Luke O'Sullivan
National University of Singapore, Political Science, Faculty Member
- Luke O’Sullivan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singap... moreLuke O’Sullivan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Political Science at the National University of Singapore. He has published articles in the fields of intellectual history, the history of philosophy, and visual culture. He is also the General Editor of the series of Michael Oakeshott’s Selected Writings. His monograph entitled 'Categories: A Study of A Concept in Western Philosophy and Political Thought' is scheduled to appear with Edinburgh University Press in 2024edit
In The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard defined a metanarrative as a vision of the historical process that served some legitimatory role. A metanarrative did not need to make claims regarding historical necessity, but it must... more
In The Postmodern Condition, Jean-François Lyotard defined a metanarrative as a vision of the historical process that served some legitimatory role. A metanarrative did not need to make claims regarding historical necessity, but it must function as a justification of a political position of some kind. Subsequent developments suggest that while his definition was sound, his prediction that metanarratives were in decline was falsified by events.
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Austrian philosopher Heinrich Gomperz attempted to reconcile the Vienna Circle’s project of a unified science with the autonomy of historical knowledge. This article situates him in the context of the ongoing reassessment of the Vienna... more
Austrian philosopher Heinrich Gomperz attempted to reconcile the Vienna Circle’s project of a unified science with the autonomy of historical knowledge. This article situates him in the context of the ongoing reassessment of the Vienna Circle in the history of philosophy. It argues that Gomperz’s synthesis of positivism with historicity was a response to difficulties raised by Rudolf Carnap and Otto von Neurath. Gomperz achieved his reconciliation via a theory of language and action that had affinities with both neo-Kantian and pragmatist thought, combining Dilthey’s hermeneutics with Carnap’s requirements for scientific propositions.
Research Interests: Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of History, Vienna Circle, Rudolf Carnap, History and Philosophy of the Human Sciences, and 5 moreLogical empiricism (Moritz Schlick, Hans Reichenbach, Rudolf Carnap), History and Philosophy of Social Sciences, Otto Neurath, History of Philosophy, and History and Philosophy of Science and the Humanities
Contemporary politics is full of historical misrepresentations and outright falsehoods about the past. But why exactly is this problematic? And why do we think there is a duty to tell the truth about the past? Paul Ricœur’s final work... more
Contemporary politics is full of historical misrepresentations and outright falsehoods about the past. But why exactly is this problematic? And why do we think there is a duty to tell the truth about the past? Paul Ricœur’s final work looked for answers.
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Review of David McIlwain, Michael Oakeshott and Leo Strauss: The Politics of Renaissance and Enlightenment (2019)
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The concept of civilisation is a controversial one because it is unavoidably normative in its implications. Its historical associations with the effort of Western imperialism to impose substantive conditions of life have made it difficult... more
The concept of civilisation is a controversial one because it is unavoidably normative in its implications. Its historical associations with the effort of Western imperialism to impose substantive conditions of life have made it difficult for contemporary liberalism to find a definition of "civilization" that can be reconciled with progressive discourse that seeks to avoid exclusions of various kinds. But because we lack a way of identifying what is peculiar to the relationship of civilisation that avoids the problem of domination, it has tended to be conflated with other ideas. Taking Samuel Huntington's idea of a "Clash of Civilisations" as a starting point, this article argues that we suffer from a widespread confusion of civilisation with "culture," and that we also confuse it with other ideas including modernity and technological development. Drawing on Thomas Hobbes, the essay proposes an alternative definition of civilisation as the existence of limits on how we may treat others.
Film matters to political theory, Davide Panagia has argued, because its unique properties as a medium create the possibility of experiencing ideas about politics in a way that the arguments of textual political theory cannot convey. This... more
Film matters to political theory, Davide Panagia has argued, because its unique properties as a medium create the possibility of experiencing ideas about politics in a way that the arguments of textual political theory cannot convey. This paper disputes this account by drawing on work on both the nature of political theory and on the concept of visual argument. It uses the work of Gilles Deleuze to argue that even if the filmic image cannot be understood on the analogy of language, insofar as film seeks to convey political ideas, these are always at least implicitly linguistic. Using examples drawn from classic and contemporary political films, the paper provides a classification of political films by genre according to the same criteria as written works of political theory. It concludes that although Deleuze's argument that film can present political images and signs in a way that has no linguistic equivalent may be correct, Panagia's further claim that there are political ideas that are uniquely suited to, or can only be conveyed in, a visual medium has no warrant.
Like most twentieth-century French intellectuals, Aron’s development was profoundly shaped by German thought. But whereas Sartre, Aron’s exact contemporary, was steeped in Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger, and perhaps the most important member... more
Like most twentieth-century French intellectuals, Aron’s development was profoundly shaped by German thought. But whereas Sartre, Aron’s exact contemporary, was steeped in Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger, and perhaps the most important member of the next generation, Michel Foucault, was indebted to Nietzsche, in Aron’s case, Adair-Toteff argues, the most important influence was Max Weber
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The late twentieth century visual turn established the study of visual culture as central to the humanities and social sciences. Yet there is no consensus over the scope of the field that has come to be known as visual studies. This... more
The late twentieth century visual turn established the study of visual culture as central to the humanities and social sciences. Yet there is no consensus over the scope of the field that has come to be known as visual studies. This article offers a dialectical account in response. It finds a precedent in two dialectical models that have been prominent in visual studies, namely those of Walter Benjamin and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It argues that the work of Merleau-Ponty offers the better model for a contemporary dialectic because it is not tied to a particular ideological position. Merleau-Ponty's work can be used to ground a dialectic of visual culture which begins with the eye and has as its three main moments the life-world, representation, and technology. Each of these three moments is explored in turn in order to demonstrate that this is a genuine dialectic in the sense that the final stage returns to the initial position but leaves it thoroughly transformed. The advantage of this approach is that it yields, for the first time, an account of the study of visual culture that does not rely on ideological or methodological principles to explain the range of the field.
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From the Philosophers' Magazine 'Snapshot' Series
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The editors represent the ‘After’ in the title as an attempt to ‘forecast…the future trend’ of world affairs. The problem with the volume as a whole is not the lack of success (which must after all remain unproven) but the failure in most... more
The editors represent the ‘After’ in the title as an attempt to ‘forecast…the future trend’ of world affairs. The problem with the volume as a whole is not the lack of success (which must after all remain unproven) but the failure in most cases even to make the effort. Indeed, in forty banal, rambling, and ungrammatical pages, the introduction never begins to address the institutional problems raised by the call for reform in the international order.