An Honours course taught by me at Edinburgh in 2009 and 2012

This infographic illustrates the PPJ Formative Peer Review process from start to finish.

Very short essay on the way Deleuze uses images in his book on Bacon. In the original French edition, the images are in a separate volume; he does that in order to mime, or enact, the theory of sensation in his text. It seems to me this is an unusual and promising strategy for art history (disposing images so their sequence and arrangement…[Read more]

How do we learn the link between speech and money? What is the process of formation that
legitimates the logic whereby speech is equivalent to money? What are the experiences, events, and subjectivities
that render the connection between currency and speaking/listening intuitive? As educators and researchers,
what do we do and say to shore up…[Read more]

Primera versión del proyecto Compartiva (filosofía software) asociado al hardware Cousateca.

Review of Edward J. Watts, Hypatia. The Life and Legend of an Ancient Philosopher

Adding to the long list of “post” conditions, the term “post-internet” offers a fairly recent attempt to characterize a certain social, political, historical, and material condition that artists, curators, educators, and critics are currently working with. For some, it provides a language to articulate the complex entwinements between online…[Read more]

Adding to the long list of “post” conditions, the term “post-internet” offers a fairly recent attempt to characterize a certain social, political, historical, and material condition that artists, curators, educators, and critics are currently working with. For some, it provides a language to articulate the complex entwinements between online…[Read more]

Adding to the long list of “post” conditions, the term “post-internet” offers a fairly recent attempt to characterize a certain social, political, historical, and material condition that artists, curators, educators, and critics are currently working with. For some, it provides a language to articulate the complex entwinements between online…[Read more]

The historical narrative of water purity tends to chart a process of secularisation with an
increasing importance on cleanliness. We suggest otherwise – that rhetorically at least, water
has never been secularised. Moral impurity and water contamination have a long and
interrelated history. Even before the connection had been made between c…[Read more]

The historical narrative of water purity tends to chart a process of secularisation with an
increasing importance on cleanliness. We suggest otherwise – that rhetorically at least, water
has never been secularised. Moral impurity and water contamination have a long and
interrelated history. Even before the connection had been made between c…[Read more]

What is philosophy? That’s a good question—not because there’s no answer, but because what’s involved in posing it points up something essential to philosophy. In the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza sets out what’s required by a definition. A circle, a typical definition might run, is a figure in which all lines drawn fro…[Read more]

As technology enables us to communicate with one another in unpredictable ways that allow for an unprecedented public exchange of diverse ideas, cultivating the philosophical habits of an engaged fallibilistic pluralism gains in urgency. The emergence of the World Wide calls us to consider how an ethics of philosophy might enable us to cultivate…[Read more]

This is a comprehensive reassessment of Aristotle’s concept of tragic hamartia, and its different interpretations from the 1530s to the present day, in the context of Aristotle’s theory of action.

This is a review of the book on visual intelligence written by Prof. Donald D. Hoffman. This review questions the view that we create what we see. It is argued that we rather create a representation of reality. This view is peddled using a discussion around frames of reference.

The use of water as an expressive trope of spiritual hygiene was widespread among monastic writers of the twelfth century, adapted for different uses in different genres. Aqueous imagery was particularly frequent within allegories or didactic figurae exploring the care of the soul as if it were a material body, with a constitution that could be…[Read more]

This paper proposes that we can reimagine insular literatures and medieval islescapes as commodious seas of cultural and intellectual loci that span time, culture, and text alike. By moving beyond the rhetoric of insular separation or connectivity, we can see that islands connect even when medieval minds saw separation. The essay focuses on the…[Read more]

This article is a discussion of the “discourse on the unthinkable” surrounding potential future democratic engagements with rivers as non-human persons or natural objects. In the context of the Asia–Pacific region, this article suggests that the developments in material philosophy entitled “new materialism” are essential tools in the reconcept…[Read more]

Gathering into lively conversation scholars in medieval, early modern and object studies, Inhuman Nature explores the activity of the things, forces, and relations that enable, sustain and operate indifferently to us. Enamored by fictions of environmental sovereignty, we too often imagine “human” to be a solitary category of being. This col…[Read more]

This article explores the representation of hunger and thirst as faculties within medieval spiritual allegory that existed at two forms. In their bodily form, hunger and thirst represented a feeling of lack indicating the need for sustenance. In their figurative moralised form these needs came to represent a longing for that which was missing…[Read more]