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Category Archives: Dissertation

To-Do List

Sunday, June 8, 2008

(1) Learn French again having all but lost what little French I learnt during French immersion in elementary and middle school. They always said two things in high school: (1) you’ll regret not taking more math and (2) you’ll regret not staying with French. Both ended up being true. I’ll likely order this book for [...]

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Animals – Human and Non-Human

Sunday, April 27, 2008

Much scholarship in “animal studies” distinguishes between the “human animal” and the “non-human animal.” The point, I suppose, is to indicate that the human also includes the animal. However, what is the purpose, then, in calling an animal – say, a groundhog – a non-human animal? If the “human” is something “added” to the “animal,” [...]

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More

Monday, May 21, 2007

Continuing the thread from yesterday, the point of my post wasn’t so much to brag about the speed at which I’m moving through my programme relative to the rest of the cohort. Nothing could be less interesting – that each person moves through their programme at their own pace is certainly a vulgar truism, but [...]

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Left Behind

Sunday, May 20, 2007

With a couple exceptions, I’m not particularly close with anyone in my cohort at York or its equivalent at Carleton. Most of the people I talk to were beginning their PhD when I was beginning my M.A. or, in the case of one of them, beginning his PhD when I was in fourth year. They’re [...]

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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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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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Hobbes

Sunday, March 4, 2007

Can any of my theologically inclined colleagues tell me if the last half of the Leviathan has any lasting importance and, thus, should be read? While it appears to be largely about “political theology,” I’m hesitant to read a hundred and fifty pages on the Christian commonwealth and another hundred and fifty pages on the [...]

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Reading (and some Writing)

Thursday, March 1, 2007

I have been interested in the question of reading – how to read; the politics (as it were) of reading; why some texts conjure certain sorts of readings. The texts that bring the strangest readings are the texts that produce high degrees of affect in their readers – Thomas Hobbes, Benedict de Spinoza, Karl Marx, [...]

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Dissertation

Friday, February 16, 2007

Now that my proposal has been accepted, I need to begin working on the dissertation proper. My biggest fear heading into this project – the evidence being derived from my comprehensives and the proposal itself – is that the final product will become overwrought; that I’ll refuse to let it go. Last night I was [...]

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