Matt Sharpe
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 3687724 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Matt Sharpe |
| PRENOMES | Matt |
| SOBRENOME | Sharpe |
| ASSINATURA | SHARPE M |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Deakin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8165-5775 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 67 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 28 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 67 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1920 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 3 |
The Bright Eye and the Gleaming Coat? A Stoic Challenge to Haybron on Wellbeing and the Preconditions of Happiness
Part 1 of this paper shows how Haybron’s discerning emotional state theory of happiness, in contrast to other recent positions, expressly draws upon the Stoics (a) in his central/periphery distinction used to critique hedonism, and (b) in his phenomenology of happiness as involving good affects of attunement, endorsement, and engagement. Part 2 then sets out two departures of Haybron from the Stoic philosophers: (a) claiming that happiness is one…
Western Marxism, from Totalitarianism to Biopower
In Western Marxism, Domenico Losurdo identifies the antithetical and sometimes hostile positions expressed on anti-colonial struggles as the salient feature of the “Western Marxist” tradition of radical European theory. As Losurdo shows, the formation of such positions, which dispense with an essential component of the Marxist theory of class struggles, is a result of a prevalence of theoretical concepts and tendencies within the Western Marxist …
Introduction to ‘Nietzsche, Philosopher of Reaction’ by Domenico Losurdo
This introduction to the English translation of the 1997 work by Domenico Losurdo, Nietzsche: per una biografia politica , provides framing background to the text. It contextualises Losurdo’s book in light of the 2020 English-language appearance of his more extensive work, Nietzsche, the Aristocratic Rebel , as well as the different strands of left-liberal and poststructuralist interpretation of Nietzsche which emerged during the Cold War. We exa…
Old wine in a postmodern bottle
The first section reconstructs Dugin’s claims to have charted a “fourth political theory” (4PT), which would have broken from “fascism” and “Nazism”, the “third political theory” (as well liberalism and communism, the first and second “PTs” respectively). The second section of the paper critically unpacks four Duginian claims to defend this position, despite his avowed recourse to intellectuals who became Nazi Party Members and public advocates o…
If nihilism is murder, what then? Camus’ distinctive conception of nihilism & its overcoming
This paper proposes that Albert Camus is a distinctive thinker of nihilism, whose unique contribution to debates around nihilism has been widely under-valued. We position his thinking of nihilism in contrast to four previous predominant uses of this contested, often polemical term (epistemological, reactionary, theological, Nietzschean), which we start by examining in part 1. Part 2 reconstructs Camus’ account of the absurd in his earlier works, …
Critique, Metacritique, and Making the (World of) Difference
This essay addresses Losurdo’s response to the metaquestion of why, if Nietzsche was an avowed aristocratic radical, he can continue to be received as a liberal or even a democratic thinker, whose appropriation by the far right sparks outrage (Section 1). This essay considers what I take to be the key idea underlying Losurdo’s Nietzsche’s ‘theoretical surplus’ (Section 2), which allows Losurdo both to explain the attraction of many broadly on the…
Nietzsche, Philosopher of Reaction
After Trickle Down, Kicking Down
This paper argues that Jordan Peterson's enthusiastic reception, including on the neofascist Right, reflects how his discourse functions as a form of indirect capitalist apologetics, which no longer obviates how the sociopolitical system produces massive inequalities, but sanctifies inequalities as natural and eternal. Part 1 frames the contention of the paper, addressing methodological issues. Part 2 establishes the understanding of indirect apo…
Philosophy as a Way of Life, the System, and the Advent of the Research University
This paper forms as it were a draft for an as-yet-unwritten, decisive chapter on the history of philosophy as a way of life (PWL).It closely examines the texts by Schleiermacher, Fichte, Humboldt, and Schelling on the foundation of the modern research university, and the place of philosophy within it, written in the years surrounding the formation of the University of Berlin.Part 1 contends that these texts represent studies of great significance…
Arendt, Heidegger, Eichmann, and Thinking, after the Black Notebooks
Preview: /Review: Emmanuel Faye, Arendt et Heidegger: Extermination nazie et destruction de la pensée, (Albin Michel, 2016), 560 pages./ The appearance of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1932-38) in 2014 has posed profound questions to philosophers and political theorists. For a long time, in ways that the Black Notebooks have definitively undermined, Heidegger’s National Socialism was widely considered as limited to 1933-34. His larger thoug…
Giving Marx’s Critique of Law a Fair Trial
This article presents a critical examination of Igor Soikhedbrod's Revisiting Marx's Critique of Liberalism: Rethinking Justice, Legality, and Rights. We argue that the book presents an important criticism of antinomian forms of critical theory, which underplay the extent to which Marx engaged in an imminent critique of liberal societies, including the rule of law, and upheld that progressive advances enshrined in this rule should be carried over…
Of Israel, Forst & Voltaire
In the recent progressive reappraisals of the enlightenment by Jonathan Israel and Rainer Forst, Voltaire figures as almost a reactionary thinker, opposing the radical dimensions of the enlightenment pushing forwards secularisation, democratisation, and toleration. Part 1 examines Israel's and Forst's accounts of Voltaire, showing their striking proximity. Part 2 is divided into the three subheadings of (i) Voltaire's deism, (ii) the pivotal subj…
On the Misery of Left Nietzscheanism, or Philosophy as Irrationalist Ideology
Matthew Sharpe discusses Aymeric Monville's Misère du nietzschéisme de gauche (The Misery of Left Nietzscheanism), an exploration of how Nietzsche's popularity on the left co-opts truly radical energy in favor of authoritarianism and elitism. "If Monville is right," Sharpe concludes, "Nietzcheanism has acted as a kind of ideological 'useful idiot
Philosophy, Theory or Way of Life? Controversies in Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance
Spiritual Exercises and the Question of Religion in the Work of Pierre Hadot
This paper addresses John M. Cooper's critique, and related critiques, of Pierre Hadot's conception of philosophy as a way of life for collapsing the distinction between philosophy and religion, via the category of "spiritual exercises". The paper has two parts. Part 1, a pars destruens, will show how Hadot presents three cogent rebuttals of these charges, with which he was familiar as early as the 1980s, following the publication of the first ed…
Unifying, Comparative, Critical and Metacritical
This review essay responds critically to the English translation of Domenico Losurdo’s monumental Friedrich Nietzsche: Aristocratic Rebel. It sets out to clearly identify and examine Losurdo’s two tasks in Nietzsche: firstly, his reconstruction of Nietzsche’s intellectual itinerary, from his earliest works until his descent into madness, in the context of later nineteenth-century social, political, philosophical, and eugenic sources; and secondly…
Of Cartesianism and Spiritual Exercises
This article challenges the recurrent critique that Pierre Hadot’s identification of ancient philosophy with the practice of spiritual exercises introduces a non- or irrational dimension into metaphilosophy. The occasion to do this is provided by Kerem Eksen’s recent reading of Descartes’s Meditations as consisting of solely intellectual, rather than spiritual, exercises—since the latter, Eksen claims, involve extrarational means and ends. Part 2…
Bringin’ Sexy Back” (and With it, Women)
Preview: /Commentary: Richard Shusterman, Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages./ Like other contributors, I would like to begin by expressing my respect and admiration for the scale and scope of Richard Shusterman’s achievement in Ars Erotica. The Preface acknowledges “the vast amount of material” involved in this project of charting “the history of erotic theory…
Reclaiming the Differences
Wittgenstein’s Unglauben
Jacques Lacan devoted one of the sessions of his important Seminar XVII, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, to Ludwig Wittgenstein’s classic work Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Despite Lacan’s and Wittgenstein’s huge influence across academic disciplines (and the analytic–continental divide in philosophy), there has been no scholarly attempt to examine Lacan’s claims concerning Wittgenstein in this seminar. This paper sets out to redress this gap…
Giving the Angel the Benefit of Law
Politics, Religion, Hope
Pierre Hadot, Albert Camus and the orphic view of nature
Between too Intellectualist and not Intellectualist Enough
A Good Person for a Crisis? On the Wisdom of the Stoic Sage (in Himself & for Us)
Is the Stoic sage a possible or desirable ideal for contemporary men and women, as we enter into difficult times? Is he, as Seneca presents him, the very best person for a crisis? In order to examine these questions, Part 1 begins from what Irene Liu calls the "standard" modern conceptions of the sage as either a kind of epistemically perfect, omniscient agent, or else someone in possession of a specific arsenal of theoretical knowledge, especial…
Critique' as Technology of the Self
This inquiry is situated at the intersection of two enigmas. The first is the enigma of the status of Kant's practice of critique, which has been the subject of heated debate since shortly after the publication of the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. The second enigma is that of Foucault's apparent later 'turn' to Kant, and the label of 'critique', to describe his own theoretical practice. I argue that Kant's practice of 'critique' s…
Arendt, Heidegger, Eichmann, and Thinking, after the Black Notebooks
Preview: /Review: Emmanuel Faye, Arendt et Heidegger: Extermination nazie et destruction de la pensée, (Albin Michel, 2016), 560 pages./ The appearance of Martin Heidegger’s Black Notebooks (1932-38) in 2014 has posed profound questions to philosophers and political theorists. For a long time, in ways that the Black Notebooks have definitively undermined, Heidegger’s National Socialism was widely considered as limited to 1933-34. His larger thoug…
On a Neglected Argument in French Philosophy
This paper wants to draw out a common argument in three great philosophers and littérateurs in modern French thought: Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, and Albert Camus. The argument makes metaphysical and theological scepticism the first premise for a universalistic political ethics, as per Voltaire's: "it is clearer still that we ought to be tolerant of one another, because we are all weak, inconsistent, liable to fickleness and error." The argume…
The Aesthetics of Ideology, or ‘The Critique of Ideological Judgment’ in Eagleton and Zizek
The notions of ‘ideology’ and ‘critique of ideology’ have been criticised in manyways. This essay examines theworks of two contemporary theorists who defend this theoretical category. Interestingly, both do this through pivotal recourse to categories drawn from modern aesthetic theory, and in particular Kant's third Critique. In thisway, they reanimate a theoretical concern with the intersection of politics and aesthetics that goes as far back as…
Spiritual Exercises and the Question of Religion in the Work of Pierre Hadot
This paper addresses John M. Cooper's critique, and related critiques, of Pierre Hadot's conception of philosophy as a way of life for collapsing the distinction between philosophy and religion, via the category of "spiritual exercises". The paper has two parts. Part 1, a pars destruens, will show how Hadot presents three cogent rebuttals of these charges, with which he was familiar as early as the 1980s, following the publication of the first ed…
In the Crosshairs of the Fourfold
In Part 1, we situate Dugin’s interpretation of Heidegger in relation to the better known, broadly left-liberal approaches to interpreting Heidegger’s thought, stressing Dugin’s unusual focus on the German thinker’s “middle” or Nazi-era texts, and showing how this periodizing optic affects Dugin’s culminating reading of Sein und Zeit and its key axiological notion of authenticity (Part 1). Part 2 examines Dugin’s appropriation of Heidegger’s radi…
On Reading Heidegger—After the “Heidegger Case”
This paper looks at the state of the literature surrounding Heidegger and Nazism today. Part 1 focusses on Hassan Givsan’s remarkable work, Une histoire consternante: pourquoi les philosophes se laissent corrompre par le “cas Heidegger”, which looks at the different, mutually inconsistent forms of “apologetics” denying that Heidegger had been a Nazi, or that this commitment could have been shaped by his philosophy. Part 2 looks at five themes tha…
Critique, Metacritique, and Making the (World of) Difference
This essay addresses Losurdo’s response to the metaquestion of why, if Nietzsche was an avowed aristocratic radical, he can continue to be received as a liberal or even a democratic thinker, whose appropriation by the far right sparks outrage (Section 1). This essay considers what I take to be the key idea underlying Losurdo’s Nietzsche’s ‘theoretical surplus’ (Section 2), which allows Losurdo both to explain the attraction of many broadly on the…
After Trickle Down, Kicking Down
This paper argues that Jordan Peterson's enthusiastic reception, including on the neofascist Right, reflects how his discourse functions as a form of indirect capitalist apologetics, which no longer obviates how the sociopolitical system produces massive inequalities, but sanctifies inequalities as natural and eternal. Part 1 frames the contention of the paper, addressing methodological issues. Part 2 establishes the understanding of indirect apo…
Golden calf
This paper examines how Gilles Deleuze addresses, and fail to address, the darker strata in Nietzsche's work which has enabled his work to be claimed by almost every far-right European political movement since the 1890s to the Alt-Right today. Part I argues that four rhetorical strategies are present which serve to domesticate Nietzsche's ideas concerning class and caste, race and sexuality, and his opposition to forms of liberalism, democracy, f…
From Amy Allen to Abbé Raynal
This paper is a critical response to Amy Allen’s The End of Progress: Decolonising the Normative Foundations of Critical Theory. We take up her book’s call for a “problematizing” history which challenges “taken-for-granted” preconceptions in order to contest Allen’s own representation of the thought of the enlightenment. Allen accepts that all the enlighteners agreed upon a stadial, progressive account of history, which she critiques epistemicall…
Restoring Camus as Philosophe
Is Neoliberalism a Liberalism, or a Stranger Kind of Bird? On Hayek and Our Discontents
This paper examines the theoretical ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, arguably the key progenitor of the global economic orthodoxy of the past two decades. It assesses Hayek's thought as he presents it: namely as a form of liberal ism. Section I argues that Hayek's thought, if liberal, is hostile to participatory democracy. Section II then argues the more radical thesis that neoliberalism is also in truth an illiberal doctrine. Founded not in any soc…
A Few Good Men
The descent of the doves
This essay is a critique of Derrida’s ethical works, using Camus’s last novella The Fall as a critical sounding board. It argues that a danger pertains to any such highly self-reflexive position as Derrida’s: a danger that Camus identified in The Fall, and staged in his character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Clamence is a successful Parisian lawyer, on top of his personal and professional life, whose equanimity is troubled after he is the unwitting p…
Middlesex in British, Roman, and Saxon Times
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To a Teacher New to Aboriginal Students
Whenever I revisit an Aboriginal community where I am known (and there are several), despite the awkwardness of language and culture difference, I find a sense of relief. Here, while I readjust to Aboriginal English, Kriol or another language, I don't have to make conversation to fill up the silences. Silence is allowed.I look back and realise I have come to this discovery instinctively and did not always feel at ease with silence. When in 1967 I…
Autonomy, Reflexivity, Tragedy
This paper looks at two 20th century theories of tragedy: those of Cornelius Castoriadis and Albert Camus. The theories that each proffer of this ancient cultural form are striking. Against more standard views, both theorists stress that tragedy is a cultural form that has only arisen historically in cultures whose forms of religious thought have been laid open to question. In this way, both argue that tragedy is an important democratic cultural …
The descent of the doves
This essay is a critique of Derrida’s ethical works, using Camus’s last novella The Fall as a critical sounding board. It argues that a danger pertains to any such highly self-reflexive position as Derrida’s: a danger that Camus identified in The Fall, and staged in his character, Jean-Baptiste Clamence. Clamence is a successful Parisian lawyer, on top of his personal and professional life, whose equanimity is troubled after he is the unwitting p…
A Few Good Men
Critique' as Technology of the Self
This inquiry is situated at the intersection of two enigmas. The first is the enigma of the status of Kant's practice of critique, which has been the subject of heated debate since shortly after the publication of the first edition of The Critique of Pure Reason. The second enigma is that of Foucault's apparent later 'turn' to Kant, and the label of 'critique', to describe his own theoretical practice. I argue that Kant's practice of 'critique' s…
‘Thinking of the Extreme Situation…’ on the New Anti-Terrorism Laws, or Against a Recent (Theoretical and Legal) Return to Carl Schmitt
(2006). ‘Thinking of the Extreme Situation...’ on the New Anti-Terrorism Laws, or Against a Recent (Theoretical and Legal) Return to Carl Schmitt. Australian Feminist Law Journal: Vol. 24, No. 1, pp. 95-123
The philosopher’s courtly love? Leo strauss, eros, and the law
The Aesthetics of Ideology, or ‘The Critique of Ideological Judgment’ in Eagleton and Zizek
The notions of ‘ideology’ and ‘critique of ideology’ have been criticised in manyways. This essay examines theworks of two contemporary theorists who defend this theoretical category. Interestingly, both do this through pivotal recourse to categories drawn from modern aesthetic theory, and in particular Kant's third Critique. In thisway, they reanimate a theoretical concern with the intersection of politics and aesthetics that goes as far back as…
Only Agamben can save us?
In this paper, I offer a strong criticism of Giorgio Agamben’s recent political texts. I argue that these texts bring to fruition a larger, contentious trend in the theoretical academy coupling one-dimensional, pessimistic accounts of modernity with strands of messianism. Since the political prospects of messianism, as Agamben’s analyses show, are very thin indeed, I reflectively question the presuppositions that lead him to this prescriptive jun…
Critchley is Žižek
In an ironically Žižekian manner, this paper argues that Simon Critchley and Slavoj Žižek's apparent political disagreement (ludic reformist versus strident revolutionary) conceal a common set of preconditions and presuppositions. These presuppositions can be summed by the slogan "the for getting of political philosophy", which more specifically means the forgetting of the difference between philosophy and political life, and the reflective need …
Toula Nicolocapoulos, The Radical Critique of Liberalism
(2009). Toula Nicolocapoulos, The Radical Critique of Liberalism: In Memory of a Vision. Critical Horizons: Vol. 10, No. 3, pp. 430-435
Is Neoliberalism a Liberalism, or a Stranger Kind of Bird? On Hayek and Our Discontents
This paper examines the theoretical ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, arguably the key progenitor of the global economic orthodoxy of the past two decades. It assesses Hayek's thought as he presents it: namely as a form of liberal ism. Section I argues that Hayek's thought, if liberal, is hostile to participatory democracy. Section II then argues the more radical thesis that neoliberalism is also in truth an illiberal doctrine. Founded not in any soc…
Hunting Plato'sAgalmata
In this essay I argue that to understand Plato's philosophy, we must understand why Plato presented this philosophy as dialogues: namely, works of literature. Plato's writing of philosophy corresponds to his understanding of philosophy as a transformative way of life, which must nevertheless present itself politically, to different types of people. As a model, I examine Lacan's famous reading of Plato's Symposium in his seminar of transference lo…
When the logics of the world collapse – Žižek with and against Arendt on ‘totalitarianism’
Financial Crisis, Social Pathologies and 'Generalised Perversion'
Slavoj Zizek's work has been highly influential in the formulation of an emerging consensus among Lacanian social researchers, that we live in a society of generalised perversion whose initial fruits are the corrosion of democracy and the recent financial crisis. This position rests upon a notion of modern subjectivity that connects ‘commodity fetishism’ with clinical perversion in a pathological configuration, so that social theoretical identifi…
Restoring Camus as Philosophe
Secularisations and Their Debates
The Poetic Presentation of Philosophy
This essay undertakes a close analysis of Leo Strauss’s remarkable but undertreated Leo Strauss on Plato’s “Symposium,” reading it as opening a privileged purview of his own (and his students’) wider understandings of philosophy, poetry, and politics. The essay begins by drawing out Strauss’s three framing justifications for his manner of reading the Symposium as a document in the “ancient quarrel” of philosophy and poetry concerning which of the…
The Black Side of the Sun
Albert Camus is typically categorized as an atheistic thinker, in the same breath as Sartre. Yet there is a sizable, often sympathetic, theological response to his works, which deal at great length with Christian themes, wrestle with the problem of evil, and are animated by his own avowed desire — in strong contrast with Sartre and other existentialists — to preserve a sense of the sacred without belief in human immortality. This essay reconstruc…
Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and i ek
Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Žižek is an engagingly written account of the turn (or return) to theology in the works of two of today's preeminent public intellectuals, Slavoj Žižek and Terry Eagleton. Thorough, mostly accurate and discerning (as far as this author is qualified to say), and animated everywhere by the author's stylistic clarity and ethical engagement, the book will serve as a good introduction for readers new to Žižek's and…
A just judgement? Considerations on Ronald Srigley's Camus' Critique of Modernity
This paper responds critically to Ronald Srigley's groundbreaking 2011 study Albert Camus' Critique of Modernity. Srigley's book reasserts Camus' credentials as a deeply serious thinker, whose literary and philosophical oeuvre was dedicated to rethinking modernity on the basis of critical reassessments of the West's entire premodern heritage. Yet we challenge whether Camus was ever, even in his final writings, so uncompromisingly anti-modern as S…
“Not for personal gratification, or for contention, or to look down on others, or for convenience, reputation, or power”
This paper examines the apology for the life of the mind Francis Bacon gives in Book I of his 1605 text The Advancement of Learning. Like recent work on Bacon led by the ground-breaking studies of Corneanu, Harrison and Gaukroger, I argue that Bacon’s conception and defence of intellectual inquiry in this extraordinary text is framed by reference to the classical model, which had conceived and justified philosophising as a way of life or means to…
Cicero, Voltaire, and the Philosophes in the French Enlightenment
Cicero, Voltaire, and the philosophes in the French enlightenment
In joy we prepare our lessons’
Nobel Prize winning author Albert Camus situates his meditations in both the opening and closing essays in his 1937 collection Noces by referring to the classical Eleusinian mysteries centring around the myths of Dionysus and the goddesses Demeter and Persephone. Noces ’ closing piece ‘The Desert’ directly evokes the two levels of initiation involved in the classical Eleusinian cult in a way which prompts us to reframe the preceding essays beginn…
Philosophy (56 obras) · Epistemology (44 obras) · Law (37 obras) · Sociology (33 obras) · Philosophy (30 obras) · Politics (30 obras) · Political science (29 obras) · Art (19 obras) · Philosophy, Ethics, and Existentialism (18 obras) · Law (17 obras)