'O que é o "subalterno" da filosofia da religião? / What Is the “Subaltern” of the Philosophy of Religion?

The The 18th-19th centuries orientalist preoccupations with mythology and ancient perennis lacked both a critical-theoretical sensitivity to historiography anchored in radical historical consciousness and a deep sense of philosophical argumentation, as distinct from discerning mythic patterns of textual (intra-textual or internal) disputation and its interpretative ramifications from another felicitous perspective, usually theology mitigated by whatever remains ‘modern’ in the arts. Philosophy of Religion on the other hand remained heavily straddled in the rigors of logic, reason, analysis, dialectic, reason, reductio, aggressive refutation, within established frameworks drawing from the other branches of philosophy, namely, again, logic, epistemology, ontology and metaphyics. This paper presents a view 'from below' to demonstrate and argue how philosophy o religion must change in the post-colonial era and pay more attention to indigenous patterns of theological thinking and critiquing of Western enlightenment-centred philosophy of religion. It is in Portuguese though.

Spinoza/space/speed/sublime: Problems of philosophy and politics in the post-colonial fiction of Gerald Murnane

This article takes account of the ‘spontaneity’ of the post-colonial fiction of Gerald Murnane within the ‘dominating space’ of the philosophy of Spinoza. My use of Paul Carter’s terms here is strategic. The compact of fiction and philosophy in Murnane corresponds with the relationship of spontaneity to the dominating organization of desire in Carter’s rendering of an Aboriginal hunter. Carter’s phrase “‘a figure at once spontaneous and wholly dominated by the space of his desire’” worries Ken Gelder and Jane M. Jacobs, who suggest that it subjugates the formation of Aboriginal desire (incorporating spontaneity) to impulses of imperialism. The captivating immanence of Spinoza’s philosophy in Murnane’s fiction, which I will demonstrate with various examples, puts pressure on the fiction to occupy the same space as the space of the philosophy. Here is a clue to why Murnane’s post-colonial thematics have been little explored by critics with an interest in post-colonial politics. The desire of Spinoza’s philosophy creates a spatial textuality within which the spontaneity of Murnane’s fiction, to the degree that it maximizes or fills the philosophy, is minimized in its political effects. That is to say, the fiction shifts politics into an external space of what Roland Barthes calls “resistance or condemnation”. However, the different speeds (or timings) of Murnane and Spinoza, within the one space, mitigate this resistance of the outside, at least in respect of certain circumstances of post-coloniality. It is especially productive, I suggest, to engage Carter’s representation of an Aboriginal hunter through the compact of coincidental spaces and differential speeds created by Murnane’s fiction in Spinoza’s philosophy. This produces a ceaseless activation of desire and domination, evidenced in Murnane’s short story ‘Land Deal’, and indexed by a post-Romantic sublime. What limits the value of Murnane’s fiction in most contexts of post-colonial politics, is precisely what makes it useful in the matter of Carter’s Aboriginal hunter.

Examining sports coaching philosophy: implications for policy, pedagogy and practice

This thesis showed that philosophy in coaching lacks the theoretical foundations of other helping professions, with a lack of guidance by formal coach education programs resulting in coaches adopting their own “sport philosophy”, which enabled coaches to operationalize it in ways that assisted their practice (observed through consistent coach behaviour).

Time, philosophy and chronopathologies

This essay is an elaboration on some central themes and arguments from my recent book, Chronopathologies: Time and Politics in Deleuze, Derrida, Phenomenology and Analytic Philosophy (Rowman and Littlefield 2012). There is hence an element of generality to this essay that the book itself is better able to justify. But a short programmatic piece has its own virtues, especially for those of us who are time poor (which is pretty much everyone in contemporary academia). Moreover, it adds a dimension to the above book by more explicitly situating it in relation to what is an emerging view in some recent scholarship (such as John McCumber, Len Lawlor, David Hoy, and before this Liz Grosz) that time is central to the identity of continental philosophy, as well as considering some of the work that in different ways contests this kind of interpretation of the identity of continental philosophy (e.g. Simon Glendinning, and, tacitly, Paul Redding). In continuing to side with the former over the latter, I will also develop my argument that time is one of the most significant factors in the divided house that I think ontemporary philosophy remains, and I conclude by offering a series of negative prescriptions regarding how we might better avoid particular chronopathologies, or time-sicknesses, that are endemic to these philosophical trajectories, and that are also present (to greater and lesser degrees) in the majority of individual philosophers standardly labeled analytic and continental. To the extent that such sicknesses are at least partly inevitable, akin to a transcendental illusion, this paper consists in a call to be more attentive to this tendency, and to the methodological, metaphilosophical, and ethico-political consequences that follow from them.