Posts & Reflections
Thoughts on philosophy and theology; helpful advice on teaching, learning, and coding.
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The Archive
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SPEP 2020 video and paper: Remembering and Thinking with Michel Serres
This September I had the privilege of taking part in a panel at SPEP 2020 (postponed until 2021) alongside Marjolein Oele and Brian Treanor. “Remembering and Thinking with Michel Serres” ranged over issues related to Serres’s contemporaneity, his natural contract idea, and the distinctiveness of his thought. Here is a recording of Brian’s paper and
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The state of nature as social critique
The state of nature as social critique This is the second post in a series on the state of nature. In the first post I explored why the state of nature matters today. This post considers how the state of nature idea functions as a tool of social critique. It is also available as a
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The State of Nature – An Idea that Shapes Us
This post is the script for a video essay on the state of nature uploaded to the Social Contract Research Network YouTube channel. The material was written to be viewed. Video version: Podcast version: This is a video about a powerful idea. It is an idea that shapes our view of ourselves, and of what
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Video: Advice on securing a large academic grant
I have been asked a few times in recent months what advice I would give to colleagues applying for competitive grants and fellowships, such as the Australian Research Council Discovery Project or Future Fellowship schemes. While my expertise is limited to my own experience and my one-time success in the Future Fellowship scheme, I’m more
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TALK Rewriting the Social Contract – the Role of Christian Social Institutions
This guest lecture was delivered at Parliament House, Canberra, on 22 February 2021, at the invitation of the Church Community Restoration Project, an alliance of Christian community organisations committed to partnering government, individuals and communities as they face the challenges of a COVID-19 recovery in Australia. The lecture draws on research from the Australian Research
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YouTube videos of ‘Ends of Autonomy’ colloquium papers: surveillance, neoliberalism, climate
This week my Warwick colleague Prof Oliver Davis and I co-hosted the second ‘Ends of Autonomy’ colloquium, eqploring how freedom is changing today in the light of new technologies, climate change and neoliberalism. Where presenters gave their consent, sessions were recorded and uploaded to the Ends of Autonomy Colloquia YouTube channel. Below are the videos
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Michel Serres and the New Social Contract
This is a paper presented at the 2020 SEP-FEP (Society for European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy) conference: https://sep-fep.com/ Abstract One of Michel Serres’s best-known works in the anglophone world is The Natural Contract, in which he argues that our current social contract dangerously neglects the non-human and needs supplementing with a new settlement
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Interview: Michel Serres, Philosophy and the Contemporary World
This week I was interviewed by David Webb for the 2020 SEP-FEP (Society of European Philosophy and Forum for European Philosophy) Conference coming up in November. The interview focused on the work of French philosopher Michel Serres (1930-2019), ranging over Serres’s style, politics, ecology, language, and my book Michel Serres: Figures of Thought (Edinburgh University Press,
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Towards a general clinamatics: narrative, the social contract, and four pages of Balibar
This post is part of a series of reflections on the social contract. For other posts in the series, please please click here. It is common to evaluate accounts of the social contract as if they were abstract arguments containing a finite list of propositions about human nature, history and politics, each with its
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Poverty, Precarity, Ecology – Michel Serres’s natural contract
This is a paper I originally prepared for a Faculty meeting. It briefly introduces the idea of the natural contract to a cross-disciplinary audience, and gestures towards some of its benefits. This paper addresses what sort of philosophy, and what sort of social sciences, are required to address the qualitatively new problems that face