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13Of Israel, Forst & Voltaire: Deism, Toleration, and RadicalismCritical Horizons 25 (2): 129-152. 2024.In the recent progressive reappraisals of the enlightenment by Jonathan Israel and Rainer Forst, Voltaire figures as almost a reactionary thinker, opposing the radical dimensions of the enlightenment pushing forwards secularisation, democratisation, and toleration. Part 1 examines Israel’s and Forst’s accounts of Voltaire, showing their striking proximity. Part 2 is divided into the three subheadings of (i) Voltaire’s deism, (ii) the pivotal subject of toleration, and (iii) the decisive question…Read more
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21Golden calf: Deleuze’s Nietzsche in the time of TrumpThesis Eleven 163 (1): 71-88. 2021.This paper examines how Gilles Deleuze addresses, and fail to address, the darker strata in Nietzsche’s work which has enabled his work to be claimed by almost every far-right European political movement since the 1890s to the Alt-Right today. Part I argues that four rhetorical strategies are present which serve to domesticate Nietzsche’s ideas concerning class and caste, race and sexuality, and his opposition to forms of liberalism, democracy, feminism and socialism: avoiding directly political…Read more
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11Philosophy as a way of life: history, dimensions, directionsBloomsbury Academic. 2021.The idea of philosophy as a 'way of life' is not a new one. From the first recorded philosophy by Plato, there has been a tradition of thinking about philosophy as pointing us towards the good life, happiness and an ethical existence. But where does this notion that philosophy has anything to offer in terms of guiding us in how to live and live well come from? In this first ever introduction to philosophy as a way of life, Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure take us us through the history of the idea…Read more
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1750, Casualty of 1914: Lest We ForgetIn Matthew Sharpe, Rory Jeffs & Jack Reynolds (eds.), 100 years of European philosophy since the Great War: crisis and reconfigurations, Springer. 2017.
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30Camus and the Virtues (with and beyond Sherman)Philosophy Today 61 (3): 679-708. 2017.Albert Camus can be meaningfully read as an agent-focussed virtue ethicist, as David Sherman has suggested. Yet moving far beyond Sherman’s version of this claim, we show here how Camus accepts what are four definitive parameters of the classical authors’ conception of the virtues—the last of which takes him beyond today’s recognised “virtue ethicists.” Firstly, he understands the virtues as lasting, beneficent dispositions to think, feel, and act in certain ways. Secondly, he conceives the virt…Read more
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12Philosophy as a way of life: from antiquity to modernityBloomsbury Academic. 2021.The idea of philosophy as a 'way of life' is not a new one. From the first recorded philosophy by Plato, there has been a tradition of thinking about philosophy as pointing us towards the good life, happiness and an ethical existence. But where does this notion that philosophy has anything to offer in terms of guiding us in how to live and live well come from? In this first ever introduction to philosophy as a way of life, Matthew Sharpe and Michael Ure take us us through the history of the idea…Read more
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55TOWARDS A PHENOMENOLOGY OF SAGESSE: uncovering the unique philosophical problematic of pierre hadotAngelaki 23 (2): 125-138. 2018.This paper starts from the contention that Pierre Hadot’s unusually divided reception reflects the different dimensions of Hadot’s own scholarly profile. Hadot’s largely favourable reception amongst historians of ideas responds to the philological dimension of his work, but misses the implicit normativity involved in his recovery of the sense of ancient philosophy as a way of life. Analytic critics have registered but contested this normativity in ways that arguably also misrepresent his work. T…Read more
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25Good reasons to philosophize: On Hadot, Cooper, and ancient philosophical protrepticMetaphilosophy 55 (2): 231-248. 2024.This paper reassesses the Cooper-Hadot debate surrounding how students are converted to philosophy as a way of life (section 1) through engagement with philosophical protreptics. In section 2, the paper identifies the core “argument from finality” in philosophical protreptics seeking to convert non-philosophers to philosophy, starting from the universal human interest in securing eudaimonia. In line with Cooper, this argument seeks to persuade prospective students on rational grounds, so that th…Read more
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32Into the Heart of Darkness Or: Alt-Stoicism? Actually, No…Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 2 (4): 106-113. 2018.
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19Bibliopolitics: The History of Notation and the Birth of the Citational Academic SubjectFoucault Studies 25 146. 2018.The paper builds upon a growing body of critical research on the proliferating use of bibliometrics as a means to evaluate academic research, but brings to it a specifically Foucauldian, genealogical approach. The paper has three parts. Part 1 situates bibliometrics as a new technology of neoliberal, biopolitical governmentality, alongside the host of other ‘metrics’ that have emerged in the last two decades. Part 2 analyses bibliometrics’ antecedents in prior notational practices in the Western…Read more
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9Resolving Hermotimus’ Paradox: Reading Lucian’s Hermotimus in Light of Plato’s RepublicJournal of Ancient Philosophy 18 (1): 124-148. 2024.Lucian’s Hermotimus, despite its first appearances of being a merely skeptical, even sophistical discrediting of philosophy, is better read as a powerful protreptic defense of the endeavor, whose key ancient intertext is Plato's Republic. To make this case, the paper involves three parts. In part i, we examine the metaphilosophical framing of the Hermotimus’s exchange between the eponymous hero, aged about 60 (§48) and Lucian’s favored interlocutor, Lycinus. We show that Lucian accepts that phil…Read more
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23Giving Marx’s Critique of Law a Fair Trial: On Igor Shoikhedbrod’s Revisiting of Marx’s Critique of Liberalism and the Rule of LawCritical Horizons 25 (2): 168-181. 2024.This article presents a critical examination of Igor Soikhedbrod’s Revisiting Marx’s Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights. We argue that the book presents an important criticism of antinomian forms of critical theory, which underplay the extent to which Marx engaged in an imminent critique of liberal societies, including the rule of law, and upheld that progressive advances enshrined in this rule should be carried over or sublated in a communist dispensation.
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24Arendt, Heidegger, Eichmann, and Thinking, after the Black NotebooksEidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 8 (1): 120-133. 2024.Preview: /Review: Emmanuel Faye, Arendt et Heidegger: Extermination nazie et destruction de la pensée, (Albin Michel, 2016), 560 pages./ The appearance of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1932-38) in 2014 has posed profound questions to philosophers and political theorists. For a long time, in ways that the Black Notebooks have definitively undermined, Heidegger’s National Socialism was widely considered as limited to 1933-34. His larger thought, at least after a proposed turning or kehre in …Read more
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12Purloined Letters—Lacan avec StraussIn Jeffrey Alan Bernstein & Jade Schiff (eds.), Leo Strauss and contemporary thought: reading Strauss outside the lines, State University of New York Press. pp. 29-50. 2021.
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30Pressing Questions for the Philosophical Life in a Time of CrisisEidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 5 (2): 1-6. 2021.Preview: 2020, the year the coronavirus pandemic spread globally, marked the twenty-fifth year since the publication of Pierre Hadot’s work Philosophy as a Way of Life. In that time, what began as the research specialization of just a few scholars has become a growing area of philosophical and metaphilosophical inquiry, bringing together researchers from around the globe. Hadot’s key ideas of spiritual exercises, and the very idea of PWL, have been applied to a host of individual thinkers from a…Read more
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23Hadotian Considerations on Buddhist Spiritual Practices (review)Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 3 (4): 157-169. 2019.
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111The Invincible Summer: On Albert Camus' Philosophical NeoclassicismSophia 50 (4): 577-592. 2011.What follows is a work of critical reconstruction of Camus' thought. It aims to answer to the wish Camus expressed in his later notebooks, that he at least be read closely. Specifically, I hope to do three things. In Part I, we will show how Camus' famous philosophy of the absurd represents a systematic scepticism whose closest philosophical predecessor is Descartes' method of doubt, and whose consequence, as in Descartes, is the discovery of a single, orienting certainty, on the basis of which …Read more
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9Slavoj Žižek: A Little Piece of the RealRoutledge. 2004.Slavoj Zizek has emerged as the pre-eminent European cultural theorist of the last decade and has been described as the ultimate Marxist/Lacanian cultural studies scholar. His large and growing body of work has generated considerable controversy, yet his texts are not structured as standard academic tomes. In Slavoj Zizek: A Little Piece of the Real, Matthew Sharpe undertakes the difficult task of drawing out an evolving argument from all of Zizek's texts from 1989 to 2001, and reads them as the…Read more
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40Unifying, Comparative, Critical and Metacritical: Domenico Losurdo’s Nietzsche as Aristocratic RebelCritical Horizons 23 (3): 284-304. 2022.ABSTRACT This review essay responds critically to the English translation of Domenico Losurdo’s monumental Friedrich Nietzsche: Aristocratic Rebel. It sets out to clearly identify and examine Losurdo’s two tasks in Nietzsche: firstly, his reconstruction of Nietzsche’s intellectual itinerary, from his earliest works until his descent into madness, in the context of later nineteenth-century social, political, philosophical, and eugenic sources; and secondly, to “interpret the interpretations”, and…Read more
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36Of Cartesianism and Spiritual ExercisesPhilosophy Today 66 (3): 471-489. 2022.This article challenges the recurrent critique that Pierre Hadot’s identification of ancient philosophy with the practice of spiritual exercises introduces a non- or irrational dimension into metaphilosophy. The occasion to do this is provided by Kerem Eksen’s recent reading of Descartes’s Meditations as consisting of solely intellectual, rather than spiritual, exercises—since the latter, Eksen claims, involve extrarational means and ends. Part 2 presents an alternative account of the role of co…Read more
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7Zizek's communism and in defence of lost causesInternational Journal of Žižek Studies 4 (2): 1-7. 2010.
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19Zizek and Politics: A Critical IntroductionEdinburgh University Press. 2010.In Zizek and Politics, Geoff Boucher and Matthew Sharpe go beyond standard introductions to spell out a new approach to reading Zizek, one that can be highly critical as well as deeply appreciative. They show that Zizek has a raft of fundamental positions that enable his theoretical positions to be put to work on practical problems. Explaining these positions with clear examples, they outline why Zizek's confrontation with thinkers such as Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze has so radically changed h…Read more
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Wherewith to draw us to the left and right : on reading Heidegger in the new millenniumIn Gegory Fried (ed.), Confronting Heidegger: A Critical Dialogue on Politics and Philosophy, Rowman & Littlefield International. 2019.
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12Understanding PsychoanalysisRoutledge. 2008."Understanding Psychoanalysis" presents a broad introduction to the key concepts and developments in psychoanalysis and its impact on modern thought. Charting pivotal moments in the theorization and reception of psychoanalysis, the book provides a comprehensive account of the concerns and development of Freud's work, as well as his most prominent successors, Melanie Klein and Jacques Lacan.The work of these leading psychoanalytic theorists has greatly influenced thinking across other disciplines…Read more
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27The Topics Transformed: Reframing the Baconian Prerogative InstancesJournal of the History of Philosophy 56 (3): 429-454. 2018.john c. briggs has commented that "The reading of Baconian texts resembles the Baconian reading of nature, for in both the interpreter must discover a clue to the labyrinth."1 This thought certainly applies to the Praerogatiuis Instantiarum and their precise role in Bacon's Novum Organum.2 These instances occupy thirty-one of the fifty-two sections of Novum Organum II, whereas only nine are devoted to the much better-known work of the tabulation of affirmative, negative and deviating instances, …Read more
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“then We Will Fight Them In The Shadows!”: Seven Parataxic Views, On Žižek’s StyleInternational Journal of Žižek Studies 4 (2). 2010.
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10The philosopher’s courtly love? Leo strauss, eros, and the lawLaw and Critique 17 (3): 357-388. 2006.This essay poses a critical response to Strauss’ political philosophy that takes as its primary object Strauss’ philosophy of Law. It does this by drawing on recent theoretical work in psychoanalytic theory, conceived after Jacques Lacan as another, avowedly non-historicist theory of Law and its relation to eros. The paper has four parts. Part I, ‘The Philosopher’s Desire: Making an Exception, or “The Thing Is...’’’, recounts Strauss’ central account of the complex relationship between philosoph…Read more