Essay analyzing Syrian wedding singer Omar Souleyman’s popularity in rave, techno, and other popular Western music markets.

This is a review of the book “Kali’s Child: The Mystical and the Erotic in the Life and Teachings of Ramakrishna, Jeffrey J. Kripal, University of Chicago Press, 1995” . “Kali’s child” fell well short of a proof that Sri Ramakrishna’s mystical experiences were actually “profoundly, provocatively, scandalously erotic”. To reconstruct the autobiogr…[Read more]

This article asks the question how post-exilic readers would have read 1-2 Samuel in Yehud. It answers the question by looking at ancient Mediterranean models of textual authority and education.

In the first decade of the twenty-first century, a young generation of Syrian experimental composers conceived a space for musiqa mu‘asira, or contemporary art music. Informed by debates on critical aesthetics, modernity, and subjectivity in the Arab world and beyond, these composers drew on particular compositional devices and techniques to m…[Read more]

This essay explores how and why three early Christian figures–Epiphanius, Romanos the Melode, and Ambrosiaster–have, at various times, been imagined as former Jews. By applying a hermeneutics of conversion, this essay argues that the significance of these three Christians’ ex-Jewishness lies not in its historicity (or falsity) but in the way…[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]

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]

These are the introductory chapter and chapter eight of the multi-authored book that I edited on food-music relations in various regions and periods. In the introduction I analyze the phenomenological basis of the unbalanced relations between food and music. Chapter 8 deals with song lyrics about food in Latin American and the Caribbean.

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.

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]

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.

This band was formed in Auckland, New Zealand following the success of an earlier drum and fife band associated with the Ponsonby Boy Scouts Association. It undertook several country-wide tours on both islands during the 1920’s and was a very successful and sought-after musical organisation.

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]

A „Don Juan”-nak szentelt, valójában az önálló mítosszá nőtt Mozart-operához, a Don Giovanni néven jegyzett „dramma giocoso per musicá”-hoz hozzászóló értekezéseikben E. T. A. Hoffman és Søren Kierkegaard nemcsak érzékeny elemzését adják az operának, hanem ezenfelül megörökítik az opera előadásához kötődő élményeiket – Kierkegaard utalásszerűen,…[Read more]