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Hegel Notes: Kant and Hegel, the Phenomenology and the Logic, Brandom and Houlgate
January 4, 2025In this note I’ll gather a few big picture thoughts on the scope of Hegel’s project in the Phenomenology, how it relates to the Science of Logic and also to Kant. This was stimulated by a few criticisms Stephen Houlgate aims at Brandom in his review of A Spirit...
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Hegel Notes: Force and the Understanding
August 15, 2024After two months of grappling with this beast it’s finally time to be rid of Force and the Understanding, by which I mean to exorcise it in the transcendental act of blogging. This third and final chapter of the Consciousness section is an incredibly obscure expanse of text, even by...
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Hegel Notes: Perception
June 13, 2024At the beginning of the Perception chapter, consciousness is now in a position to grasp objects in terms of universals: properties that might be shared with other objects. But there is an important constraint on the kind of universality available to it. Hegel articulates this constraint perhaps most clearly in...
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Hegel Notes: Sense-Certainty
May 16, 2024This post gathers a few thoughts on the line of argument pursued by Hegel in the opening chapter of the Phenomenology. Here natural consciousness takes its initial form as Sense-Certainty, a minimal knowing envisaged as the pure apprehension of immediate experience unstructured by categories or concepts. I won’t attempt to...
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Republished: Rex Butler's Baudrillard
October 20, 2022A while back I wrote a three-part series on Rex Butler’s Baudrillard book from 1999, and on his interpretation of simulation and seduction (see parts I, II, and III). Recently, these were republished as a single piece on Achim Szepanski’s blog Non. Link pinned here so I...
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Podcast Appearance: Meta-Ideological Politics
October 19, 2022I’m just catching up on some overdue blog admin, and realised I hadn’t got around to putting up this episode of Nate Coffman and Ryan Nakade’s Meta-Ideological Politics podcast, which I made an appearance on a few months ago. It was a pleasure to chat with them both, and this...
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On Depths and Surfaces
October 17, 2022In this post I’ll stake out a critical position on Timotheus Vermeulen and Robin van der Akker’s metamodernism. This is something I’ve been chewing on for some time, and will give me a chance to unpack some of the thoughts I could only gesture at in Against Metamodernism, a...
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Social Construction and Antimemes
July 2, 2022Among common complaints about life in the modern world there’s one particular cluster which have by now become so familiar as to border on the banal: that the dynamics of public life are driven by clout-seeking rather than integrity or conviction; that interpersonal relating has become cold and transactional; that...
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Materialism, Mediationalism, and the Mind-Body Problem
February 23, 2022I’ve seen it suggested a few times recently that panpsychism and illusionism are much closer to one another than they seem. This is big, if true—perhaps the only form of progress we ever really see on these deep philosophical questions is when apparently opposing positions begin to converge in their...
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Franco Berardi on Baudrillard
February 15, 2022A few comments on a lecture given by Franco Berardi at the ‘Applied Baudrillard’ conference at Oxford Brookes in 2018. I wasn’t aware that Bifo was into Baudrillard, so discovering this came as a nice surprise. The talk helps to make clear how Baudrillard’s ideas have informed the line of...
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The Other Face of Sincere Irony
February 4, 2022I recently saw this GDC talk by Leighton Gray, which was shared with some approval in a Discord server I’m a member of. The talk is ostensibly about game design and marketing, but it also doubles as a sort of metamodernism 101 and is largely concerned with the topic of...
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The Matrix Resurrections: Absolute Commodity
January 23, 2022When questioned on how he felt about the influence his writings had on the conceptual development of The Matrix (1999), Baudrillard replied that the film confuses the problem of simulation with the problem of illusion. In the sense he meant it, illusion refers to a distortion of the content of...
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Notes on Lacan's Seminar I
January 17, 2022A collection of extracts from The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book I, on Freud’s Papers on Technique (1953-1954). I was surprised at how much exposition of key Lacanian terms there was in what is ostensibly just a commentary on one particular portion of Freud’s work, but this was really very...
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Baudrillard's Subject
January 3, 2022What follows is a long-ass Baudrillard post which began life as a collection of thoughts stimulated by Adam Wadley’s essay Transcommunism in the Transpolitical Age, a truly valiant effort to draw out some of the positive lessons in Baudrillard’s philosophy. The post then mutated and grew, and now represents...
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Badiou: Being and Event
December 20, 2021A bunch of notes on Badiou’s Being and Event (Badiou, 2005). I’ll be reading this extremely slowly no doubt, and will keep adding things as I go. The aim is to pick out the main thread of argument that runs through the ‘conceptual’ meditations (hence the weird gaps...
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Deleuze & Guattari on Capitalism
December 16, 2021Here’s a few passages from Deleuze & Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus which give a good sense of their overall take on capitalism (Deleuze & Guattari, 1984, pp. 31–32):
The prime function incumbent on the socius has always been to codify the flows of desire, to inscribe them, to record...
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Note on Mechanism Design
December 14, 2021A while back Nate Coffman published a great post on mechanism design (among other things), to which I added a rather cryptic comment. I subsequently started drafting an expansion, but quickly descended down a massive rabbit hole and didn’t get anywhere—here I’d like to reign that in and briefly...
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A Hegelian Perspective on Perspectivalism
November 4, 2021Some follow up thoughts to an objection to perspectivalism I raised in Against Metamodernism. What I’d like to do here is consider how a core theme in Hegelian dialectics—namely the experience of error—can inform this discussion, as it has taken shape in metamodernism and adjacent spaces.
But first...
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Power and Common Knowledge
October 27, 2021In this post I want to unravel some thoughts I’ve been mulling over for some time, concerning the relationship between critical approaches to power and the decision theoretic concept of ‘common knowledge.’ I’ve touched on this before in relation to advertising, and was delighted to hear it brought up...
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Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition
October 18, 2021Some annotated extracts from Jean-François Lyotard’s often cited (though perhaps less often read) monograph The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Lyotard, 1986).
Several things jumped out for me while reading this. First, the figure that looms largest over these pages is the later Wittgenstein—rather than leaning on...
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