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.

Traditional arguments for privacy in public suggest that intentionally public activities, such as political speech, do not deserve privacy protection. In this article, I develop a new argument for the view that surveillance of intentionally public activities should be limited to protect the specific good that this context provides, namely…[Read more]

Der Zusammenhang zwischen dem Recht auf Privatheit und dem Recht auf demokratische Selbstbestimmung wird oft so verstanden, dass Privatheitsrechte lediglich instrumentellen Wert für demokratische Partizipation haben und alleine in der Möglichkeit bestehen, sich von der Teilnahme an der Öffentlichkeit zurückzuziehen. Ich stelle in meinem Bei…[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 this review of Abizadeh’s book, I question whether identifying a human ‘capacity for reason’ really resolves the problems with Hobbes’s philosophy’s distinctive combination of mechanistic materialism and moral normativity.

In this review, I propose that the core contribution of Skeaff’s book is to supplement existing discourses of non-domination and agonistic politics with the distinctly Spinozist concept of immanent normativity. However, I question whether this immanent normativity is so clearly and efficaciously democratic as Skeaff presumes.