Dr Ben Ware

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.