About

I am a Professor of Philosophy at Southeastern Louisiana University (email: jeffrey.bell (at) southeastern (dot) edu). I am tucked away in the Department of History and Political Science. My research interests have run roughly along two paths. Much of my career I have written on the work of Gilles Deleuze, attempting to make sense of his work both for myself and, hopefully, for the benefit of others as well. At the same time, however, I have often pursued Deleuze’s philosophy as a vehicle or tool for thinking about other issues and other philosophers. What I have always tried to do in my work is to take the clarity and rigor of analytic approaches to setting forth an argument and pursuing questions and combine this with what I have always taken to be the more relevant and interesting questions that are raised in the continental tradition. My two forthcoming books – An Inquiry into Analytic-Continental Metaphysics and Towards a Critical Existentialism – exemplify this approach to philosophy. The influence of Deleuze’s thought is present in both these works, but readers will clearly see that many other philosophers have also had an important influence on my work. In both these new books a number of ideas were developed when I was one of the bloggers at the group blog, NewAPPS, established by John Protevi and Eric Schliesser. Now that I have finished the two-volume work that has been all-consuming for much of the last three years, I plan to return to more regular blogging. This gives me an opportunity to develop thoughts in a short, straightforward format, and it allows me to restate some of the arguments from my new books in different ways.

As for the name of the blog, incognitions, I am building off a resonance with two meanings that seem to be important in philosophy. There is the sense in which philosophy, as Plato noted in the Republic, that thought is motivated by what cannot be thought, or by paradoxical, contradictory thoughts. As one delves into these thoughts one’s thinking reaches its incapacity, inability, and incompetence. With this blog I will allow myself to venture beyond my comfort zone, and this will most likely lead me to the limits of my thinking. In the second sense I’m resonating with an unknown or incognito aspect to thinking–that is, to an element of surprise that arises unplanned in one’s thought. These thoughts are thus not incognito in the sense that their author is unknown, for my name is not hidden beneath a pseudonym. The thoughts I’ll work on here may, like a stranger, introduce me to new ways of thinking about things and set the stage for future writings, just as my writing at NewAPPS did for my most recent books.

When I am not writing and researching, I attempt to stay fit by running, followed by all the activities that lead to the need for more running–eating and drinking beer, especially Belgian-styled ales. I’m always looking for a good series to stream these days but it’s hard to keep up with the sheer number of series coming out. As a result, we tend to have quiet evenings reading on the sofa.

For those who may be wondering, the image I used for the main home page of my website is from Iceland. It is the famous Black Church at Budir. I took this picture while on a Ring Road tour of Iceland with my daughter. The images at the top of each other page is from a hike I’ve taken many times with my wife and daughters on the Quiraing in the Isle of Skye, Scotland.