This report is intended as a guide to facilitate the development of the Transgender Media Portal (transgendermediaportal.org). The Transgender Media Portal aims to make audiovisual work by trans, Two Spirit, nonbinary, intersex, and gender-nonconforming people more available to artists, activists, festival programmers, researchers, instructors,…[Read more]

Wittgenstein’s and Heidegger’s objections against the possibility of a science of aesthetics were influential on different sides of the analytic/continental divide. Heidegger’s anti-scientism leads him to an alētheic view of artworks which precedes and exceeds any possible aesthetic reduction. Wittgenstein also rejects the relevance of causal…[Read more]

This essay discusses the cinematic representation of Revolution in Sergei Eisenstein’s film Oktiabr’ / October, a film which had a decisive impact on the revolutionary development of film history and theory. I will explore how Revolution can be re-enacted and shown in the medium of cinema, and how this medium is capable of not only staging his…[Read more]

Genevieve Lloyd argues that when we follow Spinoza in understanding reason as a part of nature, we gain new insights into the human condition. Specifically, we gain a new political insight: we should respond to cultural difference with a pluralist ethos. This is because there is no pure universal reason; human minds find their reason shaped…[Read more]

Students often have difficulty connecting theoretical and text-based scholarship to the real world. When teaching in Asia, this disconnection is exacerbated by the European/American focus of many canonical texts, whereas students’ own experiences are primarily Asian. However, in my discipline of political philosophy, this problem receives little…[Read more]

According to a recent interpretive orthodoxy, Spinoza is a profoundly democratic theorist of state authority. I reject this orthodoxy. To be sure, for Spinoza, a political order succeeds in proportion as it harnesses the power of the people within it. However, Spinoza shows that political inclusion is only one possible strategy to this end;…[Read more]

At the centre of Powers’ (2019) China and England is an extraordinary forgotten episode in the history of political ideas. There was a time when English radicals critiqued the corruption and injustice of the English political system by contrasting it with the superior example of China. There was a time when they advocated adopting a Chinese…[Read more]

The book draws on the political writings of Hobbes and Spinoza to establish a conceptual framework for understanding the genesis, risks, and promise of popular power.
It makes an original contribution at the intersection of early modern philosophy and democratic theory.

Harun Farocki’s last film, Sauerbruch Hutton Architects (2013), is studied by comparing it to other works by the director and analyzing its scenes. The article elaborates what is the position of this office regarding architecture as a producer of images, and then verifies what is its underlying spatiality. As a result, one can see how the…[Read more]

This paper addresses a curious pattern of interlocking relationships. This pattern unfolds in a fixed form of ever-changing content, or what is often described as a ‘standing wave’. I will attribute this pattern to the interactive nervous system that synchronizes the periodic effects of four, neurological functions. These functions connect a par…[Read more]

This paper addresses a curious pattern of interlocking relationships. This pattern unfolds in a fixed form of ever-changing content, or what is often described as a ‘standing wave’. I will attribute this pattern to the interactive nervous system that synchronizes the periodic effects of four, neurological functions. These functions connect a par…[Read more]

The essay is an analytical critique of the Citizenship (Amendment) Act by deconstructing it in regards to a wide range of legal (national and international), political and moral issues. I argue how the CAA finds itself at odds with some of the founding principles of our democracy, and also fails to serve as a citizenship law under accepted customs…[Read more]

As Prof. Dale Townsend has observed, the concept of the Gothic has had an association with fairies from its inception; even before Walpole’s 1764 Castle of Otranto (considered the first Gothic novel), eighteenth-century poetics talked of ‘the fairy kind of writing’ which, for Addison, ‘raise a pleasing kind of Horrour in the Mind of the Reader’…[Read more]

Com base na análise das formas cinematográficas de reconstituição da história em Serras da desordem, Corumbiara e Taego Ãwa, identifico a importância da figura dos espectadores indígenas para a compreensão das imagens que os filmes criam e mobilizam. Argumento que o contracampo efetivo, virtual ou espectral dos espectadores indígenas constitui…[Read more]

These slides talk about open educational resources generally (what they are, why they are valuable), and also some ways to find OER for philosophy courses.

Slides for a guest lecture on Foucault for Humanities 101, a free course at the University of British Columbia Vancouver for members of the community. These slides talk about Foucault’s view of power and resistance, panopticism, visibility, and the self.

I was intrigued by the title of this book. Finally, I thought, the Western academia has come to terms with the incorporeality of the individual soul as presented in Indian philosophy. Richard Swinburne’s introduction dispelled my delusions. He proposes that individuals are not bodies but are souls and implies that these souls have properties and t…[Read more]

Notes from Northrop Frye´s seminal volume in archetypal/anthropological criticism, “Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays” (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 1957. Rpt. 1971. 383 p). Notes taken by J. A. García Landa c. 1985, edited with illustrations for online publication 2018-20. Parenthetical pagination numbers refer to the quotations and text f…[Read more]

This book challenges an assumption at the heart of contemporary theoretical debates: that it is impossible to reason through history. Steele believes that two influential schools of contemporary thought “hide from history”: liberal philosophies of public reason as espoused by such figures as Jürgen Habermas, John Rawls and Martha Nussbaum and stru…[Read more]