READER IN PHILOSOPHY · UNIVERSITY OF SUSSEX

About

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I'm Gordon Finlayson.  I teach philosophy at the University of Sussex, where I'm also Director of the Centre for Social and Political Thought. 

I've studied at St. Andrews University, University of Essex, in Berlin, at the Freie Universität and the Humboldt University, and also Toulouse. I've taught at the University of York, and have been visiting Fellow at Vanderbilt University (2014) and at U.T. Austin (2007). 

I live in Brighton, where I have a room full of books, too many of which are unread or partly read. 

 

j.g.finlayson@sussex.ac.uk
Arts A Building Room 029
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9QN


Toutes choses sont déjà dites, mais comme personne n’écoute, il faut toujours recommencer
— Andre Gide
 
Lend me a little tobacco-shop,
or install me in any profession
Save this damn’d profession of writing,
where one needs one’s brains all the time.
— Ezra Pound
Human beings are appealed to be guided in their acts, not merely by love, which is always personal or a best tribal, but by the perception of their oneness with each human being.
— Kropotkin
 
And the final condition of the qualified intellectual was approximately this - that he restricted himself to his ‘subject’ and spent the rest of his life in the conviction that, although perhaps everything ought to be different, there was certainly no point in thinking about it.
— Robert Musil
During this period (1948-57) I was living with people who felt, or knew, that every era carries in its womb a child in whom one may not only place one’s hopes, but through whom and with whom it would be possible to go on living. They were people who had not forgotten the fundamental house-rules of human co-existence and who were heroes already in virtue of the fact that they did not succumb to semantic confusion, but called things and events by their correct names and signs.
— Bohumil Hrabal