In this essay, we trace the relations among the early years of the U.S.–Mexico borderlands after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), the role of racialist discourse in shaping the border and U.S. immigration policy, and contemporary bordering and security environments. Our ultimate aim is to show how contemporary security knowledge and p…[Read more]

Contribution to a published review panel on Mezzadra and Neilson’s book, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor.

A look at Nietzsche and Schopenhauer’s critique of scholarly education

An historical and philosophical look at Nietzsche conception of “Bildung” in context of the German tradition.

La literatura ha estado desde siempre asociada al poder, y en la Edad Media oriental esto no es una excepción. Cuando Abu’l-Qāsem Ferdowsī terminó su gran obra, el Šāh-nāmeh, en 1010, esta se transformó en un elemento legitimador de las dinastías que durante los siglos medievales pugnarían por el dominio de Persia. A través de sus versos y de…[Read more]

Here’s a draft version of the introduction I wrote some years back for the translation of Roberto Esposito’s Ten Thoughts of the Political.

L’objectif de cet article est de montrer que le républicanisme d’entreprise développé par Hsieh ne protège pas les travailleurs contre l’ensemble des interférences arbitraires. Comme ils sont fondés uniquement sur la contestation des décisions, les arrangements institutionnels que Hsieh propose n’arrivent pas à saisir l’ensemble des formes que pe…[Read more]

Peu de gens ignorent tout l’attrait et le regret que la procrastination peut engendrer. Ils n’ignorent pas la tension psychologique que ce genre de choix fait apparaître et le dilemme que cela représente. Remettre au lendemain ce qui devrait être fait aujourd’hui est une conception classique de procrastination et on considère tradition…[Read more]

Drawing on the poetry of Wallace Stevens and the remarkable series of lectures Frederick J. E. Woodbridge gave at Union College in 1930 entitled, simply, “The Philosophy of Aristotle,” but published under the title Aristotle’s Vision of Nature, this paper identifies the path of Aristotle’s thinking, its method, as a “peripatetic legomenol…[Read more]

This essay articulates the differences and suggests the similarities between the practices of Socratic political speaking and those of Platonic political writing. The essay delineates Socratic speaking and Platonic writing as both erotically oriented toward ideals capable of transforming the lives of individuals and their relationships with one…[Read more]

The main thesis of this essay is that the practice of Socratic political speaking and the practice of Platonic political writing are intimately interconnected but distinct.
The essay focuses on the famous passage from the Gorgias in which Socrates claims to be one of the few Athenians who attempt the political art truly and goes on to articulate…[Read more]

In Plato’s Protagoras Alcibiades plays the role of Hermes, the ‘ambassador god’, who helps lead Socrates’ conversation with Protagoras through a crisis of dialogue that threatens to destroy the community of education established by the dialogue itself.

By tracing the moments when Alcibiades intervenes in the conversation, we are led to an unde…[Read more]

Digital media technology, when deployed in ways that cultivate shared learning communities in which students and teachers are empowered to participate as partners in conjoint educational practices, can transform the way we teach and learn philosophy. This essay offers a model for how to put blogging and podcasting in the service of a cooperative…[Read more]

This article traces what Schürmann calls the “double comprehension of being” in Kant in which the sense of being as pure givenness is said to be recognized but denied by Kant as his thinking undertakes its Copernican turn. Schürmann insists that this can be heard in the ambiguous ways the German terms “Position” and “Setzung” are used in Kant.…[Read more]

A critical discussion of the account of social externalism and ideology critique in Sally Haslanger’s “Resisting Reality.”

A chapter giving an overview over the theory of value in the work of John McDowell and issues related to it.

Study of the form censorship took in two variant editions of Carl Albrecht Bernoulli’s Franz Overbeck und Friedrich Nietzsche: Eine Freundschaft 2 vols. (Jena: E. Diederichs, 1908)

This paper argues that liberal theories of justice cannot satisfactorily deal with institutional power. They set out to compare different institutional structures based on criteria which presume an institution-independent ontology of rights and goods. But as soon as it is acknowledged that many properties of goods and rights which are normatively…[Read more]

This is a syllabus for my MA course “Power, Oppression and Justice”, taught at the University of Groningen in 2016.

This working paper examines the notion of “immanent critique”, a central methodological commitment of critical theories of society. In the first part, I distinguish immanent critique – a critique which reconstructs norms immanent in a social practice which point beyond the normative self-understanding of its members – from both external and…[Read more]