Hume’s Aesthetics: On the Standard of Taste

There is undoubtedly a variety of opinion in matters of art appreciation – someone may, for example, detest Damien Hirst’s Continue reading →

Trump: Hegel’s World Historical Individual?

Recently I read an interesting article from Gideon Rachman. As the chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times, he Continue reading →

The Phenomenology of Language in David Abram’s ‘The Spell of the Sensuous’

I really do consider this a truly paradigm-shifting book even though I didn’t buy into all of the assumptions written Continue reading →

Reclaiming Memory, Recapturing Attention, 2: Paying Attention as Taking Care

But how exactly do we go about doing this? What is the most effective way for us to improve our Continue reading →

The Spectacle of the Scaffold – Foucault, Corporal Punishment, and the Digital Age

Witnesses who described the scene could even be prosecuted, thereby ensuring that the execution should cease to be a spectacle Continue reading →

Reclaiming Memory, Recapturing Attention, 1: Socrates and the Internet

‘“This invention, O king,” said Theuth, “will make the Egyptians wiser and will improve their memories; for it is an Continue reading →

How Should One Love?: A Review of Existentialism and Romantic Love

Skye Cleary’s book Existentialism and Romantic Love is a philosophical piece aiming to resolve the problematic nature of defining and Continue reading →

Abjection and the Real

Psychoanalysts Julia Kristeva and her predecessor Jacques Lacan have baffled graduate students for years due to their opaque and relentless Continue reading →

The Web as Rhizome in Deleuze and Guattari

‘A rhizome has no beginning or end; it is always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo. The tree is filiation, Continue reading →

Transport for London and the Total Advertisement

When TfL announced that Canada Water station was to be dubbed ‘Buxton Water’ for Marathon Day we witnessed one of Continue reading →

Louis Althusser, the Ideological State Apparatus, and Interpellation

Imagine that you’ve magically transformed into a bourgeoisie capitalist. You wake up one morning and…poof: regal cashmere pajamas, silk blankets, Continue reading →

Deleuze V. Dolezal – Yeah, We’re Actually Doing This

Deleuze and Identity Politics Deleuze has been used before to critique identity politics, sometimes this has been done with the Continue reading →

Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Video Games

The great messianic art critic Walter Benjamin saw the role of film in his era of capitalist culture as creating Continue reading →

On Certainty and Mad Max

“At the end of the world,” our eponymous hero growls in the prologue of George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road, Continue reading →

Sartre’s Existential Lobsters

‘“What crabs? Are you mad? What crabs? Ah! Yes. Well, yes… The crabs are men. And so? Where did I Continue reading →

Hemingway and Modernity’s Necropolis

The works of Ernest Hemingway have always aimed to elucidate the looming presence of death as it follows his characters Continue reading →

Simulacrum in Literature: Baudrillard and Barthelme

Simulacrum, like many terms surrounding postmodernism, has been defined in a number of ways. Perhaps the simplest definition of the Continue reading →

Time-Tearing with Philip K. Dick

I like Philip K. Dick. His ideas are intriguing and his writing is more than passable by my standards. I Continue reading →

Stiegler’s Memory, 1: The Problem With Husserl

The Problem With Husserl To French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, the outer objects that human beings create can be looked at exteriorisations of Continue reading →

Philip K. Dick’s Martian Time-Slip and Pragmatic Knowledge

Philip K. Dick is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting writers of the 20th century. His prose is Continue reading →

Borges and Murakami: Philosophy in Fiction

Borges and Murakami Philosophy in fiction has had a long and storied history, from the mythology of Ancient Greece to Continue reading →

Is Postmodernism Self-Defeating?

In academia postmodernism is nearly impossible to avoid. Characters like Foucault, Derrida, Lyotard, Jameson, Baudrillard (and many others of course), Continue reading →

Man the Animal Without Essence, 4: The Edge of Time

In the first part of Man, The Animal Without Essence I focused on the myth of Prometheus and Epimetheus, in Continue reading →

Two Lessons on Animal and Man, 2: Christianity and Cartesianism

Christianity and Cartesianism In the second lesson of his book Two Lessons on Animal and Man, Gilbert Simondon begins to Continue reading →

Two Lessons on Animal and Man, 1: Antiquity

Simondon Gilbert Simondon (1924 – 1989) was arguably one of the most original and innovative thinkers in contemporary French philosophy. Continue reading →

In What Sense Can We Understand the Mind As Existing Beyond the Brain?

In what sense can we understand the mind as existing beyond the brain? Throughout history, since the days of the Continue reading →

Foucault and Digital Discourse

Foucault calls into question the definition of discourse in his famous, methodological work the Archaeology of Knowledge. While it is Continue reading →

The Failed Übermensch: A Marxist Reading of Crime and Punishment

Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment highlights the turmoil, and tribulations of the societal exclusion of 19th century Russia’s lower class. Raskolnikov, Continue reading →

Man, the Animal Without Essence, 3: Brains, Hands and Tools

Artifice and art itself – these are the two meanings of the Greek word technē. Technē is, according to French Continue reading →

Stiegler and Derrida: The Technical History of Memory

Stiegler defines what he calls ‘grammatisation’ as the ‘technical history of memory, in which hypomnesic memory continually reintroduces the constitution Continue reading →

The Role of Freedom and Necessity in Schelling’s Inquiries

“The time has come for the higher distinction or, rather, for the real contrast, to be made manifest, the contrast Continue reading →

Fernando Pessoa and Nietzsche: The Last Man and Happiness

“Zarathustra has changed, Zarathustra has become a child, Zarathustra is an awakened one; what do you now want among the Continue reading →

Man, the Animal Without Essence, 2: Fire and the Cave

Why do humans produce art? What is it that has led us as a species to feel the need to Continue reading →

Is Vertical Farming The Future?

With the population sky high, and the size of our cities reaching breaking point, the demand on the agriculture sector Continue reading →

From Huxley to Jung: The Psychology of Initiation Rites

Initiation rites are an integral part of traditional societies. An initiation rite is a ritual or ceremony marking entrance or Continue reading →

The ‘Champagne Socialist’ Fallacy

‘Champagne socialist,’ ‘limousine liberal’, or my personal favourite ‘bourgeois bohemian’ are equivalent accusations aimed at people who advocate socialist thought, Continue reading →

Man, the Animal Without Essence

In the second half of his most famous work, Technics and Time, 1, ‘Prometheus’s Liver’, Bernard Stiegler analyses the Greek myth Continue reading →

When Fiction Lives In Fiction

Fantastic Borges essay on the history of meta-fiction and its role in literature. After a thorough search of Google I couldn’t Continue reading →

The Importance of the Synthetic A Priori in Kant’s First Critique

For Kant, the analytic/synthetic distinction and the a priori/a posteriori distinction are fundamental building blocks in his philosophy. In this Continue reading →

Slavoj Zizek writes for Ambercrombie and Fitch

The internet truly does bring up some strange things. Whilst researching an article about São Paulo’s current city-wide ban on advertising Continue reading →

Borges’ Dreamtigers

  A man sets himself the task of portraying the world. Through the years he peoples a space with images Continue reading →

Jorge Luis Borges: Selected Non-Fictions

Another Borges book. Another 5 stars. I mean this man is so brilliant I’m starting to turn into a dithering Continue reading →

The Good, the Bad, and the Evil: The Role of the Slave In Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals

In the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche aims to provide a new philosophical standpoint, one based on the concept of value Continue reading →

Proletarianization in E.M. Forster’s The Machine Stops

‘cannot you see […] that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really Continue reading →

The Influence of Kafka’s ‘The Trial’

I’ve never been so indecisive about what to rate a book as I have been with Kafka’s The Trial. Upon Continue reading →

Bioy Casares: Time Images in The Invention of Morel

Ok, so I decided to pick this up as I found out Bioy was a friend of Borges (who just Continue reading →

To what extent has Kierkegaard’s view of the self influenced Heidegger’s conception of Dasein?

 ‘A human being is spirit. But what is spirit? Spirit is the self. But what is the self? The self Continue reading →