•  15
    Turning Water into Wine
    with Zheng Ren, Rikki H. Sargent, Lea T. Adams, Erika Kline, and Jeff Hughes
    Journal of Cognition and Culture 19 (3-4): 219-243. 2019.
    Young children judge that violations of ordinary, causal constraints are impossible. Yet children’s religious beliefs typically include the assumption that such violations can occur via divine agency in the form of miracles. We conducted two studies to examine this potential conflict. In Study 1, we invited 5- and 6-year-old Colombian children attending either a secular or a religious school to judge what is and is not possible. Children made their judgments either following a minimal prompt or …Read more
  •  251
    Le Trois Modes de Domination et la Mere dans De Cive_ et _Leviathan de Hobbes
    with Cecile Housset
    In Yves Charles Zarka & Liang Pang (eds.), Hobbes : Le pouvoir entre domination et resistance, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin. pp. 39-57. 2022.
    While not ignored, the question of the role of mothers in the schema of political rule in Hobbes is not often taken up. Distinct from his contemporaries, Hobbes acknowledges only minimal differences between men and women, and argues that, because maternal protection and nourishment are necessary for its survival, the mother dominates the infant in the state of nature. How to explain that the mother loses this power of domination in the social or political order? Hobbes does not explicitly say. H…Read more
  •  12
    This article reveals three aspects of victimhood in Bataille’s reading of Sade (of the other, of the self, and Sade’s language) and relates them to some of Bataille’s metaphysical and political notions: the impossible, the general and the restricted economy, sovereignty, and transgression. Doing so shows a progressive simplification of possibilities for transgression from the pre-Christian world to that of popular sovereignty, i.e., the sovereignty of the crowd, the latter leaving open one avenu…Read more
  •  20
    This article reveals three aspects of victimhood in Bataille’s reading of Sade (of the other, of the self, and Sade’s language) and relates them to some of Bataille’s metaphysical and political notions: the impossible, the general and the restricted economy, sovereignty, and transgression. Doing so shows a progressive simplification of possibilities for transgression from the pre-Christian world to that of popular sovereignty, i.e., the sovereignty of the crowd, the latter leaving open one avenu…Read more
  •  50
    The Tensions Between ‘Criminal’ and ‘Enemy’ as Categories for Globalized Terrorism
    International Journal of Applied Philosophy 20 (1): 107-126. 2006.
    This paper examines the tensions at play in three important documents involved in the ‘war on terror’: the “Application of Treaties” White House Legal Counsel Memo of 2001, the “National Security Strategy” document of 2002, and the 2004 Supreme Court decision Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. Reading these documents, it becomes clear that there is an overarching misunderstanding and confusion of the traditionally separate concepts of ‘criminal’ and ‘enemy’ in the struggle against globalized terrorism.
  •  316
    Dissident circles during the Czechoslovak communist regime were organized in semi-private islands of resistance. They saw themselves as a parallel polis in line with Arendt’s notion of political action by pursuing “life in truth,” authentic experience, and ultimately freedom. The heroes of these circles were that society’s pariahs. In their quest for authenticity, they turned to the past to find meaning, to understand the nature of their communities and the needs for political action towards the…Read more
  •  325
    For Foucault, Hobbes is important for the transition from sovereignty to governmentality, but he does not always go into great detail how. In “Society Must Be Defended”, Hobbes’s reactions against the political historicism of his time lead him to an ahistorical foundation to the state. In Security, Territory, Population, his contract is emblematic of the art of government still caught in the logic of sovereignty. Management techniques, one of which being inheritance laws like primogeniture, indu…Read more
  •  28
    Hobbes and Butler both conjure images of an abandoned infant in their respective discussions of vulnerability. Leviathan uses this image to discuss original dominion, or natural maternal right over the child, while for Butler rights discourse produces fantasies of invulnerability that derealize other lives. However, Hobbes’s infant in nature has no rights and can only consent to being nourished. Only when able to nourish itself can it claim rights to transfer through the covenant producing a fan…Read more
  •  271
    Does the polis face the demos with hostility? Do citizens contest the city? Is a people in opposed separation from its political institutions? A multidisciplinary collection on people and the institutions they find themselves in and under, the essays here engage questions of the individual , communities, leadership, populism, citizenship, social media, and technology. The collection includes work by philosophers, political scientists, and political theorists using quantitative, historical, and h…Read more
  •  402
    Demos, Polis, Versus
    Krtika & Kontext. 2019.
    This is the Introduction to a collected volume.
  •  194
    1989 in Czechoslovakia through Arendt's Eyes: An Immodern Revolution
    Sociološki Pregled 3 (53): 787-811. 2019.
    This essay examines the status of events of 1989 in Czechoslovakia from an Arendtian perspective, focusing on whether they qualify as a revolution or even, precisely speaking, a modern event. For Arendt, revolutions are decidedly modern in that they expand freedom to all equally, an expansion conceivable because history can be thought of as rectilinear and because new ideas can be introduced into the secular world. Leaving aside the importance of violence as a criterion, we find that 1989 in Cz…Read more
  •  210
    This essay compares Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of the flesh with Judith Butler's concept of primary vulnerability in terms of their helpfulness for developing an intersubjective ontology. It compares the flesh with Butler's more recent concept of primary vulnerability insofar as she sees both as useful for intersubjective ontology. The hiatus of the flesh is that which spans between self and world and opens Merleau-Ponty's thought onto an intersubjective ontology. While Butler's discussion o…Read more
  •  258
    The Tensions between ‘Criminal’ and ‘Enemy’ as Categories for Globalized Terrorism
    International Journal of Applied Philosophy 1 (20): 107-126. 2006.
    This paper examines the tensions at play in three important documents involved in the ‘war on terror’: the “Application of Treaties” White House Legal Counsel Memo of 2001, the “National Security Strategy” document of 2002, and the 2004 Supreme Court decision Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. Reading these documents, it becomes clear that there is an overarching misunderstanding and confusion of the traditionally separate concepts of ‘criminal’ and ‘enemy’ in the struggle against globalized terrorism.
  •  447
    This article addresses a debate in Descartes scholarship over the mind-dependence or -independence of time by turning to Merleau-Ponty’s "Nature" and "The Visible and the Invisible." In doing so, it shows that both sides of the debate ignore that time for Descartes is a measure of duration in general. The consequences to remembering what time is are that the future is shown to be the invisible of an intertwining of past and future, and that historicity is the invisible of God.
  •  33
    A Cartesian Rereading of Badiou’s Political Subjectivity
    Philosophy Today 63 (1): 93-100. 2019.
    This article traces the consequences for Badiou’s political subjectivity if his understanding of the Cartesian subject is incorrect. For Badiou, the faithful subject, political and otherwise, is formed through fidelity to the appearance of an event of truth, and the process of this fidelity creates a world. These truths are immanent to the worlds in which they appear. An obscure subject, however, is faithful to a negation, while a reactive subject denies the appearance of a truth’s event. Badiou…Read more
  •  38
    This is a review of Marie-Eve Morin's translation of Jean-Luc Nancy's "Ego Sum."
  •  11
    What role do fables play in Cartesian method and psychology? By looking at Descartes’ use of fables, James Griffith suggests there is a fabular logic that runs to the heart of Descartes’ philosophy. First focusing on The World and the Discourse on Method, this volume shows that by writing in fable form, Descartes allowed his readers to break from Scholastic methods of philosophizing. With this fable-structure or -logic in mind, the book reexamines the relationship between analysis, synthesis, an…Read more
  •  34
    Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes (review)
    Bulletin Hobbes, Archives de Philosophie 25 354-355. 2013.
    This is a review of a book by Ted H. Miller.
  •  27
    The Hardwick Library and Hobbes’s Early Intellectual Development (review)
    Bulletin Hobbes, Archives de Philosophie 27 376-377. 2015.
    This is a review of a book edited by Richard Talaska.
  •  46
    Hobbes and Modern Political Thought
    Edinburgh University Press. 2016.
    Yves Charles Zarka shows you how Hobbes established the framework for modern political thought. Discover the origin of liberalism in the Hobbesian theory of negative liberty; that Hobbesian interest and contract are essential to contemporary discussions of the comportment of economic actors; and how state sovereignty returns anew in the form of the servility of the state. At the same time, Zarka controversially argues against received readings claiming that Hobbes is a thinker of a state monopol…Read more
  •  10
    Descartes
    In Marie-Eve Morin & Peter Gratton (eds.), The Nancy Dictionary, Edinburgh University Press. 2015.
    This is an entry on Jean-Luc Nancy's understanding of certain important Cartesian concepts, such as the cogito.
  •  22
    This is a review of a book by Richard F. Hassing.