•  2266
    Deleuze and Merleau-Ponty: Immanence, Univocity and Phenomenology
    with Jon Roffe
    Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology 37 (3): 228-51. 2006.
    This paper will seek firstly to understand Deleuze’s main challenges to phenomenology, particularly as they are expressed in The Logic of Sense and What is Philosophy?, although reference will also be made to Pure Immanence and Difference and Repetition. We will then turn to a discussion of one of the few passages in which Deleuze directly engages with Merleau-Ponty, which occurs in the chapter on art in What is Philosophy? In this text, he and Guattari offer a critique of what they call the “fi…Read more
  •  1361
    Despite its short historical moment in the sun, behaviorism has become something akin to a theoria non grata, a position that dare not be explicitly endorsed. The reasons for this are complex, of course, and they include sociological factors which we cannot consider here, but to put it briefly: many have doubted the ambition to establish law-like relationships between mental states and behavior that dispense with any sort of mentalistic or intentional idiom, judging that explanations of intellig…Read more
  •  516
    Most readers of Sartre focus only on the works written at the peak of his influence as a public intellectual in the 1940s, notably "Being and Nothingness". "Jean-Paul Sartre: Key Concepts" aims to reassess Sartre and to introduce readers to the full breadth of his philosophy. Bringing together leading international scholars, the book examines concepts from across Sartre's career, from his initial views on the "inner life" of conscious experience, to his later conceptions of hope as the binding a…Read more
  •  396
    Deleuze’s Other-Structure
    Symposium 12 (1): 67-88. 2008.
    Deleuze suggests that his work grounds a new conception of the Other–the Other as expression of a possible world, as a structure that precedes any subsequent dialectical mediation, including the master-slave dialectic of social relations. I will argue, however, that the ethico-political injunction that Deleuze derives from his analysis of the 'other-structure' confronts a different problem. It commits Deleuze to either tacitly prescribing a romantic morality of difference that valorizes expressi…Read more
  •  395
    The role of the body in cognition is acknowledged across a variety of disciplines, even if the precise nature and scope of that contribution remain contentious. As a result, most philosophers working on embodiment—e.g. those in embodied cognition, enactivism, and ‘4e’ cognition—interact with the life sciences as part of their interdisciplinary agenda. Despite this, a detailed engagement with emerging findings in epigenetics and post-genomic biology has been missing from proponents of this embodi…Read more
  •  377
    Throughout much of the twentieth century, the relationship between analytic and continental philosophy has been one of disinterest, caution or hostility. Recent debates in philosophy have highlighted some of the similarities between the two approaches and even envisaged a post-continental and post-analytic philosophy. Opening with a history of key encounters between philosophers of opposing camps since the late nineteenth century - from Frege and Husserl to Derrida and Searle - the book goes on …Read more
  •  317
    Suggesting that phenomenology results in an “imperialism of the same” that considers the other only in terms of their effect upon the subject rather than in their genuine alterity, Levinas initiates a line of thought that can still be discerned in the work of Foucault, Derrida and Claude Lefort. However, this paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s work is capable of avoiding this line of criticism, and that his position is an important alternative to the more dominant Derridean and Levinasian concept…Read more
  •  298
    Transcendental Priority and Deleuzian Normativity. A Reply to James Williams
    Deleuze and Guatarri Studies 2 (1): 101-108. 2008.
    I am grateful that someone whose work I greatly admire could be the philosopher to so eloquently and succinctly cut to the heart of the problem that I posed in the previous issue of Deleuze Studies. James Williams' critical reply leaves me, prima facie, confronted by a stark alternative: either I have misunderstood Deleuze, or I have illustrated problems and lacunae in Deleuze. I will suggest, however, that this is a false alternative, and that Williams' and my divergent accounts of The Logic of…Read more
  •  282
    Existentialism, Phenomenology and Philosophical Method
    with Felicity Joseph
    In Felicity Joseph, Jack Reynolds & Ashley Woodward (eds.), Continuum Companion to Existentialism, Continuum. 2011.
    This chapter explores some of the similarities and differences in the philosophical methods of five philosophers often considered existentialists: Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir and Marcel. The relationship between existentialism and phenomenological methods, as well as transcendental reasoning in general, is examined.
  •  278
    Phenomenology, Abduction, and Argument: Avoiding an Ostrich Epistemology
    Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (3): 1-18. 2022.
    Phenomenology has been described as a “non-argumentocentric” way of doing philosophy, reflecting that the philosophical focus is on generating adequate descriptions of experience. But it should not be described as an argument-free zone, regardless of whether this is intended as a descriptive claim about the work of the “usual suspects” or a normative claim about how phenomenology ought to be properly practiced. If phenomenology is always at least partly in the business of arguments, then it is w…Read more
  •  276
    Derrida, friendship and the transcendental priority of the ‘untimely’
    Philosophy and Social Criticism 36 (6): 663-676. 2010.
    This article examines Derrida’s insistence on the contretemps that breaks open time, paying particular attention to Politics of Friendship and the way in which this book envisages the ‘untimely’ as both interrupting, and making possible, friendship. Although I suggest that Derrida’s temporal deconstruction of the Aristotelian distinction between utility and ‘perfect’ friendships is convincing, I also argue that Derrida’s own account of friendship is itself touched by time, in the peculiar sense …Read more
  •  270
    Merleau-Ponty and Liberal Naturalism
    In Mario De Caro & David Macarthur (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Liberal Naturalism, Routledge. 2022.
    As neither a classical naturalist nor a non-naturalist, Merleau-Ponty appears to be a moderate or liberal naturalist. But can a phenomenologist really be a naturalist, even a liberal one? A lot hinges on how we tease this out, both as to whether it is plausible to claim Merleau-Ponty as a liberal naturalist (I argue it is), and as to whether it is an attractive and coherent position. Indeed, despite its important challenges to orthodox naturalism, there are arguably two traps to avoid. If it bec…Read more
  •  266
    Mark Eli Kalderon, "Sympathy in Perception" (review)
    Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2018 (0809). 2018.
    Mark Eli Kalderon's book boldly positions itself as a work in speculative metaphysics. Its point of departure is the familiar distinction between presentational and representational philosophies of perception. Kalderon notes that the latter has been more popular of late, as it is more amenable to "an account" explicating causal or counterfactual conditions on perception; but he wishes to rehabilitate the former, at least in part. One widely perceived disadvantage of presentationalism has been th…Read more
  •  258
    Derrida and Deleuze on Time and the Future
    Borderlands 3 (1): 15. 2004.
    This paper compares the "future politics", and the philosophies of time, of Derrida and Deleuze.
  •  237
    On the question of precisely what role common sense (or related datum like folk psychology, trust in pre-theoretic/intuitive judgments, etc.) should have in reigning in the possible excesses of our philosophical methods, the so-called ‘continental’ answer to this question, for the vast majority, would be “as little as possible”, whereas the analytic answer for the vast majority would be “a reasonably central one”. While this difference at the level of both rhetoric and meta-philosophy is sometim…Read more
  •  225
    While there is a great diversity of treatments of other minds and inter-subjectivity within both analytic and continental philosophy, this article specifies some of the core structural differences between these treatments. Although there is no canonical account of the problem of other minds that can be baldly stated and that is exhaustive of both traditions, the problem(s) of other minds can be loosely defined in family resemblances terms. It seems to have: (1) an epistemological dimension (How …Read more
  •  206
    This important collection of essays details some of the more significant methodological and philosophical differences that have separated the two traditions, as ...
  •  199
    Existentialism and Poststructuralism: Some Unfashionable Observations
    with Ashley Woodward
    In Felicity Joseph, Jack Reynolds & Ashley Woodward (eds.), Continuum Companion to Existentialism, Continuum. pp. 260. 2011.
    This chapter challenges the received doxa that the generation of ‘poststructuralist’ philosophers broke decisively with existentialism and rendered it out of date, a mere historical curiosity. Drawing on recent research in the area, it draws some lines of influence, and even argues for some surprising points of commonality, between existentialism and poststructuralism. At least some of the core philosophical ideas of poststructuralists such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Gilles Deleuze …Read more
  •  199
    This article describes some of the main arguments for the existence of other minds, and intersubjectivity more generally, that depend upon a transcendental justification. This means that our focus will be largely on ‘continental’ philosophy, not only because of the abiding interest in this tradition in thematising intersubjectivity, but also because transcendental reasoning is close to ubiquitous in continental philosophy. Neither point holds for analytic philosophy. As such, this essay will int…Read more
  •  197
    Jacques Derrida
    Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2002.
    This article attempts to introduce some of the central dimensions of Jacques Derrida's thought, with attention given to both early and late texts in his oeuvre.
  •  195
    I examine the relationship that obtains between the work of Derrida and Rawls, not least because of the conviction that Derrida (and post-structuralism more generally) offers certain invaluable things to political thought that analytic political philosophy would do well to take account of, particularly as concerns the relation between time and politics. In Derrida’s case, his emphasis on the radical difference of the future, the ‘to come’, serves as a guardrail against political absolutisms of a…Read more
  •  192
    Introduction: Post-analytic and meta-continental philosophy
    with James Chase, James Williams, and Edwin Mares
    In James Williams, Jack Reynolds, James Chase & Edwin Mares (eds.), Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides, Continuum. 2010.
    This chapter sketches some of the difficulties involved in defining analytic and continental philosophy, but begins to elaborate an argument for the centrality of methodology to the 'divide'.
  •  188
    Despite rarely explicitly thematizing the problem of dirty hands, this essay argues that Merleau-Ponty’s political work can nonetheless make some important contributions to the issue, both descriptively and normatively. Although his political writings have been neglected in recent times, his interpretations of Marxism and Machiavelli enabled him to develop an account of political phronesis and virtù that sought to retain the strengths of their respective positions without succumbing to their pro…Read more
  •  171
    Wounds and Scars: Deleuze on the Time (and the Ethics) of the Event
    Deleuze and Guatarri Studies 1 (2): 15. 2007.
    This essay examines Deleuze's account of time and the wound in The Logic of Sense and, to a lesser extent, in Difference and Repetition. As such, it will also explicate his understanding of the event, as well as the notoriously opaque ethics of counter-actualisation that are bound up with it, before raising certain problems that are associated with the transcendental and ethical priority that he accords to the event and what he calls the time of Aion. I will conclude by proposing a dialectic bet…Read more
  •  167
    Post-analytic philosophy : Overcoming the divide
    with George Duke, Elena Walsh, and James Chase
    In James Williams, Jack Reynolds, James Chase & Edwin Mares (eds.), Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides, Continuum. 2010.
    This essay uses citational analyses to argue that most of the philosophers considered "postanalytic" - Wittgenstein, McDowell, Davidson, and Rorty - are not, in fact, genuine figures of rapprochement, since the particular essays cited, and/or the background literature that is cited, are not shared in common between the standard-bearing analytic and continental journals
  •  156
    Throughout much of the 20th Century, the relationship between analytic and continental philosophy has been one of disinterest, caution or hostility. Recent debates in philosophy have highlighted some of the similarities between the two approaches and even envisaged a post-continental and post-analytic philosophy. Opening with a history of key encounters between philosophers of opposing camps since the late 19th Century - from Frege and Husserl to Derrida and Searle - the book goes on to explore …Read more
  •  155
    Wounds and Scars: Deleuze on the Time and Ethics of the Event
    Deleuze and Guatarri Studies 1 (2): 144-166. 2007.
    This paper explores the idea that Deleuze’s oeuvre is best understood as a philosophy of the wound, synonymous with a philosophy of the event. Although this wound/scar typology may appear to be a metaphorical conceit, the motif of the wound recurs frequently and perhaps even symptomatically in many of Deleuze’s texts, particularly where he is attempting to delineate some of the most important differences (transcendental, temporal, and ethical) between himself and his phenomenological predecessor…Read more
  •  153
    There has recently been a plethora of attempts to understand the key differences that separate the analytic and continental traditions of philosophy, often involving either painstaking descriptions of the divergent argumentative techniques and methodologies that concern them, or comparatively examining in detail the work of certain major theorists in both traditions (e.g. Rawls and Derrida, Lewis and Deleuze). While partly drawing on these two approaches, in this particular essay I instead propo…Read more
  •  151
    While there have been many essays devoted to comparing the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty with that of Jacques Derrida, there has been no sustained book-length treatment of these two French philosophers. Additionally, many of the essays presuppose an oppositional relationship between them, and between phenomenology and deconstruction more generally. Jack Reynolds systematically explores their relationship by analyzing each philosopher in terms of two important and related issues—embodiment and a…Read more
  •  147
    The Master-slave dialectic and the 'sado-masochistic entity': Some Objections
    Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 14 (3): 11-25. 2009.
    Hegel’s famous analyses of the ‘master-slave dialectic’, and the more general struggle for recognition which it is a part of, have been remarkably influential throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Bound up with the dominance of this idea, however, has been a corresponding treatment of sadism and masochism as complicit projects that are mutually necessary for one another in a manner that is structurally isomorphic with the way in which master and slave depend on one another. In clini…Read more