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Agar

Dr Jolyon Agar

Teaching Assistant 
(PhD Queen's University Belfast)

Room 20.203

Telephone +44(0)2890 973761

Email: j.agar@qub.ac.uk 

Teaching: Perspectives on Politics, Media, Politics & Conflict, Modern Political Thought, Religious and the Secular in Modern Political Thought, Approaches to Research Design.  

Research interests: Philosophy of the natural and social sciences, history of political thought, Hegelianism, Marxism, post-secularism. I am currently working on a book which attempts to relate the development of post-secularism to philosophical realism.  I am interested in exploring the rationalist content of the religious condition especially the search for transcendence as represented in the Hegelian tradition.  To this end I explore recent interpretations of Hegelianism as panentheistic as well as non-panentheistic (theistic and atheistic) post-Hegelians such as Charles Taylor, Ernst Bloch and Walter Benjamin.  I therefore attempt to construct an epistemologically robust and ambitious post-secularism based on a realist defence of transcendence.  In particular I attempt to demonstrate how Bloch’s radical utopian philosophy of the Not-Yet can only be grasped in terms of a critique of the Hegelian panentheistic concept of self-transcendence in the Left Hegelian tradition. I am also interested in the Critical Realism of Roy Bhaskar and the contributions his recent “spiritual” turn can make to this type of post-secularism. I am contracted to publish the book with Routledge.

Publications:

Books:

Post-Secularism, Realism and Transcendence: Explorations of the Utopian Content of the Religious Condition, London & New York: Routledge (forthcoming).

Rethinking Marxism: From Kant and Hegel to Marx and Engels, London & New York: Routledge, 2006, 240pp.

Papers:

  • “Political Theology, Ideology and Secularism”, in Political Ideologies, 4th Edition, London & New York: Routledge (forthcoming)
  • “Raging Against God: Examining the Radical Secularism and Humanism of “New Atheism”, Journal of Critical Realism, (forthcoming, 2011)
  • “Review of Marxism and Scientific Socialism: From Engels to Althusser, by Paul Thomas”, Studies in Marxism, 2009.
  • “Before Critical Realism: Kantian Empirical Metaphysics”, New Formations, Volume 56, 2005, pp.27-39.
  • “Towards Objectivity: From Kant to Marx” in Margaret Archer and William Outhwaite (eds), In Defence of Objectivity, London and New York: Routledge, 2004, pp.161-182.
  • “G.A. Cohen’s Functional Explanation: A Critical Realist Analysis”, The Philosophy of the Social Sciences, Vol 33, No. 3, September 2003, pp.291-310.