Luke O’sullivan
Biographic Data
| ID | 156160 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Luke O’sullivan |
| GIVEN NAMES | Luke |
| FAMILY NAME | O’sullivan |
| SIGNATURE | O’SULLIVAN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | National University of Singapore |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1795-3185 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1999 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Realism, Postmodernism and/as Metanarrative
The question of how realism and metanarratives are related in the philosophy of history does not seem to have been widely discussed. Whereas there are distinct philosophical and political senses of ‘realism’, contrasting with ‘idealism’ and ‘utopianism’ respectively, ‘metanarrative’ has a singular meaning based on Jean-François Lyotard’s sceptical definition of postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives”. Lyotard defined metanarratives …
Régner précairement: Inventing Precarity in Early Modern France
The language of precariousness—précaire, précairement—occupied a crucial but fiercely contested position in early modern French culture. This article traces the emergence of this concept, tracking its journey from legalistic jargon to buzzword as it was applied, co-opted, and subverted in service of the political and constitutional arguments that gripped France in the century following the outbreak of the Wars of Religion. Arguing for the signifi…
Science and indigenous knowledge: The significance of the mātauranga Māori debate
The debate over the status of mātauranga Māori – the practices and ideas of the first inhabitants of the islands that became known under British colonial rule as New Zealand – has a significance reaching far beyond its shores. The Māori peoples are amongst many indigenous groups globally who found their cultures deprecated by outsiders assuming the role of a governing power. But since the latter part of the twentieth century, arguments for the va…
Frege and the Logic of the Historical Proposition
This article argues that history played a larger role in the thought of Gottlob Frege than has usually been acknowledged. Frege’s logical writings frequently employed statements about the past as examples that included references to historical persons. Frege also described history as a science and argued that historical propositions could support valid inferences and reliably identify historical persons and events. But Frege’s eternalist theory o…
Theoretical projections: Cinematic Experience and Political Thinking
Film matters to political theory, Davide Panagia has argued, because its unique properties as a medium create the possibility of experiencing ideas about politics in a way that the arguments of textual political theory cannot convey. This paper disputes this account by drawing on work on both the nature of political theory and on the concept of visual argument. It uses the work of Gilles Deleuze to argue that even if the filmic image cannot be un…
Moving Pictures of the French Wars of Religion: Articulating Attachment in Guillaume Bouchet's 'Des peintres & peintures', Les Serées (1584-98)
Given their supposedly marvellous quality, tales of statues and images that move or otherwise come to life are surprisingly common in early modern culture.We might think of the concluding act of Molire's Dom Juan, ou le Festin de pierre or, in England, of Hermione in The Winter's Tale. 1 We might think too of Cartesian or Pascalian reflections on automata as well, of course, as the miraculously vital icons marshalled in service of Reformist and C…
"Heinrich Gomperz and "Vienna Contextualism: Historical Epistemology and Logical Empiricism
Austrian philosopher Heinrich Gomperz attempted to reconcile the Vienna Circle's project of a unified science with the autonomy of historical knowledge. This article situates him in the context of the ongoing reassessment of the Vienna Circle in the history of philosophy. It argues that Gomperz's synthesis of positivism with historicity was a response to difficulties raised by Rudolf Carnap and Otto von Neurath. Gomperz achieved his reconciliatio…
Eyemaginary unity: A dialectic of visual studies
The late twentieth century visual turn established the study of visual culture as central to the humanities and social sciences. Yet there is no consensus over the scope of the field that has come to be known as visual studies. This article offers a dialectical account in response. It finds a precedent in two dialectical models that have been prominent in visual studies, namely those of Walter Benjamin and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It argues that th…
Des responses et rencontres”: Frank Speech and Self-Knowledge in Guillaume Bouchet’s Serées
Guillaume Bouchet’s Serées (1584, 1597, 1598) constitute an exercise in commonplacing framed as a collection of tales told around a Poitevin dining table. They engage in a form of quasi-philosophical thinking staged by and for an urban merchant community, the social world in which Bouchet operated. The second book opens with a discussion of frank speech. Writing amid civil war, Bouchet takes up this “chatouilleux” subject by turning to Plutarch, …
Dreaming between the lines: The strange afterlife of Straussian romanticism
The publication of Steven Smith’s Modernity and Its Discontents is a reminder that the intellectual legacy of Leo Strauss remains highly influential in the USA. This paper sets the book in the context of the main features of Strauss’s thought and Straussian ideas more generally. It argues that this context is an almost exclusively American one, and that the enduring appeal of the Straussian historical narrative lies in the presentist justificatio…
Intimations of Oakeshott: A critical reading of his ‘Notebooks, 1922–86’
The nature and worth of Michael Oakeshott’s contribution as a political thinker have long been the subject of deep disagreement within the community of Anglophone political theory. This is partly the product of a partial familiarity with Oakeshott’s corpus. During his lifetime, his body of published work had a rather slender appearance, comprising two major monographs, separated by some forty years, and two rather more accessible collections of e…
The Idea of a Category Mistake: From Ryle to Habermas, and Beyond
The term ‘category mistake’ began to turn up regularly in public discourse in the 1990s as a general term to describe a confusion between different fields of thought with serious practical consequences. But it began its career in philosophy, introduced by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind in 1949 to attack Cartesian dualism and assert a monistic solution to the so-called mind-body problem. This paper traces the stages by which it came into gene…
Michael Oakeshott and the conversation of modern political thought
Realism and imagination: A response to Kelly
This is a reply to:Kelly, Paul. 2015. “Political philosophy and the attraction of realism.” Global Discourse. 5 (2): 191–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.962357
Sovereigns and citizens: A response to Field
This is a reply to:Field, Sandra Leonie. 2015. “Hobbes and human irrationality.” Global Discourse. 5 (2): 207–220. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.973762
Michael Oakeshott and the Left
This article examines Oakeshott's attitude to three different strands of left-wing thought: Marxism and Communism; Fabianism and democratic socialism; and anarchism and the Frankfurt school. The lasting legacy of his early adherence to socialist thought was an adherence to a romantic political individualism. It traces the transformation of his political vocabulary from a discourse of the general will to one of civil association, and argues that w…
The invisible framework: Antony Black and the foundations of comparative historiography
10.1080/13642529.2012.695043
Selected Philosophical Writings
Robert Flint: Theologian, Philosopher of History and Historian of Philosophy
Robert Flint was born into a society still dominated by the political and philosophical issues of the Scottish Enlightenment. The predominant political problem in the decade of his birth, the 1830s
Education and the Voice of Michael Oakeshott - By Kevin Williams
Education and the Voice of Michael Oakeshott. By Kevin Williams. Pp. vii+248. Exeter: Imprint Academic. 2007. £30 (hbk). ISBN-13 978-1-84540-055-2
Globalization and After
Our Knowledge of the Past: Tucker, Bayes, and the Logic of Historical Judgment
Leon Goldstein and the Epistemology of Historical Knowing1
Leon Goldstein's critical philosophy of history has suffered a relative lack of attention, but it is the outcome of an unusual story. He reached conclusions about the autonomy of the discipline of history similar to those of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott, but he did so from within the Anglo-American analytic style of philosophy that had little tradition of discussing such matters. Initially, Goldstein attempted to apply a positivistic e…
Politics, Faith, and Scepticism
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Michael Oakeshott and the conversation of modern political thought
Michael Oakeshott and the Left
This article examines Oakeshott's attitude to three different strands of left-wing thought: Marxism and Communism; Fabianism and democratic socialism; and anarchism and the Frankfurt school. The lasting legacy of his early adherence to socialist thought was an adherence to a romantic political individualism. It traces the transformation of his political vocabulary from a discourse of the general will to one of civil association, and argues that w…
Leon Goldstein and the Epistemology of Historical Knowing1
Leon Goldstein's critical philosophy of history has suffered a relative lack of attention, but it is the outcome of an unusual story. He reached conclusions about the autonomy of the discipline of history similar to those of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott, but he did so from within the Anglo-American analytic style of philosophy that had little tradition of discussing such matters. Initially, Goldstein attempted to apply a positivistic e…
Politics, Faith, and Scepticism
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Leon Goldstein and the Epistemology of Historical Knowing1
Leon Goldstein's critical philosophy of history has suffered a relative lack of attention, but it is the outcome of an unusual story. He reached conclusions about the autonomy of the discipline of history similar to those of R. G. Collingwood and Michael Oakeshott, but he did so from within the Anglo-American analytic style of philosophy that had little tradition of discussing such matters. Initially, Goldstein attempted to apply a positivistic e…
Our Knowledge of the Past: Tucker, Bayes, and the Logic of Historical Judgment
Selected Philosophical Writings
Robert Flint: Theologian, Philosopher of History and Historian of Philosophy
Robert Flint was born into a society still dominated by the political and philosophical issues of the Scottish Enlightenment. The predominant political problem in the decade of his birth, the 1830s
Education and the Voice of Michael Oakeshott - By Kevin Williams
Education and the Voice of Michael Oakeshott. By Kevin Williams. Pp. vii+248. Exeter: Imprint Academic. 2007. £30 (hbk). ISBN-13 978-1-84540-055-2
Globalization and After
The invisible framework: Antony Black and the foundations of comparative historiography
10.1080/13642529.2012.695043
Realism and imagination: A response to Kelly
This is a reply to:Kelly, Paul. 2015. “Political philosophy and the attraction of realism.” Global Discourse. 5 (2): 191–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.962357
Sovereigns and citizens: A response to Field
This is a reply to:Field, Sandra Leonie. 2015. “Hobbes and human irrationality.” Global Discourse. 5 (2): 207–220. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/23269995.2014.973762
Michael Oakeshott and the Left
This article examines Oakeshott's attitude to three different strands of left-wing thought: Marxism and Communism; Fabianism and democratic socialism; and anarchism and the Frankfurt school. The lasting legacy of his early adherence to socialist thought was an adherence to a romantic political individualism. It traces the transformation of his political vocabulary from a discourse of the general will to one of civil association, and argues that w…
Intimations of Oakeshott: A critical reading of his ‘Notebooks, 1922–86’
The nature and worth of Michael Oakeshott’s contribution as a political thinker have long been the subject of deep disagreement within the community of Anglophone political theory. This is partly the product of a partial familiarity with Oakeshott’s corpus. During his lifetime, his body of published work had a rather slender appearance, comprising two major monographs, separated by some forty years, and two rather more accessible collections of e…
The Idea of a Category Mistake: From Ryle to Habermas, and Beyond
The term ‘category mistake’ began to turn up regularly in public discourse in the 1990s as a general term to describe a confusion between different fields of thought with serious practical consequences. But it began its career in philosophy, introduced by Gilbert Ryle in The Concept of Mind in 1949 to attack Cartesian dualism and assert a monistic solution to the so-called mind-body problem. This paper traces the stages by which it came into gene…
Michael Oakeshott and the conversation of modern political thought
Dreaming between the lines: The strange afterlife of Straussian romanticism
The publication of Steven Smith’s Modernity and Its Discontents is a reminder that the intellectual legacy of Leo Strauss remains highly influential in the USA. This paper sets the book in the context of the main features of Strauss’s thought and Straussian ideas more generally. It argues that this context is an almost exclusively American one, and that the enduring appeal of the Straussian historical narrative lies in the presentist justificatio…
Eyemaginary unity: A dialectic of visual studies
The late twentieth century visual turn established the study of visual culture as central to the humanities and social sciences. Yet there is no consensus over the scope of the field that has come to be known as visual studies. This article offers a dialectical account in response. It finds a precedent in two dialectical models that have been prominent in visual studies, namely those of Walter Benjamin and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It argues that th…
Des responses et rencontres”: Frank Speech and Self-Knowledge in Guillaume Bouchet’s Serées
Guillaume Bouchet’s Serées (1584, 1597, 1598) constitute an exercise in commonplacing framed as a collection of tales told around a Poitevin dining table. They engage in a form of quasi-philosophical thinking staged by and for an urban merchant community, the social world in which Bouchet operated. The second book opens with a discussion of frank speech. Writing amid civil war, Bouchet takes up this “chatouilleux” subject by turning to Plutarch, …
"Heinrich Gomperz and "Vienna Contextualism: Historical Epistemology and Logical Empiricism
Austrian philosopher Heinrich Gomperz attempted to reconcile the Vienna Circle's project of a unified science with the autonomy of historical knowledge. This article situates him in the context of the ongoing reassessment of the Vienna Circle in the history of philosophy. It argues that Gomperz's synthesis of positivism with historicity was a response to difficulties raised by Rudolf Carnap and Otto von Neurath. Gomperz achieved his reconciliatio…
Frege and the Logic of the Historical Proposition
This article argues that history played a larger role in the thought of Gottlob Frege than has usually been acknowledged. Frege’s logical writings frequently employed statements about the past as examples that included references to historical persons. Frege also described history as a science and argued that historical propositions could support valid inferences and reliably identify historical persons and events. But Frege’s eternalist theory o…
Theoretical projections: Cinematic Experience and Political Thinking
Film matters to political theory, Davide Panagia has argued, because its unique properties as a medium create the possibility of experiencing ideas about politics in a way that the arguments of textual political theory cannot convey. This paper disputes this account by drawing on work on both the nature of political theory and on the concept of visual argument. It uses the work of Gilles Deleuze to argue that even if the filmic image cannot be un…
Moving Pictures of the French Wars of Religion: Articulating Attachment in Guillaume Bouchet's 'Des peintres & peintures', Les Serées (1584-98)
Given their supposedly marvellous quality, tales of statues and images that move or otherwise come to life are surprisingly common in early modern culture.We might think of the concluding act of Molire's Dom Juan, ou le Festin de pierre or, in England, of Hermione in The Winter's Tale. 1 We might think too of Cartesian or Pascalian reflections on automata as well, of course, as the miraculously vital icons marshalled in service of Reformist and C…
Realism, Postmodernism and/as Metanarrative
The question of how realism and metanarratives are related in the philosophy of history does not seem to have been widely discussed. Whereas there are distinct philosophical and political senses of ‘realism’, contrasting with ‘idealism’ and ‘utopianism’ respectively, ‘metanarrative’ has a singular meaning based on Jean-François Lyotard’s sceptical definition of postmodernism as “incredulity towards metanarratives”. Lyotard defined metanarratives …
Régner précairement: Inventing Precarity in Early Modern France
The language of precariousness—précaire, précairement—occupied a crucial but fiercely contested position in early modern French culture. This article traces the emergence of this concept, tracking its journey from legalistic jargon to buzzword as it was applied, co-opted, and subverted in service of the political and constitutional arguments that gripped France in the century following the outbreak of the Wars of Religion. Arguing for the signifi…
Science and indigenous knowledge: The significance of the mātauranga Māori debate
The debate over the status of mātauranga Māori – the practices and ideas of the first inhabitants of the islands that became known under British colonial rule as New Zealand – has a significance reaching far beyond its shores. The Māori peoples are amongst many indigenous groups globally who found their cultures deprecated by outsiders assuming the role of a governing power. But since the latter part of the twentieth century, arguments for the va…
Epistemology (17 works) · Philosophy (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Philosophy (13 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Politics (11 works) · History (10 works) · Art (8 works)