Tag: Philosophy
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Keir Starmer Makes More Sense Than I Thought
I normally do not make posts announcing that another post is about to come out. But this one has been a bit different. For the past weeks, I have been finishing a long article for my Substack that has honestly taken quite a lot out of me. It brings together many different threads that have…
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I’m a Bunny, and I Love Eating Veg
Transmodernity 3 In the first two pieces in my series on Transmodernity, I tried to map its yin and yang. The first looked at its strength.Its critique of reason.Its suspicion of grand universal claims.Much of that resonates with me. (It can be found here) The second looked at something darker.The inversion from God to pain.The…
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Happy New Year (Again)
Two New Years At the beginning of January, I wished everyone a happy new year in my post A Term Spent Arguing With Universal Reason. It also marked the launch of my new Substack. That was the Western new year. The calendar flipped.The numbers changed.We reset. Today feels different. Today is Chinese New Year —…
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A Term Spent Arguing With Universal Reason
This past term has been, in one way or another, an extended argument. An argument with ideas I’ve been circling for years.An argument with the philosophical foundations of modernity.And, more specifically, an argument with what often travels under the name universal reason. That argument didn’t start this year. It runs through After Nation, through my…
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Worldviews.
Most disagreements about history are not about facts. They’re about worldviews. Before we argue over dates or documents, we’ve already decided what kind of thing history is. Whether we admit it or not. A worldview answers one question before all others: What does time do? In the dominant modern Western model, time is linear.It moves…
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Thank You, Gillian Rose
At the beginning of this term, I wrote a piece called Was F. W. Hegel Assassinated? I didn’t mean that literally. I meant it as a provocation, a way of naming a vague but persistent feeling: that something essential about Hegel had gone missing, and that its disappearance had shaped the way modern thought understands…
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What Counts as Philosophy — and What Gets Crossed Out
I’m closing out my first term in the MA Global Philosophy programme at SOAS, and I still haven’t quite shaken the feeling that I’ve wandered into a small academic rebellion. There was no Philosophy department here before. No inherited canon. No silent room of portraits watching over Aristotle. Just an open page. No one is…
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Irony Without Heaven
Reading Week lies well behind me, and instead of refreshed, I somehow returned with twice the reading pile. I’d planned to ease myself back into my modules, maybe skim a few pages, tidy some citations. Instead, I’ve spent the last days bouncing between two completely different worlds: Richard Rorty’s Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity on one side…
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How Not to Collide at SOAS
I’m sitting upstairs in the main building at SOAS, behind a row of old windows that let in more noise than light. The tables are full of half-open laptops and tote bags with political slogans. It’s History of Materialism Week, and I’ve never heard so many people talking about Marx at once. The corridors hum…
