I’m finally onto the meat of my dissertation, where I get to talk about Spinoza and atheism. But this also means having to trawl through the decades of philosophers writing confidently on this with no knowledge of the history of atheism.
Kenneth Novis
@saditious.bsky.social
Philosophy DPhil @ox.ac.uk | Researching Spinoza, Bayle, and Atheism in the French Enlightenment | also French and Italian Marxism (Weil, Althusser, Deleuze and Operaismo) | Ultraleftist Metalhead | 27 | he/him https://linktr.ee/saditious
"criticizing AI use in journalism or other creative industries is classist" NO IT IS NOT there is a class that benefits enormously from cognitive surrender, epistemic warfare, and the enclosure of all hitherto produced culture and it is NOT THE WORKING CLASS
#OtD 4 Aug 1792 radical Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley was born. His most famous poem, penned after the Peterloo massacre, ends: "Rise like Lions after slumber In unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth like dew... Ye are many—they are few!" workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e15-...
I contributed to this stellar issue with a review of Idris Robinson's new book, The Revolt... (and what it means to be trained to think abstractly about the problem of "violence" in analytical philosophy depts) www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/the-...
Dominique Routhier · The philosophy of revolt (2026)
radicalphilosophy.com
Radical Philosophy @radical-philosophy.bsky.social · 2d agoRP2.21 is out now! - Rebecca Comay on The 18th Brumaire - Grégoire Chamayou on data centres - Danny Hayward on Peter Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance - Werner Bonefeld on Adorno, plus a newly translated Adorno lecture with intro by Jake Orbison And more… www.radicalphilosophy.com
I spent all of last term learning early modern physics for a section of my thesis on what Spinoza means by 'power' (in a bunch of places, he says it's the same as 'force', which is huge for Cartesian physics). But having now written the rest of the chapter, I think I need to delete it all 🥲
The left will turn one much-cherished natural fact into a social construct every day until our demands are met. Day 3: hair is a social construct
Morgan Golf-French@zenothankyou.bsky.social · 3d agoThe left will turn one much-cherished natural fact into a social construct every day until our demands are met. Day 2: Richard Dawkins is a social construct
Passing through the Gladstone Links is always so disorienting, but it’s worth it to avoid all of the tourists
Looking at the figures in early modern philosophy who have guides published on them, it's surprising to me that Malebranche is not better represented! I was always taught that he's one of the major early modern rationalists, but the work on him pales in comparison to Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz
Since we're talking about academic plagiarism right now, I want to mention the looming nightmare of AI editing (used by Routledge for their recent Companion to Simone Weil) which, being imitative and trained on an existing database of writing, could very easily result in passive plagiarism
Very excited to see this coming out in just a few months! The translation is already all available online for free, but I much prefer print versions of these things to read through and annotate
I received the news today that Raoul Vaneigem has passed away. One of the last surviving members of the Situationist International, and author of the incredible 'The Revolution of Everyday Life.' Rest in power.
This talk ended up being a bit of a nightmare, but what I've learned is that in Germany they seemingly don't distinguish between historians of philosophy and intellectual historians, while in the UK the distinction (at least where I've studied) is very sharp
Kenneth Novis@saditious.bsky.social · last wk.I'll be giving my paper titled 'A Fiction to Command the Emotions: Du Châtelet and Spinoza' today at 13:40 UK time today. Anyone interested can join by using this link, and clicking on the paperclip on the top right of the 14:00 session indico.uni-paderborn.de/event/157/ti...
I'll be giving my paper titled 'A Fiction to Command the Emotions: Du Châtelet and Spinoza' today at 13:40 UK time today. Anyone interested can join by using this link, and clicking on the paperclip on the top right of the 14:00 session indico.uni-paderborn.de/event/157/ti...
My free copy of the brand new Routledge Companion to Simone Weil just arrived in the mail this morning - it's a strange feeling seeing my words in print like this! (Full article available for free here: www.academia.edu/169551205/Si...).
I’m sure it’s inevitable that you end up taking on your supervisor’s ideas while writing your PhD dissertation, I just didn’t expect to end up arguing that Spinoza’s moral philosophy is an instance of the ineffable, or something we find ourselves having to say, but which we can make no sense of
One way theists and atheists are sometimes distinguished is based on whether they would say “I believe in (a) God.” But suppose that, when you ask them which one, they say “I believe that *I* am God.” Would we count such an extreme solipsist as being meaningfully theistic?
#OtD 25 Jul 1867 Karl Marx wrote the preface to the first German edition of his masterwork, Capital. A "weapon in the hands of workers" (as Harry Cleaver called it), it remains the most powerful critique of capitalism ever written shop.workingclasshistory.com/en-gb/collec...
I’ve been hoping to find this book at my local charity shops for years, and I decided on a whim to step into them today only to find a copy there on the shelves, waiting for me
I can't believe we're finally getting a translation of this book! A few years ago, I tried my hand at translating two of the sections in it after reading some commentary by Warren Montag, but Maruzzella and Ramos are sure to do a much better job than I ever could.
Why Bernie Sanders is wrong - and nationalizing AI is a bad idea "AI is, above all else, a weapon of class war from above. Whether it’s the state that wields it or corporations does little to change that fact."
The Socialist Case Against Nationalizing AI
AI is not a neutral technology whose benefits need to be redistributed. It is a weapon of class war from above, designed to cheapen labor and concentrate power. Nationalizing it does nothing to change...
jacobin.com
#OtD 22 Jul 1932 Errico Malatesta, Italian anarchist militant and theorist, London ice cream seller, mechanic and member of the Naples section of the International Working Men's Association, died after six years of fascist house arrest at the age of 78 stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/7864...
Meslier, represent! I have his Testament on my bedside table right now.
Aeon Magazine@aeon.co · 2w ago‘A Marxist before Marx, an anarchist before anarchism, an evolutionist before Darwin.’ Mostly forgotten by mainstream culture, the rural French priest Jean Meslier’s work was visionary and radical – and has outlasted attempts to erase him from history
"We really need to work on the ethical implications of AI!" OK, cool, about how it's making poor people's lives worse? "... No" About how it's destroying education? "No not that" OK so which ethical implications are you talking about? "Oh, you know the ones ;)"
I think I've been invited to give the keynote lecture for an undergraduate conference in Chile next month. Any tips from people for delivering these? I've never done a keynote before.
Met an Effective Altruist who tried to convince me that the most political thing you can do is to vote with your dollar
Why did nobody ever tell me that Deleuze wrote an introduction for Diderot's The Nun? I've been trying to make this connection, Diderot's materialism resembles Deleuze's in lots of interesting ways, and there's even an explicit link between them.
I've now finalised all of my materials for the History of Women in Philosophy's Summer school. If you'd like to hear my presentation, feel free to tune in on July 27th at 14:00CET!
I am conducting in the Taylorian’s Voltaire Room today, and was somewhat dismayed to see so little in here dedicated to Du Châtelet: exactly 8 books, 4 of which are only about her relation to Voltaire. It seems she is still a long way from being rightly seen as equal to her male peers.
