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3Resolving 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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6Of 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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10Giving 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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8Arendt, 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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17Good 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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6Philosophy 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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7Purloined 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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22Pressing 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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15Hadotian Considerations on Buddhist Spiritual Practices (review)Eidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 3 (4): 157-169. 2019.
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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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“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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8Retuning Orpheus' Lyre: The classical heritage's antidotes to cultural pessimismAustralian Humanist, The 120 10. 2016.Sharpe, Matthew Let me begin with words from a different, more optimistic time: 'For it may be truly affirmed to the honour of these times, and in a virtuous emulation with antiquity, that this great building of the world had never throughlights made in it, till the age of us and our fathers. For although they had knowledge of the antipodes,... yet that might be by demonstration, and not in fact; and if by travel, it requireth the voyage but of half the globe. But to circle the earth, as the hea…Read more
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1On The Grounding Of Moral Value, Or Is A Post-kantian, Post-christian Morality Possible?Minerva 5 118-137. 2001.This paper stages a consideration of Slavoj Zizek’s recent texts discussing the Christian ethics of agape. Iread Zizek’s ‘turn’ to Christian ethics as not a violation of his earlier Kantianism, but as an attempt toovercome two related problems which haunt Kantian deontological moral philosophy. The first is theproblem that Kant severs morality too totally from the realm of ‘pathological’ inclination, and does notoffer us a realistic depiction of moral psychology. The second is that the formal em…Read more
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6On the grounding of moral value, or is a post-Kantian, post-Christian morality possible?Minerva - An Internet Journal of Philosophy 5 (1). 2001.This paper stages a consideration of Slavoj Zizek’s recent texts discussing the Christian ethics of agape. I read Zizek’s ‘turn’ to Christian ethics as not a violation of his earlier Kantianism, but as an attempt to overcome two related problems which haunt Kantian deontological moral philosophy. The first is the problem that Kant severs morality too totally from the realm of ‘pathological’ inclination, and does not offer us a realistic depiction of moral psychology. The second is that the forma…Read more
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This paper stages an argument in five premises:1. That the insight to which post-structuralist ethics responds—which is that there is an 'unmistakableparticularity of concrete persons or social groups'—leads theorists who base their moral theory upon itinto a problematic parallel to that charted by Kant in his analysis of the sublime.2. That Kant's analysis of the sublime divides its experience into what I call two 'moments', the secondof which involves a reflexive move which the post-structural…Read more
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9On the dumb sublimity of law: A critique of the post-structuralist orientation towards ethicsMinerva - An Internet Journal of Philosophy 7 (1). 2003.This paper stages an argument in five premises: 1. That the insight to which post-structuralist ethics responds—which is that there is an 'unmistakable particularity of concrete persons or social groups'—leads theorists who base their moral theory upon it into a problematic parallel to that charted by Kant in his analysis of the sublime. 2. That Kant's analysis of the sublime divides its experience into what I call two 'moments', the second of which involves a reflexive move which the post-struc…Read more
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13Of diabolical evil, and related matters : on Slavoj Žižek's reading of Kant's practical philosophyInternational Journal of Žižek Studies 3 (3): 1-23. 2009.
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17Maistre avec de Sade: Zizek contra de maistreInternational Journal of Žižek Studies 1 (4): 1-24. 2007.It is possible to argue that the first world is presently living through a period of radical global reaction against the social democratic consensus of the twentieth century. In this context, the use of Slavoj Zizek's Lacnaian theory of ideology to critique the traditions of thought which inform this reaction becomes a vital task. In this paper, I use Zizek's Lacanian theory of ideology to critically analyse de Maistre's remarkable work: particularly his 'Considerations on France'. Zizek's empha…Read more
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20Kant, or the crack in the universal : Slavoj Zizek's politicising the transcendental turnInternational Journal of Žižek Studies 2 (2): 1-20. 2008.This paper examines Slavoj Zizek’s reading of Immanuel Kant. Its undergirding argument is that Zizek’s work as a whole- up to and including his politically radical statements, which have become more and more prominent since 1997- is conceivable as a project in the rereading of the Kantian ‘Copernican Revolution’ via Lacanian psychoanalysis. Critics now agree that Zizek’s orienting aim is to write a philosophy of politics, as more recent texts, like The Ticklish Subject make clear. (Kay, 2003; Sh…Read more
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3Hadot, PierreIn James Fieser & Bradley Dowden (eds.), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Routledge. 2011.
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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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12Capitalism and the Far Right. Revisiting the Pollock-Neumann Debate in the Era of Authoritarian EthnonationalismPhilosophy and Public Issues - Filosofia E Questioni Pubbliche. forthcoming.Download.
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26Camus' Askesis : reading Camus in light of the Carnets (and his L'Impromptu des philosophes)Philosophical Practice 8 (1): 1149-1164. 2013.
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56Changing Aristotle's mind and world : critical notes on McDowell's AristotlePhilosophy Study 2 (11): 804-821. 2012.Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is central to John McDowell’s classic Mind and World. In Lectures IV and V of that work, McDowell makes three claims concerning Aristotle’s ethics: first, that Aristotle did not base his ethics on an externalist, naturalistic basis (including a theory of human nature); second, that attempts to read him as an ethical naturalist are a modern anachronism, generated by the supposed need to ground all viable philosophical claims on claims analogous to the natural scienc…Read more
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28A Good Person for a Crisis? On the Wisdom of the Stoic SageEidos. A Journal for Philosophy of Culture 5 (1): 32-49. 2021.Is the Stoic sage a possible or desirable ideal for contemporary men and women, as we enter into difficult times? Is he, as Seneca presents him, the very best person for a crisis? In order to examine these questions, Part 1 begins from what Irene Liu calls the “standard” modern conceptions of the sage as either a kind of epistemically perfect, omniscient agent, or else someone in possession of a specific arsenal of theoretical knowledge, especially concerning the physical world. We contest this …Read more
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53Slavoj Zizek is one of the most provocative and important thinkers writing in contemporary philosophy. This book is an engaged debate with Zizek. It contains a series of specially commissioned critical essays from an impressive collection of contributors covering the full extent of his oeuvre. Essays examine Zizek on cultural theory, film studies, ethics, political theory, social theory, Kant and Lacanian psychoanalysis. In the spirit of Zizek‘s own interventions, these essays critically interro…Read more
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8Pierre Hadot (1922-2010)In James Fieser & Bradley Dowden (eds.), Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Routledge. pp. 1--14. 2011.