India has been the seat of deep philosophical engagements since the Vedic period. However, Indian philosophical wisdom, albeit different from Western philosophical in many respects, was not widely known to the rest of the world before colonial thinkers started their dialogue with Indian philosophy through their translations and academic exegeses.…[Read more]

In this article I consider the stories of Jesus’ women ancestors in the genealogy which opens the Gospel of Matthew. Reading these stories in light of Marxist-feminist analyses of marriage, sex work and reproductive labor, alongside contemporary sex workers’ rights discourse, and through Marcella Althaus-Reid’s claim that all theology is “a se…[Read more]

This is a recording of a reading of Aristotle’s De Anima by Richard Lee and Christopher P. Long that was originally presented at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Citta di Castello, Umbria, Italy, on July 10, 2018. The theme of the 2018 Collegium was Aristotle: Physis, Psyche, Anthropos, and Kristi Sweet read Chris Long’s part at the conference…[Read more]

In addition to the enigmatic The Codomas, Henri Matisse distinguished three other images with a name, Icarus, Monsieur Loyal and Pierrot’s Funeral for his landmark livre d’artiste Jazz. While the characters Loyal, Pierrot and Icarus were readily identifiable and the images could be interpreted within the context of the difficulties of the Ger…[Read more]

Henri Matisse’s images in Jazz, created during the disruption of the German Occupation of France, were embedded with symbols of cultural resistance, while his text, which he composed after the defeat of the Germans, reflected the transition to a post-Liberation France. The wartime symbols and allusions camouflaged within these images are readily r…[Read more]

John 20:24-29 – the Doubting Thomas Narrative – is explored in terms of the thesis that Jesus showed Thomas wounds absolutely identical to the wounds originating at the time of the crucifixion. John understands the risen Jesus to enact sovereignty over time in this passage. This was a new stage in John’s Christological Development and aug…[Read more]

In interpreting the risen Jesus’ action of appearing ‘out of nowhere’ at John 20:19-20 (and Luke 24:36) and his inferred action of rising from the dead at John 20:5-7 (and Luke 24:12), the consensus of both classical and modern biblical tradition has been to understand these actions as Jesus in some sense passing through physical objects and there…[Read more]

In the section ‘Jesus Christ, Lord of Time’ in Church Dogmatics III/2 Karl Barth held that lordship or sovereignty over time was central to the reality of the risen Jesus. I argue that his enacting sovereignty over time coincided with the very resurrection of time itself – the past recapitulated in the present – in a way necessarily invol…[Read more]

Borges made a habit of differing from himself. “El otro” and “Borges y yo” are only the most overt examples from a corpus that constantly played with his biography, his beliefs, and his proper name. In his “non-fiction,” this Auseinselbstsetzung takes the form of self-contradiction, asserting opposed theses in his own name, celebrating…[Read more]

Religions are widely accessible in the digital community and Hinduism and Hindu Nationalism Online engages with some of the internet’s representations of Hinduism, with a focus primarily on political and politico-nationalist representations. Juli L. Gittinger focuses on three organizations throughout the book: Vishva Hindu Parishad (VHP), R…[Read more]

By way of the autobiographical writings of Bruno Schulz and the “resurrection” paintings of Stanley Spencer, this talk sketches out some of the ways in which literature and the fine arts situate themselves within the division, or series of breaks, that Michel de Certeau argued Western historiography inscribes between past and present, between the…[Read more]

This essay ruminates the ethics of a co-implicated, bounded dependence between objects (human and otherwise) that are always in some sense withdrawing from each other but also always together in a some-place labeled “here”: the world (where no Absolute or Outside vantage point is possible or habitable). This essay also considers the possibility,…[Read more]

Through a comparative analysis of Chaucer’s “The Clerk’s Tale” and Lars von Trier’s film “Breaking the Waves,” this essay wonders what happens when two texts and one reader happen to each other and open up a singular adventure that is also a moment of ‘futurition’ that opens up new horizons of meaning, both human and inhuman. How can we reckon the…[Read more]

Few of Arendt’s writings have drawn more criticism from her own supporters than “Reflections on LIttle Rock,” in which she opposes the federally mandated desegregation of schools. I take Arendt’s comments as a way of opening up problems in her conception of the relationship among political storytelling, plurality and judgment. I do this through a…[Read more]

This is a worksheet I ask students to use to engage in self-assessment of their own essays. I use a version of the same worksheet for peer feedback on essays.

From Charles Taylor to Marcel Gauchet, theorists of the social imaginary have given us new ways
to talk about the shared structures of meanings and practices of the West. Theorists of this group
have argued against the narrow horizons of meaning that are deployed by deliberative political
theories in developing their basic normative concepts…[Read more]

When speaking of the philosophical importance of James’s late style, critics and philosophers have taken two broad approaches. One route, exemplified by Martha Nussbaum, attributes this style to the sensitivity of the characters. The other, exemplified by Robert Pippin, attributes the writing’s complexity to the ambiguities of the moral codes dur…[Read more]

Introduction to Althusser’s concept of ideological reproduction, written for those with little to no theory experience.

Slides for an Introduction to Philosophy course at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. These are about Michael Walzer’s article, “Just War and Terrorism” (2006).

Slides for an Introduction to Philosophy course at the University of British Columbia. These refer to an article by Soran Reader, “Making Pacifism Plausible” (2000).