David Hume and Scottish Philosophy

By Gordon Graham Not so very long ago, it was quite widely accepted that Britain’s most significant contribution to the development of philosophy was ‘empiricism’ and that its great exponents were the Englishman John Locke, the Irishman George Berkeley, and…

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Multiculturalism Isn’t a Dirty Word

David Cameron has been avoiding the m-word. In his recent speech about extremism, the word ‘multicultural’ was noticeable by its omission for two reasons. First, Cameron said that Britain was a ‘successful multiracial and multi-faith democracy’ and a term like…

Politics – An Extract from The Badiou Dictionary

The problem of how philosophy is to approach the word politics is especially difficult, as it is itself a stake of political struggle and thus steeped in equivocity. The question of just who is and who is not considered political, and what objects are part or are not part of political consideration, is itself always intrinsic to politics. Philosophy thus encounters the word politics as inherently equivocal or, in Badiou’s terms, as a ‘split word’.

Cinema – An Extract from The Badiou Dictionary

Badiou's interventions on cinema are scattered over a large time span, dispersed in myriad film reviews, short articles and conferences, and for the main part are devoted to discussing one or several individual films, as evidenced by his recently published collection, Cinema.
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Deleuze – An Extract from The Badiou Dictionary

Gilles Deleuze (1925–95) is the contemporary philosopher to whom Badiou returns more than any other. His engagement with Deleuze is however neither homogeneous nor unequivocally critical, as it is often thought to be. In short, Deleuze figures in Badiou’s work as his preeminent philosophical disputant.

Bogus criticisms and animal becomings

By Ashley Woodward Peter Shaffer’s play Equus is perhaps best known to some today as ‘the one in which Harry Potter gets his kit off’ (as one of my students put it). Yet apart from the fact that it’s controversial…