5 Things You Never Knew About Spinoza
Spinoza: a renegade thinker whose life was far from boring. From stab wounds to spiders, how many of these strange facts did you know about Spinoza?
Primary and Secondary Qualities: More Trouble than You’d Think!
Size and shape versus sound and colour: discover how primary and secondary qualities have perplexed philosophers for thousands of years, and how Thomas Reid offers us a way forward.
What Electricity Has Done to Thought: an excerpt from The Life Intense by Tristan Garcia
What Electricity Has Done to Thought: an excerpt from The Life Intense by Tristan Garcia.
Venus Voluptas: The Desire of Gods and Men
Thomas Nail writes about Venus as the desire of gods and men in Lucretius' De Rerum Natura. She is not only the external object of desire of the other gods and of men; she is the desire itself.
You Don’t Know Jacques: Speculative Realism, New Materialism, and the Denial of Deconstruction
Fifty years have passed since the publication of Of Grammatology, and the Oxford Literary Review has dedicated its July 2018 issue to marking “The Age of Grammatology”. In my contribution to this issue, Misreading Generalised Writing: from Foucault to Speculative…
Studying sixteenth-century France from inside and outside France
My guest edited special issue of Nottingham French Studies (NFS), explores ‘Text, Knowledge and Wonder in Early Modern France‘, fleshing out new aspects of the sense of wonder that permeates much literature, philosophy, culture, and ritual in the period. As Genevieve…
Rediscovering the Wonder of Philosophy
Wonder is largely absent as a topic of concern to contemporary philosophers. Yet ancient philosophers saw it as the source of what was distinctive in their way of thinking. Plato and Aristotle thought that it was the stirrings of wonder…
Utopia: A round-table discussion
Sir Thomas More (1477 – 1535) was the first person to write of a ‘utopia’, a word used to describe a perfect imaginary world. The term was first published in 1516, and became the short title of his book about an…
James Benning: A Cinema of Our Times
In James Benning’s film Concord Woods (2014), we watch a replica of Henry David Thoreau’s famous cabin at Walden Pond. The cabin is first shown during the summer solstice, graced by the golden sunlight. The shot lingers for sixty minutes…