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King’s People
Dr Ben Ware

Dr Ben Ware

  • Visiting

Visiting Senior Research Fellow in Philosophy

Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Art (CPA).

Contact details

Biography

Ben Ware is the Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and the Visual Arts (CPVA) at King’s College London. He received his PhD from the University of Manchester, where he was also a Leverhulme Early Career Research Fellow. Ben has published widely on modern European philosophy, the philosophy of Wittgenstein, continental critical theory and modernist aesthetics. He is currently working on a book on philosophy and extinction for Verso.

Research interests and PhD supervision

  • Philosophical Modernism
  • Theory and Philosophy of Art, Literature & Culture
  • Wittgenstein
  • Ethics
  • Psychoanalysis

Expertise and public engagement

  • Co-Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Art (CPA). For details, please see the main CPA webpage: https://philosophyandvisualarts.com/
  • Philosopher in Residence at the Serpentine Galleries, London
  • Recent major collaboration with the Estate of the artist Francis Bacon, resulting in the publication of Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (London: Thames & Hudson, 2019)

Selected publications

  • Francis Bacon: Painting, Philosophy, Psychoanalysis (London: Thames & Hudson, 2019)
  • Living Wrong Life Rightly: Modernism, Ethics and the Political Imagination (London: Palgrave, 2017)
  • Dialectic of the Ladder: Wittgenstein, the ‘Tractatus’ and Modernism (London: Bloomsbury, 2015)
  • ‘Excremental Happiness: From Neurotic Hedonism to Dialectical Pessimism’, College Literature: A Journal of Critical Literary Studies, 45: 2 (2018): 198-221.
  • ‘Johannes de Silentio and the Art of Subtraction’, Parallax 22: 4 (2016): 391-411.