematical second kind of knowledge, ignoring Spinoza’s clear preference for knowl…Read more
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3On the Viral EventEuropean Journal of Psychoanalysis | Coronavirus and Philosophers: A Tribune. 2020.
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242Foucault sobre ética y subjetividad: ‘cuidado de sí’ y ‘estética de la existenciaDorsal. Revista de Estudios Foucaultianos 2 301-321. 2017.Este ensayo considera la estructura del sujeto ético que se encuentra en los últimos trabajos de Foucault sobre ética, y da cuenta de sus dos conceptos éticos fundamentales: “cuidado de sí” y “estética de la existencia”. El “cuidado de sí”, se argumenta, da a Foucault una manera de conceptualizar la ética que no depende de categorías jurídicas, y que no concibe al sujeto ético en el modelo de la sustancia. “El cuidado de sí” conlleva una comprensión del sujeto ético como un proceso que siempre e…Read more
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321What is the body without organs? Machine and organism in Deleuze and GuattariContinental Philosophy Review 51 (1): 95-110. 2017.In the two volumes which make up Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose new concepts of “machine” and “organism.” The problem of the relationship between machines and organisms has a long philosophical history, and this essay treats their work as a contribution to this debate. It is argued that their solution to this problem is found in their difficult concept of the “body without organs,” a concept that is given some much-needed clarification in the essay. The first section …Read more
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50Foucault on Ethics and Subjectivity: ‘Care of the Self’ and ‘Aesthetics of Existence’Foucault Studies 19 135-150. 2015.This paper considers the structure of the ethical subject found in Foucault’s late works on ethics, and gives an account of his two major ethical concepts: “care of the self” and “aesthetics of existence.” The “care of the self,” it is argued, gives Foucault a way of conceptualising ethics which does not rely on juridical categories, and which does not conceive the ethical subject on the model of substance. The “care of the self” entails an understanding of the ethical subject as a process which…Read more
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11An Event Worthy of the Name, a Name Worthy of the EventJournal of Speculative Philosophy 29 (3): 387-394. 2015.ABSTRACT In a number of his later works, Derrida makes reference to the concept of the “event.” However, unlike for many of the other concepts developed in this phase of his writing, we do not find one “basic” or “primary” text in which he develops the logic of the concept. We find him alluding to it in different contexts and making use of it in certain ways, but, at least with this concept, he leaves much of the philosophical “work” to readers. The aim of this article is to elucidate Derrida's …Read more
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33“After you, sir!”: Substitution in Kant and LevinasJournal of the British Society for Phenomenology 48 (2): 149-161. 2017.This paper compares the later Levinas’ notion of “substitution” with Kant’s account of substitution in Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. Kant’s account is modelled on the Christian doctrine of the vicarious substitution of Christ, and some recent commentators on Levinas have argued that Levinas’ account is also similar to this Christian doctrine. By bringing out what I see as major differences between the two accounts, I show that Levinas’ notion of substitution should not be unders…Read more
Memphis, Tennessee, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
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German Idealism |
20th Century Continental Philosophy |
Friedrich Schelling |
Immanuel Kant |
Gilles Deleuze |
Michel Foucault |
Areas of Interest
Johann Gottlieb Fichte |
G. W. F. Hegel |
Jacques Derrida |
Emmanuel Levinas |