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Monthly Archives: April 2007

Barbarians, Old and New

Saturday, April 28, 2007

On May 19th at 9:00 AM in a room yet to be announced, I’ll be giving the first public presentation on my work on barbarians and savages, drawing upon Hobbes and Montesquieu as examples. Apparently my session is entitled “Fundamentalisms” (I’m not sure why!) as one other person is doing a paper on Israeli fundamentalism [...]

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The Weekend in Film

Monday, April 23, 2007

Inside Man – I’ve never seen a Denzel Washington movie I liked (c.f., Training Day, The Bone Collector). Whereas The Bone Collector had Queen Latifah and Training Day had Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg, Inside Man had the creepiest looking man in Hollywood, Willem Dafoe. The conjunction of Willem Dafoe as hardened SWAT Captain John [...]

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The SEK Affair

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

(This post ends my public involvement in this dispute. Comments and trackbacks are accordingly closed. Should you have anything you wish to share with me on this issue, please do no hesitate to send an email – craig@theoria.ca)
Unfortunately one SEK has decided to continue what he takes to be a petty feud and rivalry [...]

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Concordances for Hobbes

Monday, April 16, 2007

In an effort to get a grasp on the structure of Hobbes’ works and how that structure changes through the course of his subsequent publications, I’ve adapted the table of concordances J.C.A. Gaskin provides in his introduction to The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (Oxford UP, 1994). Should energy permit, I’ll construct similar tables [...]

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Hobbes

Monday, April 16, 2007

I’ve been working through Hobbes over and over again the past few weeks – his political writings and a number of commentaries. (The imbrication of rational choice/game theoretic and analytic philosophy – i.e., Gauthier, Kavka, Hampton, etc – is especially infuriating; but that is another discussion. Suffice to say, I find it problematic how (1) [...]

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The Weekend in Film

Wednesday, April 11, 2007

We resumed watching “Battlestar Galactica” this weekend and should likely finish season 2.0 (i.e., the first half of the second season) on DVD within the week. Consequently, we didn’t watch many movies this weekend. Indeed, we only watched one movie and I wonder how well that time was spent:
The Sentinel – Has that guy from [...]

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Still More on The History of Madness

Tuesday, April 10, 2007

As is always the case when matters such as this arise, the criticism of particular works or, indeed, of entire corpuses of works gets tied up with issues of academic politics. This is clearly the case when the “anti-Theory” (whatever that is, of course) dogmatists at The Valve go on the offensive. For them, questions [...]

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More History of Madness

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Rather than going away as an issue, the Scull versus the Foucauldians debate seems to be spreading. It seems odd to me that people are willing to get worked up over this issue. Afterall, standard periodizations of Foucault’s work place The History of Madness outside his developed periods; viz., the archaeological, the genealogical, and the [...]

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The Weekend in Film

Sunday, April 1, 2007

Before moving on to the most recent weekend, I’d like to fill in gaps – movies I missed in the first installment of “The Weekend in Film.” In addition to the afore-reviewed movies, we also watched the following:
Drop Dead Sexy – Easily the best movie we watched that weekend, which likely explains why we forgot [...]

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