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]

This work provides a close linguistic and thematic analysis of the dialogues in the two novels Midaq Alley by N. Mahfouz and Rosa Mistika by E. Kezilahabi, as they reflect fundamental assumptions about gender, tradition, and modernity. Certain complex clauses that have been traditionally recognized in Logic and Philosophy to be used in argument…[Read more]

Writing a factual or fictional dream is a difficult task as its ›otherness‹ will challenge all of our accustomed modes of narration. So the existence of established cultural and textual patterns is a welcome help. This collection of essays describes these patterns, their historical and individual modifications and their relation to the dre…[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]

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]

Mount Putuo, the Chinese Potalaka, is located in the Zhoushan archipelago not far off the coast from Ningbo. The abode of Avalokiteğvara/Guanyin was not only a popular pilgrimage site, but also played a strategic role for the naval control of the archipelago, especially in the Ming and Qing dynasties. In late imperial China, a number of military…[Read more]

Below we develop a method to determine whether the use of grammatical particles in Chinese Buddhist scriptures is characteristic for the period of their translation. The corpus consists of three different Chinese translations of an early Indian Mahāyāna text from two different periods. We use the results of Principal Component Analysis (PCA) to d…[Read more]

Hidden in the Buddhist biographical literature on eminent monks is a large amount of information about who knew whom. It is especially rich for the time between 300 and 1000 CE, when the four major collections of “Biographies of Eminent Monks” (gaoseng zhuan) allow us to date and locate the relationships of individuals to a degree unimaginable for…[Read more]

Se o estudo do que Clarisse denomina filmes de contato depende de uma compreensão histórica do que está em jogo em cada uma das obras abordadas, sua análise de Os últimos isolados (Adrian Cowell, 1967-1999), Corumbiara (Vincent Carelli, 1986-2009) e Os Arara (Andrea Tonacci, 1980-) busca pensar a relação entre culturas como experiência aberta…[Read more]

This is the Vol – 2, SPECIAL ISSUE 4: VOL – 2, MARCH 2020 issue.

This is the Vol – 2, SPECIAL ISSUE 4: VOL – 1, MARCH 2020 issue.

Althusser’s thinking about education and law stands out for two reasons. First, whereas most accounts of school law fall under a broadly liberal category, Althusser’s—like most Marxists’—emphasizes school law as repressive, ideological, and reproductive of capitalism. Second, what distinguishes Althusser among Marxists generally is his landmark…[Read more]