Posts & Reflections
Thoughts on philosophy and theology; helpful advice on teaching, learning, and coding.
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The Archive
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French Philosophy Today to join Difficult Atheism on Edinburgh Scholarship Online
I’ve just learned that French Philosophy Today will shortly join Difficult Atheism on Edinburgh Scholarship Online. This, I hope, will come as good news to at least some of those who have been in touch with me about the price of the hardback edition.
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Difficult Atheism reviewed in Derrida Today
The latest issue of Derrida Today includes a review of my Difficult Atheism by Christina Smerick. You can read the whole review online for free here. Watkin’s thesis is bold and unapologetic, and shapes the path of his reading and thinking with intense focus. His main concern, bordering on a battle cry, is that the ground gained by atheism
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French Philosophy Today reviewed at NDPR
French Philosophy Today has just been reviewed over at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. Here are some highlights: Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s famously defined philosophical production as concept creation. If they are correct, then Watkin’s work is not just a scholarly commentary of philosophy but also itself an inventive philosophical work. If Alain Badiou, the
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French Philosophy Today: Summary of Chapter 6 – Bruno Latour
This is the sixth in a series of posts providing short summaries of the chapters in my latest book, French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour. For further chapter summaries, please see here. Chapter 6 considers the figure of the human that emerges in Bruno Latour’s An Inquiry into Modes
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French Philosophy Today: Summary of Chapter 5 – Michel Serres
This is the fifth in a series of posts providing short summaries of the chapters in my latest book, French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour. For further chapter summaries, please see here. With Michel Serres’s universal humanism (Chapter 5) the argument returns to the question of host capacities in
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French Philosophy Today: Summary of Chapter 4 – Malabou, The Epigenetic Human
This is the fourth in a series of posts providing short summaries of the chapters in my latest book, French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour. For further chapter summaries, please see here. Chapter 4 turns to the question of human identity over time in Malabou. After setting out the
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Jean-Luc Nancy and Visual Culture just published, with my chapter on Nancy, dance and equality
Just published: Nancy and Visual Culture. Here is the abstract for my chapter, entitled “Dancing Equality: Image, Imitation and Participation”. ‘We are facing a very new demand in terms of art’ remarks Nancy in Allitérations, ‘the demand that art be “made by everyone”’. And yet we also know very well that the arts require individuality, singularity
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French Philosophy Today: Summary of Chapter 3 – Malabou, The Plastic Human
This is the third in a series of posts providing short summaries of the chapters in my latest book, French Philosophy Today: New Figures of the Human in Badiou, Meillassoux, Malabou, Serres and Latour. For further chapter summaries, please see here. The transition from Badiou and Meillassoux to Malabou leads us away from a host capacity
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My review of Ignaas Devisch’s Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community now available on the H-France website
My extended review of Ignaas Devisch’s excellent Jean-Luc Nancy and the Question of Community has just been published on the H-France website. The PDF can be downloaded here.
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Talk in Melbourne on Aug 5 – Varieties of Contemporary Atheism: Badiou, Nancy, Meillassoux
On August 5 at 11am I will have the pleasure of speaking at the Melbourne University of Divinity philosophy seminar on the subject “Varieties of Contemporary Atheism: Badiou, Nancy, Meillassoux”. The talk seeks to synthesise and develop some of the main lines of thinking from Difficult Atheism and to open the argument of the book to