Knox Peden
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 1023665 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Knox Peden |
| NOMBRES | Knox |
| APELLIDO | Peden |
| FIRMA | PEDEN K |
| AFILIACIONES | Australian National University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9821-1310 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 20 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 2 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 13 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 7 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2009 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2021 |
| ÍNDICE H | 1 |
Arcana and Ambiguity in Intellectual History
As history became a narrative of contexts as well as of actions, the moral and exemplary character of the actions related was affected ... The narrative of action became a narrative of mystery, meaning not only the mystery of random contingency, but the mystery of how decision and action were framed in the face of contingency. Whether action had proved successful or disastrous, that which was exemplary about it was at the same time that which was…
Spinoza Contra Phenomenology
DRAFT to be approved by sponsor: This book shows how French philosophers in the twentieth century used Spinoza's rationalism to combat the irrationalism of phenomenology and, in the process, developed a mode of philosophical critique that was effective in targeting philosophical efforts to provide an ontological basis for political engagement
Truth and Meaning in Historical Interpretation
This essay argues that Donald Davidson's work in philosophy sheds light on debates about truth, meaning, and context in historical interpretation. Drawing on distinctions between Davidson's project and that of his mentor, W. V. O. Quine, I aim to show that certain ambiguities that have arisen in the methodological reflections of Quentin Skinner and Frank Ankersmit, to take representatives of contrastive approaches to intellectual history, are cla…
Walter Benjamin’s idea of revolution
This paper analyses the diverse references involved in Walter Benjamin’s idea of revolution. Despite its significance for his philosophical outlook, the concept of revolution seems to receive no systematic or perhaps even consistent treatment in his heterogeneous writings. But what is clear is that, in contrast to the way the term is usually understood in political philosophy, Benjamin conceives of revolution primarily as a category of experience…
What’s wrong with inevitable progress? Notes on Kant’s anthropology today
My discussion in this essay beings with a short rehearsal of Kant’s approach to anthropology and history in order to provide the framework for my subsequent focus on the political commentary that has surrounded the Black Lives Matter movement. This movement presents the most recent political challenge to white America’s belief in the inevitability of progress and I am interested in the light that might be shed on this challenge when viewed throug…
Bentham, torture, modernity
In this essay, I examine the relatively little-known and commented-upon writings of Jeremy Bentham regarding the potentially beneficial uses of torture in a utilitarian frame. If, following Michel Foucault’s extraordinarily influential work on Bentham’s panopticism, the motifs of governmental surveillance, practical intervention into mass behaviours, and institutional diagrams have become some of the crucial themes of sociological and historical …
The fall of Rome and the retreat of European multiculturalism
A feature of neo-conservative critiques during the course of this century, concerning public issues such as immigration and multicultural policy and Islamic terrorism, has been the use of a rhetoric based on historical imagery as a means to generate affective reactions to matters of debate. This article examines one example of such rhetoric, the claim by the economic historian Niall Ferguson that the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015 re…
The great leveller
If we compare it with the fellow notion of liberty, equality has an ambivalent place in modern political thinking. Whilst it counts as one of the fundamental norms, many think that equality is valuable only as a way to realise some features of liberty. I take a historical perspective on this issue, and try to identify some of the pre-modern roots of such an ambivalent attitude towards equality. I do this by using Jacques Rancière’s political mode…
Concentration or representation
There is a tension in the notion of popular sovereignty, and the notion of democracy associated with it, that is both older than our terms for these notions themselves and more fundamental than the apparently consensual way we tend to use them today. After a review of the competing conceptions of “the people” that underlie two very different understandings of democracy, this article will defend what might be called a “neo-Jacobin” commitment to p…
The politics of extra/ordinary time
This article reads the papal encyclical as a genre in political thought. As a form, the encyclical authorizes itself through the ontological surety provided by Christian revelation, juxtaposed with an intervention into contemporary and contested politics. As explicitly theological texts, encyclicals trouble normative notions of the political. At the same time, however, they do significant political work in the world. This article reads the genre …
Donald Davidson’s “Spinozistic Extravagance”
This article suggests reasons why Donald Davidson’s work in philosophy of mind and metaphysics can be identified as Spinozist and also explores the significance of using proper names from the history of philosophy to describe contemporary projects. It argues that what makes Davidson’s work Spinozist is not just its internal features, but the role it occupies in relation to other positions identified as Kantian and Hegelian in today’s philosophica…
The politics of disenchantment
This article looks at Marcel Gauchet's major metahistorical statement, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (1985), and uses it to advance a series of claims about the place of secularization in debates within and about French politics, especially in relation to modern French history. The argument is put forward that Gauchet's work is best understood as offering an alternative philosophy of history to Marxism that coul…
Response to My Critics – On Seeming Right
Notes1 See, inter alia, Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May '68 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007).2 See 'To Get Rid of the Signified: An Interview with Jacques Bouveresse' in Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (eds) Concept and Form, Volume 2: Essays and Interviews on the Cahiers pour l'Analyse (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 245–258.3 Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revel…
Hayden White’s Metahistory and the Irony of the Archive
Hayden White’s contention that “moral and aesthetic” preferences are primary in shaping a historian’s vision of the past seems to play in to various contemporary efforts to consider history at a scale conducive to insight into climate change and global political dilemmas. Nevertheless, his critique of the archive as a repository of truth acquires new resonance as the naturalist and technological reconfiguration of the archive accompanying these d…
The Aesthetics of Scale
Untimely Hesitations
Intellectual historians owe Nietzsche a debt for many things, not least for lending the quality of “untimeliness” a positive connotation. In the late 1990s, when Marxism was arguably at its nadir as an intellectual program, much less a political one, Warren Breckman published an insightful study of Marx's early thought and its genesis out of a series of disputes with the Young Hegelians concerning the state and its ambiguous relationship with the…
The Burden of Intelligibility
Ian Hunter's career as an intellectual historian has been grounded in a commitment to regionalism and the refinement of a methodology devoted to conceiving thought in terms of various modes of comportment. This essay suggests that Hunter's recent work on ‘The History of Theory’ downplays the first principle in its development of the second, and consequently risks abandoning the commitment to historical pluralism that has been a distinguishing fea…
Neither/Nor
An Atheism that is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought examines the advent of antihumanism as a cultural figure out of a network of intellectual crises in interwar and postwar France and ties this advent to the more general consequences of secularization in the modern age. Bracketing political judgments, and eschewing dialectical methods, Stefanos Geroulanos shows how the critique of humanism that emerged from disparate quarters of French inte…
Descartes, Spinoza, and the Impasse of French Philosophy
This article presents a decades-long conflict in the upper echelons of postwar French academic philosophy between the self-identifying “Cartesian” Ferdinand Alquié, professor at the Sorbonne, and the “Spinozist” Martial Gueroult of the Collège de France. Tracking the development of this rivalry serves to illuminate the historical drama that occurred in France as phenomenology was integrated into the Cartesian tradition and resisted by a commitmen…
Gilles Deleuze
The politics of disenchantment
This article looks at Marcel Gauchet's major metahistorical statement, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (1985), and uses it to advance a series of claims about the place of secularization in debates within and about French politics, especially in relation to modern French history. The argument is put forward that Gauchet's work is best understood as offering an alternative philosophy of history to Marxism that coul…
Untimely Hesitations
Intellectual historians owe Nietzsche a debt for many things, not least for lending the quality of “untimeliness” a positive connotation. In the late 1990s, when Marxism was arguably at its nadir as an intellectual program, much less a political one, Warren Breckman published an insightful study of Marx's early thought and its genesis out of a series of disputes with the Young Hegelians concerning the state and its ambiguous relationship with the…
Gilles Deleuze
Descartes, Spinoza, and the Impasse of French Philosophy
This article presents a decades-long conflict in the upper echelons of postwar French academic philosophy between the self-identifying “Cartesian” Ferdinand Alquié, professor at the Sorbonne, and the “Spinozist” Martial Gueroult of the Collège de France. Tracking the development of this rivalry serves to illuminate the historical drama that occurred in France as phenomenology was integrated into the Cartesian tradition and resisted by a commitmen…
Neither/Nor
An Atheism that is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought examines the advent of antihumanism as a cultural figure out of a network of intellectual crises in interwar and postwar France and ties this advent to the more general consequences of secularization in the modern age. Bracketing political judgments, and eschewing dialectical methods, Stefanos Geroulanos shows how the critique of humanism that emerged from disparate quarters of French inte…
Untimely Hesitations
Intellectual historians owe Nietzsche a debt for many things, not least for lending the quality of “untimeliness” a positive connotation. In the late 1990s, when Marxism was arguably at its nadir as an intellectual program, much less a political one, Warren Breckman published an insightful study of Marx's early thought and its genesis out of a series of disputes with the Young Hegelians concerning the state and its ambiguous relationship with the…
The Burden of Intelligibility
Ian Hunter's career as an intellectual historian has been grounded in a commitment to regionalism and the refinement of a methodology devoted to conceiving thought in terms of various modes of comportment. This essay suggests that Hunter's recent work on ‘The History of Theory’ downplays the first principle in its development of the second, and consequently risks abandoning the commitment to historical pluralism that has been a distinguishing fea…
Hayden White’s Metahistory and the Irony of the Archive
Hayden White’s contention that “moral and aesthetic” preferences are primary in shaping a historian’s vision of the past seems to play in to various contemporary efforts to consider history at a scale conducive to insight into climate change and global political dilemmas. Nevertheless, his critique of the archive as a repository of truth acquires new resonance as the naturalist and technological reconfiguration of the archive accompanying these d…
The Aesthetics of Scale
Response to My Critics – On Seeming Right
Notes1 See, inter alia, Julian Bourg, From Revolution to Ethics: May '68 and Contemporary French Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007).2 See 'To Get Rid of the Signified: An Interview with Jacques Bouveresse' in Peter Hallward and Knox Peden (eds) Concept and Form, Volume 2: Essays and Interviews on the Cahiers pour l'Analyse (London: Verso, 2012), pp. 245–258.3 Samuel Moyn, Origins of the Other: Emmanuel Levinas between Revel…
Walter Benjamin’s idea of revolution
This paper analyses the diverse references involved in Walter Benjamin’s idea of revolution. Despite its significance for his philosophical outlook, the concept of revolution seems to receive no systematic or perhaps even consistent treatment in his heterogeneous writings. But what is clear is that, in contrast to the way the term is usually understood in political philosophy, Benjamin conceives of revolution primarily as a category of experience…
What’s wrong with inevitable progress? Notes on Kant’s anthropology today
My discussion in this essay beings with a short rehearsal of Kant’s approach to anthropology and history in order to provide the framework for my subsequent focus on the political commentary that has surrounded the Black Lives Matter movement. This movement presents the most recent political challenge to white America’s belief in the inevitability of progress and I am interested in the light that might be shed on this challenge when viewed throug…
Bentham, torture, modernity
In this essay, I examine the relatively little-known and commented-upon writings of Jeremy Bentham regarding the potentially beneficial uses of torture in a utilitarian frame. If, following Michel Foucault’s extraordinarily influential work on Bentham’s panopticism, the motifs of governmental surveillance, practical intervention into mass behaviours, and institutional diagrams have become some of the crucial themes of sociological and historical …
The fall of Rome and the retreat of European multiculturalism
A feature of neo-conservative critiques during the course of this century, concerning public issues such as immigration and multicultural policy and Islamic terrorism, has been the use of a rhetoric based on historical imagery as a means to generate affective reactions to matters of debate. This article examines one example of such rhetoric, the claim by the economic historian Niall Ferguson that the terrorist attacks in Paris in November 2015 re…
The great leveller
If we compare it with the fellow notion of liberty, equality has an ambivalent place in modern political thinking. Whilst it counts as one of the fundamental norms, many think that equality is valuable only as a way to realise some features of liberty. I take a historical perspective on this issue, and try to identify some of the pre-modern roots of such an ambivalent attitude towards equality. I do this by using Jacques Rancière’s political mode…
Concentration or representation
There is a tension in the notion of popular sovereignty, and the notion of democracy associated with it, that is both older than our terms for these notions themselves and more fundamental than the apparently consensual way we tend to use them today. After a review of the competing conceptions of “the people” that underlie two very different understandings of democracy, this article will defend what might be called a “neo-Jacobin” commitment to p…
The politics of extra/ordinary time
This article reads the papal encyclical as a genre in political thought. As a form, the encyclical authorizes itself through the ontological surety provided by Christian revelation, juxtaposed with an intervention into contemporary and contested politics. As explicitly theological texts, encyclicals trouble normative notions of the political. At the same time, however, they do significant political work in the world. This article reads the genre …
Donald Davidson’s “Spinozistic Extravagance”
This article suggests reasons why Donald Davidson’s work in philosophy of mind and metaphysics can be identified as Spinozist and also explores the significance of using proper names from the history of philosophy to describe contemporary projects. It argues that what makes Davidson’s work Spinozist is not just its internal features, but the role it occupies in relation to other positions identified as Kantian and Hegelian in today’s philosophica…
The politics of disenchantment
This article looks at Marcel Gauchet's major metahistorical statement, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion (1985), and uses it to advance a series of claims about the place of secularization in debates within and about French politics, especially in relation to modern French history. The argument is put forward that Gauchet's work is best understood as offering an alternative philosophy of history to Marxism that coul…
Truth and Meaning in Historical Interpretation
This essay argues that Donald Davidson's work in philosophy sheds light on debates about truth, meaning, and context in historical interpretation. Drawing on distinctions between Davidson's project and that of his mentor, W. V. O. Quine, I aim to show that certain ambiguities that have arisen in the methodological reflections of Quentin Skinner and Frank Ankersmit, to take representatives of contrastive approaches to intellectual history, are cla…
Spinoza Contra Phenomenology
DRAFT to be approved by sponsor: This book shows how French philosophers in the twentieth century used Spinoza's rationalism to combat the irrationalism of phenomenology and, in the process, developed a mode of philosophical critique that was effective in targeting philosophical efforts to provide an ontological basis for political engagement
Arcana and Ambiguity in Intellectual History
As history became a narrative of contexts as well as of actions, the moral and exemplary character of the actions related was affected ... The narrative of action became a narrative of mystery, meaning not only the mystery of random contingency, but the mystery of how decision and action were framed in the face of contingency. Whether action had proved successful or disastrous, that which was exemplary about it was at the same time that which was…
Epistemology (16 obras) · Philosophy (16 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Political science (13 obras) · Sociology (13 obras) · Politics (9 obras) · Philosophy (8 obras) · Art (7 obras) · History (6 obras) · Aesthetics (5 obras)