Hello!
This is the blog of Jane Clare Jones.
I'm a PhD student in Philosophy at Stony Brook University in New York, but am English/Welsh by derivation, and currently live in South-East England, where I work on a) my dissertation/thesis; b) this blog; and, c) growing things in the ground. Before doing this, I completed an MPhil at Goldsmiths on origins in Irigaray and Heidegger, and at some point in the distant past I studied Social and Political Science at the University of Cambridge.
I work primarily in Feminist ethics and metaphysics (both Analytic and Continental), contemporary French philosophy (roughly Bergson to Nancy), and Aristotelian ethics and politics (classical and revived). My current work is concerned with using the resources of French thought (particularly Bergson and Derrida) to elaborate an anti-mechanistic process-relational ontology, and deploying this ontology to demonstrate why the ontologico-epistemic order that Bergson calls 'the geometric'* is antithetical to the creation of a just society which fosters the flourishing of life.
My work touches on issues of:
- Time and Duration
- The Survival of the Past
- Dependency and Vulnerability
- The Metaphysics of Permeability
- The Critique of Identitarianism
- Security and Indemnification
- The Entanglement of the Material and Ideal
- Animal ethics and Posthumanism
- Ecology
- The Critique of Law
- Justice as Care/Flourishing
- Quasi-teleology and Growth
When it comes down to it, my fundamental concern is with justice...with what it might consist of, with why it is so frequently abused, with what we might do to protect and foster it.
With this concern in mind the aim of this blog is to:
a) Explore philosophical perspectives which might have something to say about how we get to a more just future...well, any kind of future at all really...
b) To rant about the current mess we're in...
c) To take inspiration from George Orwell's ambition to turn political writing into art, and every now and again, to see if its possible to make of philosophical writing an art. It's probably a lunatic idea. But I thought I'd give it a go.
Oh, and there is a high probability that in places I will laspe into rambles about Doctor Who.
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* 'The geometric' refers to the constellation of socio-cultural phenomena which devolve from the assumption of ontological atomism, or a metaphysics of solids, as opposed to the metaphysics of permeability which underpins 'the vital'...These are, among others, mechanical materialism, mathematization, scientism, Platonic ideality, rationalism, the denial of becoming, securitization, the liberal humanist subject, justice as the rule of law...and yeah, capitalism. If you're big into any of these things this maybe isn't the place for you, unless you like hanging out with people who annoy you.
