•  122
    Philosophy and The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy (edited book)
    Palgrave-Macmillan. 2012.
    [Adapted from the book's back-cover:] This is the ‘philosophy and. .’ book that really needed to be written – because it is about The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. For (to paraphrase the great man himself) Hitchhiker’s is not above a little philosophy in the same way that the sea is not above the sky. Moreover: this edited collection tries hard to combine accessibility – and some humour – with rigour. The book contains an introduction, nine chapters (all originally unpublished, save one that…Read more
  •  42
  •  156
    How should philosophy be clear? Loaded clarity, default clarity, and Adorno
    Telos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2009 (146). 2009.
    [First paragraph:] Part of the point of this article is to support the following claim by Adorno: “Rarely has anyone laid out a theory of philosophical clarity; instead, the concept of clarity has been used as though it were self-evident.” In fact, and again with Adorno, I shall argue for what I call the “loadedness thesis”: the thesis that philosophical conceptions of clarity are pervasively, and perhaps inevitably, philosophically partisan (section one). Yet I shall proceed to argue for a conc…Read more
  •  36
    Defending Adorno’s Practical Philosophy
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 23 (1): 126-140. 2015.
    A critical notice of Fabian Freyenhagen, Adorno’s Practical Philosophy: Living Less Wrongly. The following is from the article's conclusion. 'Freyenhagen shows that Adorno’s thought has some practical import, but not that it could not have more. He shows that Adorno’s normative judgements can be read so as to cohere with the idea that today we cannot know the good, but not that the latter idea is true. Thus, Freyenhagen partially solves the two problems that he set out to solve. To that extent h…Read more
  •  116
    Adorno’s Negative Dialectic: Theme, Point, and Methodological Status
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (2). 2009.
    This paper provides a critical interpretation of the theme, point, and methodological status of Adorno’s so-called negative dialectic. The theme at issue, ‘non-identity’, comes in several varieties; and the point of Adorno’s dialectic, namely reconciliation, is multifaceted. Exploration of those topics shows that negative dialectic seques into substantive doctrines, including a version of transcendentalism and a claim about deformation. The peculiar methodological status of negative dialectic ex…Read more