PhD project:
My current project considers various ways in which human collectives — groups, markets, communications networks — have been modelled as cognitive agents. When I’m feeling ambitious, I think of this as an attempt to write a political history of ‘hiveminds’. I am interested in the fact that the dialectic between individual and society has so often been theorised by way of a speculative individuation of society itself, and I think that these speculations are always ways to think through (or, sometimes, pointedly avoid) fundamental problems of social co-ordination.
At the moment, I’m writing about about superorganisms, H.G. Wells, the mind-life continuity thesis, and 1920s vitalism.
Published papers:
‘A Humanistic Despair: Interwar Philosophy Between Fascism and Extinction’, International Journal of Philosophical Studies (forthcoming)
This is a piece about how Weil read Freud and how the world reads Weil. It asks whether it is ever possible to cheat the ‘law’ of desire, what kinds of attentive practice might open that possibility, and how a psychoanalytic ethics might be imagined or reimagined.
‘An Archival Paradise: John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language and Early Modern Info-Utopianism’, Utopian Studies (July 2023) [Winner of the Eugenio Battisti Award].
This is a version of my MPhil thesis. It’s about seventeenth-century ‘universal philosophical languages’, which were these amazingly grandiose attempts to exhaustively ontologise the world and then encode that ontology into a linguistic structure. These systems have been interpreted as foreshadowing later logicist attempts to construct universal formalisms. What was most interesting to me, given this, was the way in which their architects – scientists clustered around the early Royal Society – advertised them as politically revolutionary information technologies.
‘Between the Void and Emptiness: Ontological Paradox and Spectres of Nihilism in Alain Badiou’s Being and Event and Graham Priest’s One’, Open Philosophy (March 2023).
This is an attempt to make sense of two difficult philosophical projects by squashing them together. The projects are those of Alain Badiou, who claims that that ‘ontology is mathematics’, and Graham Priest, who claims that certain ontological theses are ‘true contradictions’. These claims have much more in common than just being disconcertingly unintuitive, but I like that they have that in common, too.
‘Weird Horizons and the Mysticism of the Unhuman in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy’, The Cambridge Quarterly (January 2022).
This is a version of my undergraduate dissertation, which was published after winning the Cambridge Quarterly prize. It’s about the parallels between ‘new weird’ science fiction and medieval mystical writing, both of which engage with the hard task of representing the definitionally unrepresentable. The philosopher in me was troubled by this paradox. I now see this paper as an attempt to grapple with ‘limit of thought’ problems without the conceptual resources of dialetheism.
Conference papers and talks:
‘Are We Living in a Superorganism?’ PhilSoc Lecture Series, Edinburgh (October 2025).
‘Society as Organism, Organism as Mind: The Group Mind Hypothesis in Early Social Psychology.’ Conference: ‘Scales of Life’, ICI, Berlin (May 2025).
‘Therapies without Cure: Pragmatism and Psychoanalysis’. Conference: ‘Towards a Heterodox Tradition in Analytic Philosophy: Transformative, Humanistic, Transformational’, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan (March 2025).
‘A Humanistic Despair: Interwar Philosophy between Fascism and Extinction’. Conference: ‘The Politics and Philosophy of Despair’, University College Dublin (January 2025).
Other stuff:
I spent some time in 2024 working as a research assistant for the Cultures of Knowledge project at Oxford’s History department. While cataloguing correspondence by the founding members of the Royal Society, I wrote four short biographies for Early English Letters Online: Robert Moray, Alexander Bruce, Robert Southwell, and William Petty. These should be of use to anyone interested in Early Modern science and culture. I’d also highly recommend the letters themselves, which deserve to be more widely read than they are. Those from Robert Moray to Alexander Bruce should be of particular interest to anyone curious about the early Royal Society, the history of Freemasonry, Civil War politics, seventeenth-century Scottish slang, or Early Modern homosociality.
My academic CV can be found here.
Georgie Newson 