Papers by Thomas Meagher
Globalizing Political Theory, 2022
Punk Rock and Philosophy: Research and Destroy, 2022
Black Issues in Philosophy, 2022
Philosophy and Global Affairs, 2021
This paper offers a philosophical exploration of Nelson Maldonado-Torres's formulation of the "de... more This paper offers a philosophical exploration of Nelson Maldonado-Torres's formulation of the "decolonial reduction" as an instrument of phenomenology and ideological critique. Comparing the decolonial reduction to Edmund Husserl's notion of the transcendental-phenomenological reduction or epoché, I argue that working through the demands of rigor for either mode of reduction points to areas of overlap: the work of transcendental phenomenology is incomplete without the performance of the decolonial reduction and vice versa. I then assess Maldonado-Torres's anchoring of the decolonial reduction in the spirit of the "decolonial attitude" and criticism of the Husserlian theoretical attitude. I conclude that foreclosing the theoretical attitude as a framework from which to perform the decolonial reduction implies significant limitations and pitfalls for the decolonial project.
AlterNATION, 2020
This article seeks to examine 'the spirit of seriousness', as articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre and... more This article seeks to examine 'the spirit of seriousness', as articulated by Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, as a problem for decolonial theory and philosophy. It gives an account of the spirit of seriousness from the vantage of existential phenomenology in general and then works through its relevance, by way of W.E.B. Du Bois, Lewis Gordon, and Sylvia Wynter, for a diagnosis of the colonial condition and Euromodern man. Thus, it argues that decolonisation is necessarily opposed to a spirit of seriousness, the one manifest in the attitude of the coloniser which various colonial forms seek to impose upon the colonised. It then explores the seeming paradox that decolonisation calls for taking seriously commitments that might amount to a form of decolonisation that adopts the spirit of seriousness. Through a discussion of Frantz Fanon, this article argues that the project of decolonisation requires serious commitments that nonetheless reject the spirit of seriousness.
Alternation - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of the Arts and Humanities in Southern Africa, 2020
Socialism and Democracy
Published in 1920, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil comes at a middle period in W.E.B. Du B... more Published in 1920, Darkwater: Voices from Within the Veil comes at a middle period in W.E.B. Du Bois’s lifetime and work. This places it between the two periods that tend to predominate in Du Bois scholarship: the period from the 1890’s into the early nineteen-aughts, with Du Bois’s existential and philosophical reflections on black oppression as well as burgeoning innovation in the social sciences at the fore, and the period in the 1930’s and 1940’s where Du Bois’s Marxism and anti-colonial political commitments take center stage. Coming as it does in this middle period, Darkwater rarely receives much holistic assessment as a text unto its own. This is unsurprising, given its eclectic composition: the text alternates between argumentative essays and a variety of narratives and poetic pieces. These latter give the book a coherent through line, in which themes established in the essays are brought together and given space to resonate. This through line, though, is established by weaving together a variety of pieces that stand on their own, most of which had been published in some form prior to Darkwater. As literary scholars Susan Gillman and Alys Eve Weinbaum write, “The disparate parts that comprise Darkwater are thus, with few exceptions, read separately, and analyzed as if they exist in isolation.” These isolated readings often reflect the general scholarly tendencies toward clustering around the themes of the early and late periods of Du Bois’s writings. Essays like “The Souls of White Folk” are often paired with works from the earlier period. Pieces like “Of the Ruling of Men” tend to be read alongside the later works. And the works of poetry and fiction in the text are, for the most part, examined only in the context of comparison with Du Bois’s other lyrical writings.
Southern Journal of Philosophy, 2021
This article explores Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro in terms of its politica... more This article explores Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro in terms of its political philosophical content. It examines how Woodson's account of the miseducation of Black people and the accordant miseducation of whites is involved in the production and reproduction of an unjust basic structure, with reference to John Rawls and Frantz Fanon. It then turns to Woodson's critique of leadership and its relationship to miseducation, drawing on E. Franklin Frazier's study of the Black bourgeoisie and the political philosophy of Enrique Dussel. Finally, it examines miseducation as a site for the reproduction of racist knowledge production in light of the work of Anténor Firmin and examines how, for Woodson, rigor in the human sciences was essential for counteracting miseducation and serving the greater cause of liberation.
GCAS Review, 2019
This paper examines methodological problems in political philosophy by way of an examination of t... more This paper examines methodological problems in political philosophy by way of an examination of the phenomenon of coloniality, animated by an analysis of Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo's Decolonizing Democracy: Power in a Solid State. I argue that rigorous political philosophy cannot involve narrowing one's philosophical scope to either "ideal theory" or "nonideal theory," as has become commonplace in contemporary Analytic philosophy. Sanín-Restrepo's text is taken up as an exemplar of an approach in which the theoretical account of an ideal or ideals is worked out in relation to a critical account of political reality, and, hence, an account that restricts itself neither to ideal nor nonideal theory. Using Sanín-Restrepo’s account of coloniality, I defend the position that both ideal theory and nonideal theory in the Analytic tradition would manifest certain forms of disciplinary decadence due to their inattention to forms of epistemic and axiological colonization formative to Euromodern philosophy. By the same token, though, I argue that this points to tendencies toward decadence in the so-called Continental tradition, and that these tendencies may call into question certain of Sanín-Restrepo’s conclusions about the function of political philosophy for decolonization. I conclude with a discussion of the synthesis of alternative ideals as an imperative for anti-colonial and decolonial approaches in political philosophy, arguing that such an endeavor entails pairing the project of articulating novel values beyond Euromodern ones with the critical project of elucidating coloniality’s implicit rationality.
This paper examines methodological problems in political philosophy by way of an examination of t... more This paper examines methodological problems in political philosophy by way of an examination of the phenomenon of coloniality, animated by an analysis of Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo’s Decolonizing Democracy: Power in a Solid State. I argue that rigorous political philosophy cannot involve narrowing one’s philosophical scope to either “ideal theory” or “nonideal theory,” as has become commonplace in contemporary Analytic philosophy. Sanín-Restrepo’s text is taken up as an exemplar of an approach in which the theoretical account of an ideal or ideals is worked out in relation to a critical account of political reality, and, hence, an account that restricts itself neither to ideal nor nonideal theory. Using Sanín-Restrepo’s account of coloniality, I defend the position that both ideal theory and nonideal theory in the Analytic tradition would manifest certain forms of disciplinary decadence due to their inattention to forms of epistemic and axiological colonization formative to Euromodern...
Contemporary Political Theory, 2018
A "critical exchange" in Contemporary Political Theory on Jane Gordon's book _Creolizing Politica... more A "critical exchange" in Contemporary Political Theory on Jane Gordon's book _Creolizing Political Theory: Reading Rousseau through Fanon_.
Contemporary Political Theory, 2018
Dissertation by Thomas Meagher
Essays by Thomas Meagher
Black Issues in Philosophy, 2022
Black Issues in Philosophy, 2019
Book Reviews by Thomas Meagher
Comparative Literature Studies, 2019
Uploads
Papers by Thomas Meagher
Dissertation by Thomas Meagher
Essays by Thomas Meagher
Book Reviews by Thomas Meagher