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Staff Profile

Dr Michael Lewis

Senior Lecturer in Philosophy

  • Email: michael.lewis@ncl.ac.uk
  • Address: Department of Philosophy
    University of Newcastle Upon Tyne
    Tyne and Wear
    NE1 7RU
    United Kingdom
Background
Biography

I have taught philosophy at the University of Sussex (2007–9, 2011), the University of Warwick (2010), the University of the West of England (2011–2015), and the University of Newcastle upon Tyne (2016–), where I am Senior Lecturer in Philosophy. In the Autumn of 2022, I was a Visiting By-Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge.

At Newcastle I have been Senior Tutor in Philosophy, Combined Honours Advisor for Philosophy, and Head of Philosophy. I am currently Chair of the Board of Examiners and Study Abroad Co-ordinator.

I am the founding editor and general editor of the Journal of Italian Philosophy.


If you are thinking of pursuing a PhD at Newcastle: I am trying strictly to limit the number of PhDs I begin to supervise in any one year, so do encourage you to look around the department to see who else might be capable of supervising your project.


Research

My work at present considers the problem of the boundary between the human, understood by philosophy as a political, linguistic, and technical animal, and the non-human animal.

    The most substantial issue of this project will be a book entitled, The Reinvention of Man: Philosophy and Anthropology which investigates the motivations behind the project of a ‘philosophical anthropology’ (as developed by Gehlen, Plessner, and Scheler in the 1920’s and 30’s, but whose origins are much more ancient): in other words, it addresses the ontological or metaphysical question of the essence of man, animal, and nature. I attempt to demonstrate how this project has been received and reinvented by various philosophers in the post-Kantian European tradition from Heidegger to Stiegler, from Derrida to Lacan, from Agamben and Esposito to Virno, the 'naturalising phenomenologists' from Karl Loewith to Hans Jonas and Merleau-Ponty, by way of a number of other figures, all of whom are addressing - in one way or another - the question of ‘human nature’ and the ‘human animal’.

    This work is the continuation of a trilogy of books, which took as their point of departure my doctoral work on Martin Heidegger and the relation between ethics and politics in his work (Heidegger and the Place of Ethics, 2005), which I developed in a later text (Heidegger Beyond Deconstruction: On Nature, 2007) in the direction of the question of nature (earth) and animality, including the animality of man, and thus in the direction of the ontological and ethico-political status of nature, and man’s ecological responsibilities, but perhaps more fundamentally this was to raise the most basic question of the anthropological project, which might be expressed in terms of the genesis of the transcendental, the natural preconditions for the emergence of transcendental structures and the transcendental subject.

    This work on the animality of man also concerned the question of the relation between transcendental philosophy and empirical science — the question of the place of empirical data, and in particular the results arrived at by anthropology, zoology and psychology, in a philosophical determination of the essence of man and the animal. This led to a comparative study of two ways of collapsing the transcendental-empirical (philosophical-scientific) divide, in Derridean deconstruction and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory (Derrida and Lacan: Another Writing, 2008). The question of ‘structure and genesis’ was thereby raised in a somewhat novel fashion, and at least in a way that responded to contemporary problematics in continental philosophy.

    This project of rethinking the human, its language, politics, and technics, in their animal genesis, has more recently issued in two shorter books:

First, a small book on the notion of the domestic animal (a wild animal inducted into the human home or oikos), which attempts to demonstrate the significance of the conjunction of the notions of beauty and animality for post-Kantian philosophy, in particular. Thus it begins from a consideration of Kant’s third critique, and the relation between its two halves, which deal precisely with beauty on the one hand, and the organism, on the other. This then leads us on to a consideration of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature and a number of recent and contemporary continental thinkers of the animal, and more precisely of the relation between nature and culture, animal and human, with Derrida perhaps foremost amongst them (but also others, including Wittgenstein, Levinas, Lacan, Heidegger, and Meillassoux) (The Beautiful Animal: Sincerity, Charm, and the Fossilised Dialectic, 2018).

Secondly, what may be considered a companion piece to the book on animals, a book on humans, as addressed by the work of Giorgio Agamben, which is now - finally - close to completion. Here we attempt to isolate the philosophical core of his work, and in particular the precise nature of the relation and order of foundation that exists between language, being, and the political (the book is provisionally entitled, Agamben's Theory of Grounding: Logic, Ontology, Politics, and projected for completion in 2024). (Another text, Philosophy, Biopolitics, and the Virus: The Elision of an Alternative, the completion of which proved more urgent, is also concerned in large measure with Agamben's work, in particular his work on the so called 'non-pharmaceutical intervention' and its effects. This has, necessarily, delayed completion of the other text on his work, but provides a significant supplement to it.)

          Both (if not all three) of these texts, along with the trilogy that preceded them, may be conceived as prolegomena to the work described above under the heading of philosophical anthropology. We are after all working out how not to dehumanise the human, and how to protect the conditions in which a properly human life might still be possible.

 

The preliminary work for forthcoming monographs has been appearing in article and essay form: ‘On Thinking at the End of the World: Derrida, Lyotard, Bataille’ (in Georges Bataille and Contemporary Thought, Bloomsbury, 2017), ‘Heidegger and Žižek: On Political and Non-Political Action at the End of History’ (in Heidegger and the Global Age, Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), ‘The Relation between Transcendental Philosophy and Empirical Science in Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics’ (in Cosmos & History, 2017), ‘A Voice that is Merely Breath’ (in The Philosopher, 2018), ‘Virno’s Philosophical Anthropology’ (in the Journal of Italian Philosophy, 2018), 'Beyond the Death of Man: Foucault, Derrida, and Philosophical Anthropology' (Kritikos, 2019), ‘Plessner’s Philosophical Anthropology: From the Philosophy of Nature to Politics’ (Stasis, 2020), and ‘Escaping the Anthropological Circle: Kant and Hegel on Madness and Habit’ (Lo Sguardo: Rivista di filosofia 2021), ‘Against the Logic of Immunity: Philosophy and the Epidemic’ in Pandemic Response and the Cost of Lockdowns: Global Debates from the Humanities and Social Sciences (London: Routledge, 2022), the Introduction to The Bloomsbury Italian Philosophy Reader (with David Rose) (London: Bloomsbury, 2022), ‘The Machine in Esposito and Agamben’ in Journal of Italian Philosophy 5 (2022), and a number of book reviews, of Giorgio Agamben, Where Are We Now? And Other Writings (Journal of Italian Philosophy 5 (2022)), and ‘Another Kantian Spirit: Review of Lorraine Daston, Against Nature’, Global Discourse 11:1–2 (2021).


In addition to this, and in some ways in parallel, I have been attempting to explore as much of Italian Philosophy and Theory as I can, and this is ongoing (cf. The Bloomsbury Italian Philosophy Reader (2022) and the Journal of Italian Philosophy).


I am interested in the place of breath, breathing and the stifling of breath or breathlessness in the history of philosophy, and have written a number of essays which have helped, in a small way, to contribute to the foundation and consolidation of the discipline of 'critical respiratory studies'.


I am beginning to write on Ivan Illich, and attempting to delineate the basic philosophical gesture of his thought and work, most immediately for the sake of a forthcoming issue of the Journal of Italian Philosophy, devoted to his relationship with Giorgio Agamben, and potentially as a book, if this proves fruitful. At the moment, the most immediately useful product of this comparison is a clarification of Agamben’s theory of institution, which should prove useful in confronting Roberto Esposito’s critical account of the same, and in general in my pursuit of a theory of the human and the necessity of institutions.


In conjunction with this, I am investigating the work of George Orwell, alongside Ivan Illich and other less well-known figures, as well as Agamben, to examine the possibilities of rethinking political philosophy and in particular the opposition of Left and Right, with a view to moving beyond an internationalist/globalist anti-capitalist left and the construal of leftism in terms of identity politics (wherever this ends up leaving us). In conjunction with this, but also more broadly, I am more and more concerned with questions of free speech, thought, and action, and the culture of cancellation and shunning, which I am trying to construe philosophically in terms of a certain conception of logos and a certain conception of negation. In light of this, I am developing a (narrower) project to rethink the possibilities of the contemporary university, so as to determine whether it is possible to pry it away from the latter kind of gesture.


Some examples of my writing may be found on my Academia.edu website.




Current Doctoral Students

Calum Morgan, Thesis Topic: Geopolitics and Space in Heidegger, Deleuze and Guattari, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2023–

Oscar Tyler, Thesis Topic: (Post-)Kantian Philosophy and Genius, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2022–.

Emily Monaghan, Thesis Topic: Anthropology and Sexual Difference, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2022–

Naomi Harland-Smith, Thesis Topic: Animals in Philosophy and Law. University of Durham, 2021– (co-supervised with Durham Modern Languages & Newcastle Law).

Samuel Briault, Thesis Topic: Vision and Blindness: A Dialectical Materialist Approach. University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2021–.

Robert Atkinson, Thesis Topic: Psychoanalysis and Addiction, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2020– (co-supervised with Durham Modern Languages).

Matthew Collins, Thesis Topic: Lacan on Sublimation, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2020–24 (funded by AHRC, submitted).

Justina Mitkute, Thesis Topic: How does the Human-Animal Connection Shape Human Identity? University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2020– (Creative Practice PhD in Documentary Film, Co-supervised with Newcastle Film, Culture Lab).

Jim Lloyd, Thesis Topic: Animal Perception, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2018– (funded by AHRC, co-supervised with Newcastle Fine Arts).

Nicholas Brignell, Thesis Topic: Adorno and Hegel, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2018– (funded by AHRC, submitted).


Recently Completed

Tuba Ilhan Dalar, Thesis Topic: Reappraising Rawls' Kantianism through Hegel's Social and Political Thought, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2018–24 (funded by the Government of Turkey). Completed.

Marco Pavanini, Thesis Topic: Human Constitutive Technicity: The Evolutionary Turn in the Philosophy of Technology, University of Durham, 2019–24 (funded by AHRC, co-supervised with Durham Modern Languages). Completed.

Elliot Sturdy, Thesis Topic: Contemporary German Literature and the Middle Voice, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2019–23 (Co-supervised with Newcastle Modern Languages and Durham Modern Languages). Completed.

Lucy Carolan, Thesis Topic: Photography and Disorders of Memory, University of Newcastle upon Tyne, 2017–23 (funded by AHRC, co-supervised with Newcastle Fine Arts). Completed.


Research Identifiers/Citation Indices

Google scholar: https://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=7-xqLdEAAAAJ&hl=en

Orcid id: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6373-9046

Scopus Author Id: 57193167301

Academia.edu: https://newcastle.academia.edu/MichaelLewis




 

Teaching


Office Hours: Term-time only, cf. sign on office door.


2024-25

  • Rationalism and Empiricism (Spinoza, Locke, Leibniz)
  • Post-Kantian Philosophy: Materialism and Idealism (tbc.)
  • Early Twentieth Century Ontology and Epistemology (Walter Benjamin & Simone Weil)
  • Projects
  • Philosophical Approaches to the Humanities and Social Sciences (co-taught)
  • MLitt Introduction to Continental Philosophy (tbc.)


2023-24 (Sabbatical, Semester I)

  • Texts in Contemporary Philosophy: Henri Bergson’s Matter and Memory.
  • German Idealism (Hegel, Philosophy of History, Phenomenology of Spirit, Science of Logic)
  • Phenomenology (Semesters I & II) (Introduction to Phenomenology; Phenomenology and the End of the World: Anders, Jaspers, Blanchot, Derrida, Jonas)
  • Projects
  • Philosophical Theory: Thinking and Intepreting (co-taught)


2022-23 (Sabbatical, Semester I)

  • Post-Kantian Philosophy: Idealism (Fichte, Hegel, Schelling)
  • Phenomenology (Semester II) (Max Scheler, Hans Jonas, Emmanuel Alloa, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Henry)
  • Projects (All years)
  • Philosophical Theory: Thinking and Intepreting (co-taught)
  • MLitt Introduction to Continental Philosophy (a session introducing Ivan Illich as a Philosopher, & a session with visiting speaker Marco Piasentier on Biopolitics)


2021-22:

  • Rationalism and Empiricism
  • Ancient Philosophy I (The Pre-Socratics)
  • Post-Kantian Philosophy: Idealism (Between Kant and Hegel, the development of the critical philosophy from Reinhold to Hegel)
  • Phenomenology (Semester II) (Karl Löwith, Hans Blumenberg, & Dominique Janicaud, on Science, Technology, Nature, Language, and Anthropology)
  • Projects (All years)
  • Introduction to Continental Philosophy (Two sessions on Claude Levi-Strauss, Wild Thought)
  • The session on Post-Structuralism for Thinking Theories and Methods (on Saussure, Levi-Strauss, & Derrida)


2020-21:

  • Kantian and Post-Kantian Philosophy I: Idealism {this year, on the invention of anthropology in Kant, Herder, and Hegel}
  • Phenomenology {this year, on the myth of the given: Husserl, Marion, Heidegger, the Neo-Kantians, Wilfrid Sellars, Claude Romano}
  • Postmodern Political Thought (Jean-Luc Nancy and Community)
  • The Networked Society (on Marcuse, Horkheimer, Instrumental Reason and Formal Logic)
  • Projects (All years)
  • The session on Post-Structuralism for Thinking Theories and Methods, for postgraduates in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Three sessions of the Introduction to Continental Philosophy/Research Assignments module on the MLitt Philosophy {Georges Bataille, anthropogenesis and cave paintings}


2019-20:

  • Kantian and Post-Kantian Philosophy I: Idealism
  • Phenomenology
  • Projects (All years)
  • The session on Post-Structuralism for Thinking Theories and Methods, for postgraduates in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Two sessions of the Introduction to Continental Philosophy (two sessions on Agamben's Use of Bodies).

2018-19:

  • Kantian and Post-Kantian Philosophy I: Idealism
  • Phenomenology
  • Projects (1st and 2nd year)
  • Sessions on Phenomenology and Post-structuralism in Thinking Theories and Methods, for postgraduates in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences; one session on Alain Badiou for the MLitt Philosophy.

2017-18:

  • Philosophy and Religion
  • Knowledge and Human Interests
  • Meaning, Truth, and Language
  • Projects
  • A session on Postmodernism and Poststructuralism on the Postgraduate Research Methods module, for all doctoral students in the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences
  • Two sessions on the MLitt in Philosophy course, PHI9001 Research Assignments, concerning Agamben's What is Philosophy? and a research talk on Paolo Virno's Essay on Negation.

2016-17:

  • Philosophy and Religion, 2016–17.
  • European Philosophical Traditions II: Moral Philosophy and Human Nature, 2016–17.
  • Meaning, Truth, and Language, 2016–17. 
  • Cultural Contradictions of Scientific Rationality, 2016–17. 
  • Knowledge and Human Interests, 2016–17 (Seminars in Term 1).
  • Philosophy Project, 2016–17.
Publications