“If Marx or Keynes were alive today, they would be shocked to see how far the profession has degenerated.” (McKeown, The View from Below)

“Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so the socialists and communists are the theoreticians of the proletariat class.” (Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy)

My name is Alexander Jeuk (“yoik”). I am a philosopher with broad interests in issues such as philosophy, economics, politics, culture and science. My research and writing seek to be different from the norms that guide research today, which are often completely unbeknownst to most researchers themselves.

When you look at philosophy today, you have roughly three different approaches dominating the field. Philosophers at “elite universities” write neo-scholastic pieces for a handful of other philosophers at “elite universities”; l'art-pour-l'art without the art but all the social distinction they can muster.

So-called “naturalists” aim at routinely redefining everything we know about the world and our minds in light of every new fad from the sciences. And many ethicists, social and political philosophers primarily spell out the intuitions behind liberalism, as philosopher Onora O’Neill fittingly put it, among them many who consider themselves socialists.

In economics, the situation is worse. The majority of economists just defend liberal capitalism—which they hide behind mathematics, in the implications of their idealizations and assumptions, in their technical vocabulary, and in a pseudo-diversity of positions (e.g., Neoclassical, New Classical, Austrian economics, etc.)—the same strategy that the philosopher Avner Baz laments about “pluralism” in philosophy.

Even the people who reject the majority view in economics—the opposition that is allowed in the sense in which the Soviets allowed dissenting voters to suggest plurality—have a hard time redefining economics so that it works, and not only works, but works for the many.

Likewise, scientific research in diverse areas, from psychology to medicine, is beholden to philosophical research assumptions (e.g., ontological and methodological reduction) and a sociological structure (e.g., overspecialization, peer-review, publishing in small debates, publish or perish, grant writing) that has led to an age of scientific, societal and technological stagnation.

Therefore, I try to zoom out and look at these practices and norms themselves. Inspired by the methodological tradition of Marx, Heidegger and Polanyi, I look at what researchers and most of us today take for granted, be it in philosophy, politics, the sciences or any kind of important cultural discourse. Then I identify the norms and presuppositions that make the least sense— or make more ‘sense’ for some people rather than others—and try to develop something genuinely new.

In addition to the topics mentioned above, I work on many other issues, such as learning, intelligence, Latin and logic, as well as media criticism, video games, the British legal system, Heideggerian phenomenology and football.

I hope you find my research interesting. Under “articles & research,” I attempt to update a database that gives you an overview of my writing on unalienated, Alexanderplatz (by taz), magazines, newspapers, scientific journals and pre-print repositories.

I am always happy to hear from you. Please don't hesitate to contact me via the contact form.