Archive for the ‘Hegel’ Category

Recently I did two overlapping talks (one in Brussels one online) on the question of the ends of life (genocide, apocalypse, extinction) and how this relates to the philosophy and history of biology (thinking about ends in terms of goals or thinking life teleologically in the overarching sense in that life is defined by having […]


I cannot hope to provide a complete or even thorough review of Reza’s Intelligence and Spirit. S.C. Hickman has provided some reflections here but it would be a tall order for anyone to do a proper review (though I imagine one is forthcoming). This introduction by Robin Mackay is very helpful. Here I simply want to address […]


I am going to start writing on this blog again since I no longer have an immediate philosophy community and it’s at least one way to not go completely insane. What is occupying my time these days is trying to work through the analytic/continental divide (instead of merely talking about it as a problem to […]


Time Alone

23Mar18

This originally appeared here as part of Emily Thomas’ series on the metaphysics of time. Can two people ever experience the same now? The question can immediately strike us as naive, or not worth asking. Yet, for the British Idealist F.H. Bradley (1846-1924), the answer was a firm ‘no.’ The possible reasons why are numerous […]


For almost two years I have been working on a short book on the philosophy of F.H. Bradley. One of the most interesting aspects of Bradley is the role that he gives to experience and feeling. Though his foundation is a combination of Kant and Hegel (the emphasis of the self’s unity in the former […]


“Shorn of its rational constraint, the banner of ‘realism’ by itself becomes strictly meaningless. In fact, the relations between ‘realism,’ ‘materialism,’ and ‘idealism,’ are of considerable dialectical complexity so I think it’s a mistake to brandish any one of them in isolation from the others. They derive whatever philosophical sense they posses from their contrastive […]


Maurizo Ferraris’ recent short text Positive Realism (Zer0, Dec 2015) attempts to define what his form of New Realism is against, and what it builds off of, engaging a wide range of philosophical positions (metaphysical realism, internal realism, scientific realism, Markus Gabriel’s New Realism, Harman’s ontology and others) while making a general claim to a philosophy […]


Having defended my dissertation Schelling’s Naturalism: Space, Motion, and the Volition of Thought I’m now in the strange position of looking for an academic job. But, in the meantime, I thought I would give a general update. 1 – Starting the end of this month I’ll be team teaching a course on German Idealism and […]


The initial chatter around Pete Wolfendale’s book generally seemed to fall into two camps. The first being that the text was merely a massive pile of vitriol directed towards OOOers with the second being the question ‘Why would Pete devote so much of his time to a provocation that may well go unanswered?’ Wolfendale addresses […]


Despite the fact that Schelling is a German Idealist or, more broadly, a post-Kantian thinker, there is not (to my knowledge) anything resembling a consensus regarding Schelling’s relation to Kant. Iain Grant sets up the relation as an overtly hostile one (akin to what the Furies do to Orestes) while thinkers such as Arran Garre […]