My chapter ‘Do Signs have Styles?’ is now published in the collection Revisiting Style in Literary and Cultural Studies edited by Jasmin Herrmann, Moritz Ingwersen, Björn Sonnenberg-Schrank and Olga Ludmila Tarapata. Their volume is a fascinating selection of recent academic work on style. You can find a draft of my…
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Language and Process: Words, Whitehead and the World by Michael Halewood
If you are interested in process philosophy and language, I recommend Michael Halewood’s new book on Language and Process. The book is the first in my new series as editor (with Jeffrey A. Bell and Paul Livingston) for Edinburgh University Press, Intersections in Continental and Analytic Philosophy. We have other…
Continue ReadingThe Nostalgic Sublime
There is a strong argument against the idea of the nostalgic sublime. If the sublime leads to a drive to act in new ways, due to the enthusiasm released by simultaneous feelings of terror and attraction to a strange and inexplicable event, then the backward looking and stultifying qualities of…
Continue ReadingMetaphysics: Deleuze│Spencer-Brown
Some philosophers, struck with the recent discovery that no one set of metaphysical assumptions is necessary to communication, have fallen into the fallacy of thinking that we can communicate without any metaphysics at all… It is one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of discoveries in 2000 years to…
Continue ReadingManifest Destiny and the Sublime – Part 3: Necessarily Dangerous
In this final blog on the sublime and manifest destiny I will argue that the sublime is always at risk of leading to the violence of manifest destiny. I’ll also give more precise definitions and respond to a series of objections, referring back to the connection of manifest destiny to…
Continue ReadingManifest Destiny and the Sublime – Part 2: Reversing Perspectives
Having made the case for the connection between the sublime, fascism and imperialism in Arnold Fanck’s film SOS Eisberg, Lill-Ann Körber reverses perspectives and considers ‘sublime icebergs today’ in the Greenlandic film Nuummioq. These icebergs do not fit the conventional sublime of overawing size and power, sought out by the…
Continue ReadingManifest Destiny and the Sublime – Part 1: Manifest Destiny Returns
Following Donald Trump’s bluster about buying Greenland, the idea of manifest destiny had another resurrection: ‘There we get a sense of motion, as in…Manifest Destiny. Admittedly, Manifest Destiny is not a PC phrase. Yet trendy pieties aside, it’s hard to argue with the long-term logic of national expansion as key…
Continue ReadingIs There (Still) a Continental – Analytic Divide in Philosophy?
My answer (pp 148-9) and many others to this question in Gavagai philosophy journal
Continue ReadingCinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 10 on “Painting, Moving Images and Philosophy”
Cinema: Journal of Philosophy and the Moving Image 10 on “Painting, Moving Images and Philosophy” is now online at cjpmi.ifilnova.pt. I was guest editor, working with Susana Viegas, for this issue. Thanks to a terrific line up of papers and Susana’s outstanding knowledge of the field, the issue tackles the relation…
Continue ReadingReview of Jay Lampert’s The Many Futures of a Decision
My review of Jay Lampert’s The Many Futures of Decision in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
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