Loving the world of endlessly shifting expectations that is modern academia. To be accepted into the final year of the Philosophy DPhil at Oxford, you used to have to submit a 5,000 word essay for the Confirmation interview. This year, without telling anyone beforehand, they've changed it to 8,000.

Steve Nadler's latest book on Spinoza has now been officially announced on the Princeton University Press website. I'm admittedly biased towards it already, as I do think Spinoza was an atheist. But it'll be interesting to see how he deals with this at book-length press.princeton.edu/books/hardco...

"It’s absolutely hilarious that a nominally ‘libertarian’ government is being bailed out by the largest and most powerful state in the world. It just goes to show – capitalism cannot survive without the state." open.substack.com/pub/gracebla...

Another conference paper acceptance: I'll be presenting the second half of one of my dissertation chapters, on Spinoza and Montesquieu, at Cambridge University's Early Modern Workshop.

"by attributing to [Spinoza] a number of theses which he would surely never have acknowledged, though they did not actually contradict him. But to be a heretical Spinozist is almost orthodox Spinozism, if Spinozism can be said to be one of the greatest lessons in heresy that the world has seen"

A new translation of some work by Julius Dickmann is out in the latest issue of Historical Materialism - Dickmann was, of course, a very important Marxist economist for Simone Weil, and I'm sure it'll be useful to have English-language access to some of his work now.

OK, a🧵: Our new paper studies workers' political consciousness in times of class demobilization. We show there's more to workers' politics than right-wing resentment. Listening to workers, we reconstruct their moral critiques of money, power & recognition. Link journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

I've been thinking about the song 'Io se fossi dio' by Giorgio Gaber. In one verse, he says he wishes the Brigate Rosse hadn't assassinated Aldo Moro, not because Moro wasn't a terrible person, but so that people wouldn't act like Moro was a saint just because he'd been killed.

Ross Wolfe concludes his critique of Losurdo's “worthless” work: “Its influence in the current online Stalinist revival attests to the extent to which defeat can be repackaged and sold as victory.” newintermag.com/revisionism-...

Ross Wolfe untagles Domenico Losurdo's supposedly decolonial critiques of Western Marxists: "Losurdo’s specific accusations against them feel haphazard. The only consistent feature throughout is his dishonesty." newintermag.com/losurdos-lies/

Ross Wolfe tackles Domenico Losurdo's work as "a new school of falsification, all in service of justifying the course history has taken. Everything he wrote had to align with the geopolitical interests of [a] few nominally socialist states" newintermag.com/against-losu...

It’s good to be back in the UK where nobody can drive those hideous cyber trucks. I’d never seen one in person before, but now I can honestly see why raccoons mistake them for garbage bins.

I have a bunch of papers I could submit for this year's BSHP conference, but I'm not sure which one to go with: * Spinoza's Moral Error Theory * Spinoza and the Politics of Atheism * Bayle and the Malebranche-Arnauld Debate * Spinoza and Bayle against Lockean Toleration

RESEARCH! @asalgadoborge.bsky.social on Spinoza, God, parts, and attributes! Read: tinyurl.com/je3k66ju (open access). #philosophy #spinoza #earlymodern #god #metaphysics

Last night I realised that I have been living in error, and that people from Toronto really do sound like that

From the Acid Horizon team, an in-depth discussion on Berardi’s book Quit Everything is conducted by (@saditious.bsky.social) and Franco Bifo Berardi. + youtu.be/kXMcNY5w9LI

Trying to get this piece on Spinoza and naturalism published is really starting to feel like hitting my head against a wall and hoping the wall will fall down. Rejection after rejection, it's been brutal.

For the next step in my DPhil, I need to write a full outline of my thesis. I'm not too great at things like this, but how does the following look as an abstract for the piece? I've tried to keep the abstract under 200 words, and each chapter outline will be 150.

I'd like to write a paper on Spinoza and eliminative materialism. From parallelism, it follows that anything (including mental phenomena) can be given a parallel explanation solely in terms of bodies. With that, it's not far to shed all use of mental language completely.

I notice that philosophers often allow merely superficial similarities to be counted as real similarities. But if A and B both say, e.g. 'sin is wrong,' and both have different definitions of 'sin' and 'wrongness,' we plainly shouldn't call it a similarity at all!

Final day of 20% off. Please consider sharing for my stupid bill’s sake. allgrimprints.shop

The employee asked the girl and her mother if they needed help shopping. That’s it. That’s all. The misinformation, the insinuations (because the facts are inconveniently benign) are EXACTLY what was done to lesbians in the 80s. This is the product of hate and fear, not reality.

Our special issue on early modern social epistemology is finally out with The Southern Journal of Philosophy! onlinelibrary.wiley.com/toc/20416962... It includes a short intro by Ruben Noorloos & me. Why not start with mine (on Mary Shepherd)? It’s free via: onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...

There's a new website for the Boycott Watkins campaign: www.boycottwatkins.com (Watkins is the company that owns Zer0 and Repeater books, as well as several other imprints). If you support BDS, please also add your name to the list at the bottom of the page!

I've typed up this provisional abstract for my talk as a loose guide for what I plan to discuss:

Are you a café worker? We invite café workers to respond to our inquiry at: www.workersinquiry.work

Take a read via @notesfrombelow.bsky.social: Part 2 (exploring how cafe workers are organizing at work): notesfrombelow.org/article/clas...

Take a read via @notesfrombelow.bsky.social: Part 1 (on what cafe workers think and do while at work): notesfrombelow.org/article/clas...

In ‘Class Composition in the Cafe Sector’ we hope that by presenting workers’ narratives alongside our analysis of the sector, we can develop a framework for how workplaces in the sector are structured and what tensions exist within them that can aid organising for class struggle.

Incredibly enough, I've been invited to go over to Groningen in October to personally participate in their Spinoza Fest. I'm working on a paper that I plan to present there, titled 'Spinoza's Moral Error Theory'.

I suspect that I will need to delete this footnote from the final piece due to constraints on the word count, but I think it is worth sharing nonetheless

I don’t have commentary for this… it is just horror.

"The power of the people itself is anarchic in principle, for it is the affirmation of the power of anyone, of those who have no title to it. It is thus the affirmation of the ultimate illegitimacy of domination." —Ranciere

I was in Paddington Station with a friend and we spotted Peter Hitchins. My friend didn’t recognise him, and as he was right next to us, my friend pointed at him and said “Isn’t that David Icke?”

#OtD 19 Jul 1907 against the background of a mass dockers' strike, a police officer in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Constable William Barrett, was suspended after refusing to escort scabs to work. A mutiny of about 70% of Belfast police followed stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9100...

#OtD 19 Jul 1921 anti-fascist militia the Arditi del Popolo took their first official action in Piombino, Italy. They attacked a fascist meeting place, rounded up the fascists, then held the streets for several days before being forced to withdraw stories.workingclasshistory.com/article/9103...

I’ve finally found the time to make a start with @axdouglas.bsky.social’s new book - my only big shock so far is that there isn’t more Deleuze!

It's frustrating how little there is in English on Pierre Nicole. Among the three leading representatives of the Jansenist movement, there is obviously an obscene amount on Pascal, and there is some really good stuff on Arnauld. Nicole? An old book and some articles.

Some books I’ve been able to find discounted recently:

It does all smack of Gender: the right are only ever sad little boys who can't help doing as they do, while all the onus of agency is put on the left who must appease and coddle them - and all this even while actual formal power is, after all, actually in the hands of right wingers.

I wrote about the slow death of the French public intellectual app.thenewworld.co.uk/story/138799...

now in paperback so you can finally write a review! www.routledge.com/The-Concept-...

I get to tell my family that I’m reading a book about bondage for my dissertation

The latest from the great Alberto Toscano inthesetimes.com/article/pale...

This is why we love Deleuze: "like Lucretius again, Spinoza assigns to philosophy the task of denouncing all that is sad, all that lives on sadness, all those who depend on sadness as the basis of their power."

Yitzhak Melamed: "[For] Spinoza, Heidegger’s rambling announcements of his intention to radically reorient western philosophy and place man in straight confrontation with his own death appear as mere symptoms of nervousness of an old grandpa."

Check out this very original and exciting paper, shedding new light on what on earth Spinoza means by "simplest bodies" !! Also fun for looking at understudied material from Gueroult and Deleuze:

While the escalating war between Israel and Iran has everyone's attention, starving civilians in Gaza are being massacred and the situation keeps getting more and more unbearable.

Go ahead and read David's great new paper! I'm always very happy to see the Deleuzian line of interpretation being defended, even if it comes with some caveats here

🚨 New publication alert! 🚨 ‘The Opium of the Lasses: Beauvoir’s Revaluation of Love in The Second Sex’ academic.oup.com/aristotelian...