Posts & Reflections
Thoughts on philosophy and theology; helpful advice on teaching, learning, and coding.
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More unacceptable reasons to enjoy the pandemic. Let’s read Camus’s La Peste #8
For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here. In the previous post in this series I reflected on how literature can reveal the hidden side of a pandemic. Attitudes that would be incendiary if voiced in the first person can be exposed and explored in literary texts, absent
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The unspoken pandemic: on the illicit enjoyment of plague. Let’s read Camus’s La Peste #7
For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here. Everyone is writing about the pandemic right now, but we are not writing everything. There are some some impulses, some reactions, some fleeting thoughts that we prudently keep under our hats at a time like this. Once the COVID-19 pandemic
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An Easter meditation: On the very idea of having something to say about COVID-19. Let’s read Camus’ La Peste #6
For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here. I have come across an impressive amount of self-styled insight in the past few days: what the world will look like after the virus, how we should reshape it, what an opportunity this is, how things will never be the
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Pandemics, the phenomenology of statistics, and the numerical sublime. Let’s read Camus’ La Peste #5
For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here. There has been much talk over the past weeks of COVID-19 being an “invisible enemy”. Setting the war metaphor aside for a moment, it is illuminating to reflect on the ways in which we make pandemics visible. In La Peste figures and
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The Ends of Autonomy: Updated CFP outlining new arrangements for remote participation
*** Updated Call outlining new arrangements for remote participation *** The Ends of Autonomy The Past, Present and Future of Freedom Call for Papers Twin cross-disciplinary colloquia run out of Warwick University, UK (7-10 July 2020) and Monash University, Australia (15-16 December 2020) will explore the genealogy of ideas of freedom, autonomy, liberation
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Pandemic temporality: the strange times of COVID-19. Let’s read Camus’ La Peste #4
For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here. A pandemic does strange things to time. We are used to living in different times at once. There is the clock time of regular 60-second minutes and 24-hour days. There is the joy of youthful infatuation when a day with one’s
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Bonkers is the new normal: escalating paradigm shifts in the progress of a pandemic. Let’s read Camus’ La Peste #3
For the full series of “Lets read Camus’ La Peste” posts, please click here. Camus, drawing his reader into the heightening tension of La Peste, calibrates attitudes to the plague with an escalating vocabulary. Each shift in terminology is accompanied by a dramatic event or realisation that causes a paradigm shift in the understanding of
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Epidemics are apocalyptic, but not in the way we might think. Let’s read Camus’ La Peste #1
This is my first post about Albert Camus’s La Peste (The Plague). I’m about a quarter of the way through the novel now, and there’s SO MUCH to write about. Reading Camus in the context of the current COVID-19 situation provides a counterpoint outside the media frenzy from which to gain perspective and insight into
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Call for Papers: The Ends of Autonomy
Together with my colleague Oliver Davis at Warwick I am organising twin colloquia on freedom, autonomy, liberation and emancipation later this year. Here is the CFP: The Ends of Autonomy The Past, Present and Future of Freedom Call for Papers Twin cross-disciplinary colloquia at Warwick University, UK (7-8 July 2020) and Monash
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Plato’s cave, Michel Serres, and imagining Nietzsche’s madman happy
I’ve been teaching Nietzsche’s madman this week in the context of a unit on literary modernism, and there has been some fascinating discussion among the students about the solar imagery in the passage. As a contribution to that discussion, here is an extract from Michel Serres: Figures of Thought in which I compare the image of