Michael Bennett

BA (Vind), MA (Western), PhD (McMaster)

Mike Bennett’s research explores the areas of overlap between philosophy and evolutionary science, the relationships between truth, language, and therapy in classical Athens and postwar Paris, and the use and abuse of the history of philosophy. He is the author of Deleuze and Ancient Greek Physics: The Image of Nature (Bloomsbury 2017) and co-editor of the interdisciplinary collection Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory (Edinburgh University Press 2019).

Since earning his PhD in Philosophy from McMaster University in 2014, Dr. Bennett has taught at King’s in various positions, including as a Faculty Fellow and Senior Fellow in the Foundation Year Program and an Assistant Professor (LTA) in Contemporary Studies. Having previously taught single courses for the History of Science and Technology, he joined the program full-time in 2021.

Selected Publications

• Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory, co-edited with Tano Posteraro, Edinburgh University Press, 2019.
• Deleuze and Ancient Greek Physics. Bloomsbury Academic Press, 2017.
• “Nail’s Lucretius: Strong Misreading and Whig History,” Parrhesia, forthcoming.

• “Go Nomadism, Evolutionary Computation, and Natural Selection: A Response to Jay Lampert,” Deleuze and Guattari Studies, forthcoming.
• “Habermas’s Interpretation of Arendt in The Future of Human Nature: Communicative Reason, Power, and Natality,” Philosophy Today, vol. 65, no. 3, Summer 2021.
• “Answering the Bioethicists’ Objection: Habermas and Arendt on Evolution,” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy, vol. 24, no. 1, 2020.
• “Lucretius,” in Deleuze’s Philosophical Legacy, Vol. II, edited by Graham Jones and Jon Roffe. Edinburgh University Press, 2019
• “Deleuze, Developmental Systems Theory, and the Philosophy of Nature,” in Deleuze and Evolutionary Theory, edited by Michael J. Bennett and Tano Posteraro. Edinburgh University Press, 2019
• “Deleuze and Heidegger on Truth and Science,” Open Philosophy, special topics issue on The New Metaphysics: Analytic/Continental Crossovers, edited by Jon Cogburn and Paul Livingston, 2018
• “Cicero’s De Fato in Deleuze’s Logic of Sense.” Deleuze Studies, vol. 9, no. 1, 2015.
• “Deleuze and Epicurean Philosophy: Atomic Speed and Swerve Speed.” Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy, vol. 21, no. 2, 2013.
• “Bergson’s Environmental Aesthetic.” Environmental Philosophy, vol. 9, no. 2, 2012.
• “Texts and Icons in Heidegger’s Metaphysical Tradition.” Diacritics, vol. 42, no. 2, 2012.

Interests

19th- and 20th-century European philosophy; poststructuralism and postmodernism; science studies and philosophy of science; gender, sex, and sexuality; biopolitics and bioethics; new materialisms; philosophy and ecology; history of philosophy (especially ancient Greek and Roman); language and logic (especially jokes and paradoxes