Posts & Reflections
Thoughts on philosophy and theology; helpful advice on teaching, learning, and coding.
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The Archive
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Michel Serres book excerpt: Serres’ algorithmic universal
This is the second in a series of extracts from Michel Serres: Figures of Thought that I will be posting in the run-up to the book’s publication around April 2020. The archive of all the extracts will be accessible here. Serres’ algorithmic universal In addition to the sharp contrast between Cartesian analysis and Leibnizian combination,
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Representing French and Francophone Studies with Michel Serres
I am delighted that my article “Representing French and Francophone Studies with Michel Serres” has just been published in the latest number of the Australian Journal of French Studies. Many thanks to Ash, Leslie and Gemma at the ANU who worked hard on the editing and wrote a splendid introduction to the AJFS special edition.
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Michel Serres book excerpt: Serres, Leibniz, and umbilical thinking
This is the first of a number of extracts from Michel Serres: Figures of Thought that I will be posting in the run-up to the book’s publication around April 2020. The archive of all the extracts will be accessible here. Serres and Leibniz Weighing in at 800 pages and around 300 000 words, Le Système
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Why Michel Serres is, and is not, an ecological thinker
In this excerpt from Michel Serres: Figures of Thought I address the question of whether Serres should be considered an “ecological” thinker.
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Kant, Foucault and Serres on the a priori
Michel Serres’ “objective transcendental” naturalises the a priori, taking a different path both to Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason and to Foucault’s “historical a priori”
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Why Michel Serres? A Personal Reflection
On the day of Michel Serres’s death, I reflect on what drew me to write on this beguiling, prescient, inimitable thinker
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Michel Serres and film 4: Jean-Luc Godard’s Alphaville
This the fourth of four undergraduate lectures in which I explore how the thought of Michel Serres can inform film studies. I embarked upon the lectures as a speculative experiment, but in writing them I became convinced that there are rich resources in Serres’s thought for generating novel and engaging readings of films that often
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From Plato to Postmodernism: Introduction
Here is the Introduction from my 2011 book From Plato to Postmodernism: The Story of Western Culture Through Philosophy, Literature and Art. The Introduction is entitled “To the man with a hammer …” human beings are not born once and for all on the day their mothers give birth to them, but […] life
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Michel Serres and film 3: Krzysztof Kieślowski’s Trois Couleurs Bleu
[vc_row row_height_percent=”0″ overlay_alpha=”50″ gutter_size=”3″ column_width_percent=”100″ shift_y=”0″ z_index=”0″ shape_dividers=””][vc_column][vc_column_text] This the third of four undergraduate lectures in which I explore how the thought of Michel Serres can inform film studies. I embarked upon the lectures as a speculative experiment, but in writing them I became convinced that there are rich resources in Serres’s thought for generating
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Infographic: How does online reporting of climate change frame the question of freedom?
As I continue to work on the how freedom, liberation and emancipation are framed in key areas of public debate today, here is a quick observation about how the language of freedom is deployed in relation to climate change in online news sources, presented as an infographic: …and an accompanying video: