• Axiomatic Heresy: The Non-Philosophy of Francois Laruelle
• Badiou's Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics
• Liquider l'homme une fois pour toutes [in French]

Working title:
'Philosophical and Scientific Discourses on Nature after Kant'

Description:
The idea of ‘philosophy of nature’ as a legitimate domain of philosophical investigation which could be carried out independently of, or as a complement to, the sciences of nature, is supposed to have been discredited by the speculative excesses of German Idealist ‘naturephilosophy’ in the early 19th Century. Yet one of the more conspicuous characteristics shared by otherwise disparate tendencies in contemporary continental philosophy is the contestation of the claim according to which, in the wake of the Kantian critique of metaphysics, only the natural sciences are entitled to discourse on nature. Thus, avowedly counter-scientific concepts of nature seem to play a crucial role in the phenomenological ontologies inspired by Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty; in the Critical Theory of Adorno, Horkheimer, Marcuse and their contemporary disciples; and in the neo-vitalist metaphysics which take its lead from the combined influences of Nietzsche, Bergson, Whitehead and Deleuze.

Perhaps the decisive factor in this resurgence of counter-scientific conceptions of nature in 20th Century continental philosophy has been the critique of the problematic of ‘representation’ (and of the scientific representation of the world more particularly) by figures such as Bergson, Heidegger, Adorno & Horkheimer, and Deleuze—a critique whose ascendancy has been bolstered by its resonances with the critiques of Cartesianism formulated by representatives of the analytic tradition such as Wittgenstein, Putnam, and Rorty. Among continental philosophers in particular, the largely unchallenged acceptance of the destitution of the problematic of representation has encouraged a more or less wholesale relinquishment of epistemology understood as the theoretical investigation into the nature and conditions of cognition. It is this assumption that epistemology has been liquidated that has been taken to license a counter-scientific ontology and metaphysics of nature; the latter being brandished not only as an antidote to scientific ‘reductionism’, but also as a necessary corrective to the ‘positivistic’ naturalization of the analysis of mind, whose most obvious consequence is the emergence of a natural science of cognition (i.e. ‘cognitive science’).

This project will contend 1) that these counter-scientific conceptions of nature represent a neo-Aristotelian resurgence in contemporary continental philosophy; 2) that the model of representation whose critique underwrites the liquidation of epistemology is a wilful caricature; and 3) that a naturalized but non-adaptationist account of representation provides the basis for a conception of epistemology capable of prosecuting scientific realism and countermanding the regressive tenor of these neo-Aristotelian philosophies of nature.

Authored books:

• Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan 2007.

Edited books:

• The Origins and Ends of the Mind: Philosophical Essays on Psychoanalysis, ed. with C. Kerslake, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007.
  
  
• Alain Badiou: Theoretical Writings, translated and edited with Alberto Toscano, London: Continuum, 2004.
  

Chapters in books:

• 'The Thanatosis of Enlightenment' in The Origins and Ends of the Mind: Philosophical Essays on Psychoanalysis, ed. with C. Kerslake, forthcoming, Leuven: Leuven University Press, 2007.
  
  
• 'L’Anti-phénomène: présentation et disparaitre’ in Écrits autours de la pensée d'Alain Badiou, ed. Bruno Besana and Oliver Feltham, Paris, l’Harmattan, 2007.
  
  
• 'Liquider l'homme une fois pour toutes' in Theorie-rebellion. Un ultimatum, ed. G. Grelet, Paris, l'Harmattan, 2005.
  
  
• 'Aleatory Rationalism', (with Alberto Toscano), editors' Postface to Alain Badiou: Theoretical Writings, London Continuum, 2004.
  
  
• 'Nihil Unbound. Remarks on Subtractive Ontology and Thinking Capital', in Think Again: Alain Badiou and the Future of Philosophy, ed. Peter Hallward, London: Continuum, 2004.
  

Journal articles:

• 'The Expression of Meaning in Deleuze's Ontological Proposition' in Pli - The Warwick Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 19: Sense and Nonsense, 2008.
  
  
• 'The Enigma of Realism: On Quentin Meillassoux's After Finitude' in Collapse: Philosophical Research and Development. Vol. II, 2007.
  
  
• 'Le genre est obsolète' in Multitudes 28 Hiver-Printemps 2007.
  
  
• 'Presentation as Anti-Phenomenon in Alain Badiou's Being and Event', Continental Philosophy Review, Vol. 39, No. 1, March 2006.
  
  
• 'Badiou's Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics' in Angelaki, Vol. 10, No. 2: Continental Philosophy and the Sciences: The French Tradition, ed. A. Aitken, August 2005.
  
  
• 'Solar Catastrophe: Lyotard, Freud and the Death-Drive', Philosophy Today, Vol. 47, Winter 2003.
  
  
• 'Axiomatic Heresy: The Non-Philosophy of Francois Laruelle', Radical Philosophy 121, Sep/Oct 2003.
  
  
• 'Non-philosophy, Cloning and the Emancipation of Thought' in Revista Latinoamericana de Estudios Avanzados, No.17, May-August 2002.
  
  
• 'Behold the Non-Rabbit. Kant, Quine, Laruelle' in Pli - The Warwick Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 12: What is Materialism? 2001.
  
  
• 'Stellar Void or Cosmic Animal? Badiou and Deleuze on the dice-throw' in Pli -The Warwick Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 10: Crises of the Transcendental, 2000.