Daniel J Smith | University of Memphis (original) (raw)
Published Papers by Daniel J Smith
Continental Philosophy Review, 2018
In the two volumes which make up Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose new c... more In the two volumes which make up Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose new concepts of 'machine' and 'organism'. The problem of the relationship between machines and organisms has a long philosophical history, and this essay treats their work as a contribution to this debate. It is argued that their solution to this problem is found in their difficult concept of the 'body without organs', a concept that is given some much-needed clarification in the essay. The first section details Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the machine, examining the ways in which it differs from the traditional concept as described by Canguilhem: 1) their machines do not have predictable movements, but instead produce events; 2) they do not have a purpose; 3) they are able to reproduce themselves. The second section details their conception of the organism through their account of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: 1) organisms are bodies which normalize and which create hierarchies; 2) they also do not have a purpose; 3) they have a 'unity of composition'. The final section argues that their concept of the 'body without organs' shows us how to understand the relation between the two transformed concepts, and defines the body without organs as the becoming-machine of the organism.
Foucault Studies , Jun 2015
This paper considers the structure of the ethical subject found in Foucault’s late works on ethic... more This paper considers the structure of the ethical subject found in Foucault’s late works on ethics, and gives an account of his two major ethical concepts: “care of the self” and “aesthetics of existence.” The “care of the self,” it is argued, gives Foucault a way of conceptualising ethics which does not rely on juridical categories, and which does not conceive the ethical subject on the model of substance. The “care of the self” entails an understanding of the ethical subject as a process which is always in a relation, specifically in a relation to itself. Using his essay “What is an Author,” it is argued that the subject of the “aesthetics of existence,” like the author of a text, is understood to be fully immanent to the “object” which it is usually considered to be opposed to and separated from. Rather than aiming at a true expression of an “authentic” inner substance, Foucault’s “aesthetics of existence” leads instead to practices of “creativity,” whose form cannot be given in advance.
Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology, 2017
European Journal of Philosophy, 2020
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.12601 In the period following the public... more https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.12601
In the period following the publication of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason, there was a wide-ranging debate in German philosophy about the concept of freedom. It drew in not only Kant and the so-called “popular philosophers” of his generation, but also many of those who would go on to be the leading lights of post-Kantian idealism, including Reinhold, Fichte, and Schelling. Building on recent scholarship that brings Fichte's ethics into contemporary discussions of this freedom controversy, this article introduces Schelling's contribution, found in the seventh installment of his “General Overview of the Most Recent Philosophical Literature.” This article first reconstructs the conflict between Kant and Reinhold as Schelling understood it, which forms the background to this text. Then, it outlines the original position he stakes out in this debate, which is termed an “ethics of temptation.”
Kant-Studien, 2023
This paper develops a new interpretation of the "table of nothing" that appears at the end of the... more This paper develops a new interpretation of the "table of nothing" that appears at the end of the transcendental aesthetic in the Critique of Pure Reason. In contrast to previous interpretations, which have taken it to be part of Kant's account of the failures of reason, this paper argues that it should be understood as proffering Kant's positive account of the objects he will be concerned with in the transcendental dialectic, namely objects that, properly understood, are nothing. I examine the four nothings in turn, showing how Kant's concern is to develop a positive account of each one that allows him to determine its object while recognizing that it in some sense is not. I introduce Allison's distinction between error and illusion and argue that the table of nothing is Kant's theoretical account of what illusions are as objects, and thereby explains how something like a transcendental dialectic is possible at all.
Philosophy World Democracy, 2022
https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/rethinking-democracy-in-kurdistan
Philosophy World Democracy, 2022
https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning/philosophy-is-dead-long-live-philosophy
Virality of Evil: Philosophy in the Time of a Pandemic, 2022
Research in Phenomenology, 2021
This essay re-examines Hegel's critique of Spinoza's Ethics, focusing on the question of method. ... more This essay re-examines Hegel's critique of Spinoza's Ethics, focusing on the question of method. Are the axioms and definitions unmotivated presuppositions that make the attainment of absolute knowledge impossible in principle, as Hegel charges? This essay develops a new reading of the Ethics to defend it from this critique. I argue that Hegel reads Spinoza as if his system were constructed only according to the mathematical second kind of knowledge, ignoring Spinoza's clear preference for knowledge of the third kind. The Ethics, I argue, is a book with several layers: it is at once a deductive mathematical system, and a handbook to aid the intuitive power of the active philosophical reader. The letter of each text may be identical, but they have little else in common-Pierre Menard's rewriting of Don Quixote given systematic philosophical form.
positions politics: episteme, 2021
European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2020
https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/on-the-viral-event/ To what extent does the coronavirus ... more https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/on-the-viral-event/
To what extent does the coronavirus crisis present us with a situation that is genuinely new? The interventions of some notable philosophers seem to imply that we can make do by simply re-deploying concepts that were already in wide circulation before the crisis hit. This paper suggests that in fact, the crisis is an “event”, and offers a preliminary accounting of some of the most major changes that will have been brought about by the crisis.
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2015
In a number of his later works, Derrida makes reference to the concept of the “event.” However, u... more In a number of his later works, Derrida makes reference to the concept of the “event.” However, unlike for many of the other concepts developed in this phase of his writing (the gift, hospitality, and so on), we do not find one “basic” or “primary” text in which he develops the logic of the concept. We find him alluding to it in different contexts and making use of it in certain ways, but, at least with this concept, he leaves much of the philosophical “work” to readers. The aim of this article is to elucidate Derrida's concept of the event, to lay out as clearly as possible the way in which the concept functions. In the first part, I go through the logic, working out step by step what makes an “event worthy of the name” (to use Derrida's preferred idiom). In the second part, I deal with the paradoxes that arise when we ask how it is possible to say anything about an event, how one might go about constructing a “name worthy of the event.”
Book Reviews by Daniel J Smith
Critical Philosophy of Race, 2021
Another Mind-Body Problem is concerned with a staple issue of early modern philosophy: the mind-b... more Another Mind-Body Problem is concerned with a staple issue of early modern philosophy: the mind-body problem. However, its aim is quite different than most other works written on this topic. Rather than proffering a new solution, or a new interpretation of a canonical philosopher's proposed solution, Harfouch aims to transform the meaning of the problem itself. The standard story focuses on the topic of interaction-a focus that Harfouch takes to stem from the contemporaneity of this question in analytic philosophy of mind (1-2). The problem is still widely debated, and historians of this period have for the most part followed this interest, producing a great deal of historical work on this topic. However, this reference to contemporary philosophy already indicates a possible difficulty here. Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and others were not contemporary philosophers of mind, and any attempt to connect their work to the most recent developments in an only tangentially related subfield of philosophy risks turning into bad history. To be clear, Harfouch is not denying that the traditional version of the mind-body problem exists, either in contemporary philosophy or within the canonical early modern texts. The argument, rather, is that we should understand the philosophy of mind-related interaction-problem as just one component of a wider mind-body problem, which encompasses not only
Contemporary Political Theory, 2021
In the past few decades, important scholarship has criticized the common caricature of Kant as an... more In the past few decades, important scholarship has criticized the common caricature of Kant as an overly abstract philosopher interested only in idealized a priori claims. Against this received image, scholars have pointed to the hundreds of pages that Kant devoted to the empirical world in all its non-ideal imperfection, arguing that these, too, are philosophically insightful texts worth taking seriously. This scholarship has mostly focused on Kant's anthropology, but it has also explored his writings on education, religion, art, and history. Kant's Nonideal Theory of Politics extends this general approach into Kant's political theory, which Huseyinzadegan shows is not just a theory of right [Recht] that aims to deduce political goals a priori, but is at the same time a 'nonideal theory' concerned with 'the contingent variables of politics' (4). After the 'first part' of Kant's politics, an ideal theory telling us what its ultimate normative goals should be, there is a 'second part' (4), which addresses 'politically salient features of history, culture, and geography' (13). Kant's Nonideal Theory of Politics is an exploration of this under-appreciated and generally under-theorised layer of Kant's political theory. It is essential that these two 'guiding threads' not be confused, as Huseyinzadegan thinks they often are. In fact, they constitute 'two types of theoretical endeavor' (3), having different aims and methods, and which operate according to distinct logics. Where the well-known ideal theory of Recht makes the kind of deductive universal claims familiar to readers of Kant's moral philosophy, its nonideal part, which has its roots in the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of history, mobilizes instead the hypothetical use of reason guided by the principle of purposiveness [Zweckma¨ssigkeit]. This aspect of Kant's politics is not about justifying normative claims supposed to hold for any time or place, but instead concerns those domains where strict a priority cannot be reached. Kant famously understands history, nature, and culture in progressive and developmental terms, but this means that he needs a conceptual apparatus which does not abstract away from space and time if he is to have anything concrete to say about them. The model for this regulative, teleological form of theorizing comes primarily from his
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2020
Force, Drive, Desire: A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, Sarah Allen (tr.), Northwestern University ... more Force, Drive, Desire: A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, Sarah Allen (tr.), Northwestern University Press, 2020, 391pp., $39.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780810142237. Daniel J. Smith, The University of Memphis Everything Search NDPR
Teaching Documents by Daniel J Smith
Following a “historical turn” in the modern period, many philosophers began to develop expansive ... more Following a “historical turn” in the modern period, many philosophers began to develop expansive and self-consciously philosophical accounts of the history of philosophy, a process which led in turn to many creative transformations in the content of that history. What concepts have philosophers used to construct their various accounts of the history of philosophy? How have they decided on the main periods and major figures, and how have they addressed the difficult problem of choosing what material should be included? Do standard historiographical categories such as “empiricist”, “modern” or “18th century” stand up to scrutiny? How did philosophy’s unusually stable and long-lasting canon come about? What is the history of those exclusions – of women, of non-Europeans – that are a major concern for contemporary philosophy? These are just some of the questions we will ask during the semester though a careful study of the history of the history of philosophy, which will primarily be focused on the modern period.
This class is an introduction to the historical and political thought of Michel Foucault. We will... more This class is an introduction to the historical and political thought of Michel Foucault. We will focus on his mid-1970s lectures at the Collège de France, which are arguably his most creative and experimental works. In this transitional phase of his thinking – which immediately follows a period of militant engagement with groups such as the GIP (Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons) – Foucault presents his public audience with a range of little-known historical texts as a way of commenting obliquely on his political present. We will be especially interested in tracking the micro-level changes in his approach to history and politics, including those concepts and frameworks he ends up abandoning, many of which have been taken up by other philosophers since these lecture courses were first officially published in the 1990s. Topics we will cover include biopolitics, genealogy, state racism, class struggle, subjugated knowledges, governmentality, Nazism, war, the security state, socialist racism, and the management of epidemics.
The course will be divided into three parts. In the first 9 weeks we will read “Society Must Be Defended” (1975-6) and the first four lectures of Security, Territory, Population (1977-8). For the next 3 weeks we will survey some of the reception of these lectures, focusing especially on the way their ideas have been developed by philosophers from around the world, including in Latin America (Castro-Gómez), Africa (Mbembe), the United States (Butler), and the Middle East (Öcalan). In the last 3 weeks we will engage with the recent debate about Foucault and the coronavirus pandemic, focusing especially on the question of the usefulness (and the possible limitations) of the notion of “biopolitics” for understanding our current global situation.
A close study of Kant's magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason. Will include discussion of topi... more A close study of Kant's magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason. Will include discussion of topics including Kant's critique of pre-critical metaphysics, the nature of transcendental philosophy in general and transcendental idealism in particular, the idea of a "dialectic", the nature of freedom, the existence of God, and the idea of a history of pure reason.
This course will provide students with an overview of the major figures and topics of early moder... more This course will provide students with an overview of the major figures and topics of early modern philosophy. Philosophers in this period were responding to dramatic changes that were taking place in European society and culture stemming from the “scientific revolution”, and the main themes and concerns of their work emerge from this context. In the first half of the class, we will discuss topics in metaphysics and epistemology such as the nature of causality, the existence of God, and the relation between mind and body, with a special focus on the problem of evil.
Many of the philosophers we will have read in the first half were also influential political theorists. Modern philosophy coincides with the “age of revolutions” in which the world as we know it was formed. The ideas we will study in the second half of the class had a profound impact on social upheavals taking place in England, the United States, France, and Haiti. Alongside canonical writings in political philosophy written by the philosophers we will have encountered in the first half of the class, we will read key texts from these four revolutions that were directly inspired by them, including manifestoes, constitutions, the declaration of independence, and some famous political speeches.
An introduction to classic and contemporary issues in philosophy, with reference to the 2020 Netf... more An introduction to classic and contemporary issues in philosophy, with reference to the 2020 Netflix sci-fi thriller Dark. Does everything that happens, happen for a reason? Do we have free will? What ultimately exists? Can we ever escape suffering and satisfy our desires? Does God exist? How should we live in a world marked by apocalypse? What is the true nature of evil?
Continental Philosophy Review, 2018
In the two volumes which make up Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose new c... more In the two volumes which make up Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari propose new concepts of 'machine' and 'organism'. The problem of the relationship between machines and organisms has a long philosophical history, and this essay treats their work as a contribution to this debate. It is argued that their solution to this problem is found in their difficult concept of the 'body without organs', a concept that is given some much-needed clarification in the essay. The first section details Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the machine, examining the ways in which it differs from the traditional concept as described by Canguilhem: 1) their machines do not have predictable movements, but instead produce events; 2) they do not have a purpose; 3) they are able to reproduce themselves. The second section details their conception of the organism through their account of Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: 1) organisms are bodies which normalize and which create hierarchies; 2) they also do not have a purpose; 3) they have a 'unity of composition'. The final section argues that their concept of the 'body without organs' shows us how to understand the relation between the two transformed concepts, and defines the body without organs as the becoming-machine of the organism.
Foucault Studies , Jun 2015
This paper considers the structure of the ethical subject found in Foucault’s late works on ethic... more This paper considers the structure of the ethical subject found in Foucault’s late works on ethics, and gives an account of his two major ethical concepts: “care of the self” and “aesthetics of existence.” The “care of the self,” it is argued, gives Foucault a way of conceptualising ethics which does not rely on juridical categories, and which does not conceive the ethical subject on the model of substance. The “care of the self” entails an understanding of the ethical subject as a process which is always in a relation, specifically in a relation to itself. Using his essay “What is an Author,” it is argued that the subject of the “aesthetics of existence,” like the author of a text, is understood to be fully immanent to the “object” which it is usually considered to be opposed to and separated from. Rather than aiming at a true expression of an “authentic” inner substance, Foucault’s “aesthetics of existence” leads instead to practices of “creativity,” whose form cannot be given in advance.
Journal for the British Society for Phenomenology, 2017
European Journal of Philosophy, 2020
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.12601 In the period following the public... more https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.12601
In the period following the publication of Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and Critique of Practical Reason, there was a wide-ranging debate in German philosophy about the concept of freedom. It drew in not only Kant and the so-called “popular philosophers” of his generation, but also many of those who would go on to be the leading lights of post-Kantian idealism, including Reinhold, Fichte, and Schelling. Building on recent scholarship that brings Fichte's ethics into contemporary discussions of this freedom controversy, this article introduces Schelling's contribution, found in the seventh installment of his “General Overview of the Most Recent Philosophical Literature.” This article first reconstructs the conflict between Kant and Reinhold as Schelling understood it, which forms the background to this text. Then, it outlines the original position he stakes out in this debate, which is termed an “ethics of temptation.”
Kant-Studien, 2023
This paper develops a new interpretation of the "table of nothing" that appears at the end of the... more This paper develops a new interpretation of the "table of nothing" that appears at the end of the transcendental aesthetic in the Critique of Pure Reason. In contrast to previous interpretations, which have taken it to be part of Kant's account of the failures of reason, this paper argues that it should be understood as proffering Kant's positive account of the objects he will be concerned with in the transcendental dialectic, namely objects that, properly understood, are nothing. I examine the four nothings in turn, showing how Kant's concern is to develop a positive account of each one that allows him to determine its object while recognizing that it in some sense is not. I introduce Allison's distinction between error and illusion and argue that the table of nothing is Kant's theoretical account of what illusions are as objects, and thereby explains how something like a transcendental dialectic is possible at all.
Philosophy World Democracy, 2022
https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/articles-1/rethinking-democracy-in-kurdistan
Philosophy World Democracy, 2022
https://www.philosophy-world-democracy.org/other-beginning/philosophy-is-dead-long-live-philosophy
Virality of Evil: Philosophy in the Time of a Pandemic, 2022
Research in Phenomenology, 2021
This essay re-examines Hegel's critique of Spinoza's Ethics, focusing on the question of method. ... more This essay re-examines Hegel's critique of Spinoza's Ethics, focusing on the question of method. Are the axioms and definitions unmotivated presuppositions that make the attainment of absolute knowledge impossible in principle, as Hegel charges? This essay develops a new reading of the Ethics to defend it from this critique. I argue that Hegel reads Spinoza as if his system were constructed only according to the mathematical second kind of knowledge, ignoring Spinoza's clear preference for knowledge of the third kind. The Ethics, I argue, is a book with several layers: it is at once a deductive mathematical system, and a handbook to aid the intuitive power of the active philosophical reader. The letter of each text may be identical, but they have little else in common-Pierre Menard's rewriting of Don Quixote given systematic philosophical form.
positions politics: episteme, 2021
European Journal of Psychoanalysis, 2020
https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/on-the-viral-event/ To what extent does the coronavirus ... more https://www.journal-psychoanalysis.eu/on-the-viral-event/
To what extent does the coronavirus crisis present us with a situation that is genuinely new? The interventions of some notable philosophers seem to imply that we can make do by simply re-deploying concepts that were already in wide circulation before the crisis hit. This paper suggests that in fact, the crisis is an “event”, and offers a preliminary accounting of some of the most major changes that will have been brought about by the crisis.
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2015
In a number of his later works, Derrida makes reference to the concept of the “event.” However, u... more In a number of his later works, Derrida makes reference to the concept of the “event.” However, unlike for many of the other concepts developed in this phase of his writing (the gift, hospitality, and so on), we do not find one “basic” or “primary” text in which he develops the logic of the concept. We find him alluding to it in different contexts and making use of it in certain ways, but, at least with this concept, he leaves much of the philosophical “work” to readers. The aim of this article is to elucidate Derrida's concept of the event, to lay out as clearly as possible the way in which the concept functions. In the first part, I go through the logic, working out step by step what makes an “event worthy of the name” (to use Derrida's preferred idiom). In the second part, I deal with the paradoxes that arise when we ask how it is possible to say anything about an event, how one might go about constructing a “name worthy of the event.”
Critical Philosophy of Race, 2021
Another Mind-Body Problem is concerned with a staple issue of early modern philosophy: the mind-b... more Another Mind-Body Problem is concerned with a staple issue of early modern philosophy: the mind-body problem. However, its aim is quite different than most other works written on this topic. Rather than proffering a new solution, or a new interpretation of a canonical philosopher's proposed solution, Harfouch aims to transform the meaning of the problem itself. The standard story focuses on the topic of interaction-a focus that Harfouch takes to stem from the contemporaneity of this question in analytic philosophy of mind (1-2). The problem is still widely debated, and historians of this period have for the most part followed this interest, producing a great deal of historical work on this topic. However, this reference to contemporary philosophy already indicates a possible difficulty here. Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, and others were not contemporary philosophers of mind, and any attempt to connect their work to the most recent developments in an only tangentially related subfield of philosophy risks turning into bad history. To be clear, Harfouch is not denying that the traditional version of the mind-body problem exists, either in contemporary philosophy or within the canonical early modern texts. The argument, rather, is that we should understand the philosophy of mind-related interaction-problem as just one component of a wider mind-body problem, which encompasses not only
Contemporary Political Theory, 2021
In the past few decades, important scholarship has criticized the common caricature of Kant as an... more In the past few decades, important scholarship has criticized the common caricature of Kant as an overly abstract philosopher interested only in idealized a priori claims. Against this received image, scholars have pointed to the hundreds of pages that Kant devoted to the empirical world in all its non-ideal imperfection, arguing that these, too, are philosophically insightful texts worth taking seriously. This scholarship has mostly focused on Kant's anthropology, but it has also explored his writings on education, religion, art, and history. Kant's Nonideal Theory of Politics extends this general approach into Kant's political theory, which Huseyinzadegan shows is not just a theory of right [Recht] that aims to deduce political goals a priori, but is at the same time a 'nonideal theory' concerned with 'the contingent variables of politics' (4). After the 'first part' of Kant's politics, an ideal theory telling us what its ultimate normative goals should be, there is a 'second part' (4), which addresses 'politically salient features of history, culture, and geography' (13). Kant's Nonideal Theory of Politics is an exploration of this under-appreciated and generally under-theorised layer of Kant's political theory. It is essential that these two 'guiding threads' not be confused, as Huseyinzadegan thinks they often are. In fact, they constitute 'two types of theoretical endeavor' (3), having different aims and methods, and which operate according to distinct logics. Where the well-known ideal theory of Recht makes the kind of deductive universal claims familiar to readers of Kant's moral philosophy, its nonideal part, which has its roots in the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of history, mobilizes instead the hypothetical use of reason guided by the principle of purposiveness [Zweckma¨ssigkeit]. This aspect of Kant's politics is not about justifying normative claims supposed to hold for any time or place, but instead concerns those domains where strict a priority cannot be reached. Kant famously understands history, nature, and culture in progressive and developmental terms, but this means that he needs a conceptual apparatus which does not abstract away from space and time if he is to have anything concrete to say about them. The model for this regulative, teleological form of theorizing comes primarily from his
Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews, 2020
Force, Drive, Desire: A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, Sarah Allen (tr.), Northwestern University ... more Force, Drive, Desire: A Philosophy of Psychoanalysis, Sarah Allen (tr.), Northwestern University Press, 2020, 391pp., $39.95 (pbk), ISBN 9780810142237. Daniel J. Smith, The University of Memphis Everything Search NDPR
Following a “historical turn” in the modern period, many philosophers began to develop expansive ... more Following a “historical turn” in the modern period, many philosophers began to develop expansive and self-consciously philosophical accounts of the history of philosophy, a process which led in turn to many creative transformations in the content of that history. What concepts have philosophers used to construct their various accounts of the history of philosophy? How have they decided on the main periods and major figures, and how have they addressed the difficult problem of choosing what material should be included? Do standard historiographical categories such as “empiricist”, “modern” or “18th century” stand up to scrutiny? How did philosophy’s unusually stable and long-lasting canon come about? What is the history of those exclusions – of women, of non-Europeans – that are a major concern for contemporary philosophy? These are just some of the questions we will ask during the semester though a careful study of the history of the history of philosophy, which will primarily be focused on the modern period.
This class is an introduction to the historical and political thought of Michel Foucault. We will... more This class is an introduction to the historical and political thought of Michel Foucault. We will focus on his mid-1970s lectures at the Collège de France, which are arguably his most creative and experimental works. In this transitional phase of his thinking – which immediately follows a period of militant engagement with groups such as the GIP (Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons) – Foucault presents his public audience with a range of little-known historical texts as a way of commenting obliquely on his political present. We will be especially interested in tracking the micro-level changes in his approach to history and politics, including those concepts and frameworks he ends up abandoning, many of which have been taken up by other philosophers since these lecture courses were first officially published in the 1990s. Topics we will cover include biopolitics, genealogy, state racism, class struggle, subjugated knowledges, governmentality, Nazism, war, the security state, socialist racism, and the management of epidemics.
The course will be divided into three parts. In the first 9 weeks we will read “Society Must Be Defended” (1975-6) and the first four lectures of Security, Territory, Population (1977-8). For the next 3 weeks we will survey some of the reception of these lectures, focusing especially on the way their ideas have been developed by philosophers from around the world, including in Latin America (Castro-Gómez), Africa (Mbembe), the United States (Butler), and the Middle East (Öcalan). In the last 3 weeks we will engage with the recent debate about Foucault and the coronavirus pandemic, focusing especially on the question of the usefulness (and the possible limitations) of the notion of “biopolitics” for understanding our current global situation.
A close study of Kant's magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason. Will include discussion of topi... more A close study of Kant's magnum opus, the Critique of Pure Reason. Will include discussion of topics including Kant's critique of pre-critical metaphysics, the nature of transcendental philosophy in general and transcendental idealism in particular, the idea of a "dialectic", the nature of freedom, the existence of God, and the idea of a history of pure reason.
This course will provide students with an overview of the major figures and topics of early moder... more This course will provide students with an overview of the major figures and topics of early modern philosophy. Philosophers in this period were responding to dramatic changes that were taking place in European society and culture stemming from the “scientific revolution”, and the main themes and concerns of their work emerge from this context. In the first half of the class, we will discuss topics in metaphysics and epistemology such as the nature of causality, the existence of God, and the relation between mind and body, with a special focus on the problem of evil.
Many of the philosophers we will have read in the first half were also influential political theorists. Modern philosophy coincides with the “age of revolutions” in which the world as we know it was formed. The ideas we will study in the second half of the class had a profound impact on social upheavals taking place in England, the United States, France, and Haiti. Alongside canonical writings in political philosophy written by the philosophers we will have encountered in the first half of the class, we will read key texts from these four revolutions that were directly inspired by them, including manifestoes, constitutions, the declaration of independence, and some famous political speeches.
An introduction to classic and contemporary issues in philosophy, with reference to the 2020 Netf... more An introduction to classic and contemporary issues in philosophy, with reference to the 2020 Netflix sci-fi thriller Dark. Does everything that happens, happen for a reason? Do we have free will? What ultimately exists? Can we ever escape suffering and satisfy our desires? Does God exist? How should we live in a world marked by apocalypse? What is the true nature of evil?
Course Description: This course will introduce students to some of the major issues in biomedical... more Course Description: This course will introduce students to some of the major issues in biomedical ethics. The course will be structured around some of the major "problem areas" that are widely debated in these fields: the ethics of medical research; organ transplantation; reproduction and reproductive technologies; human enhancement; healthcare provision. It will also introduce students to a range of ethical theories and modes of ethical theorising.