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Brian Holmes

American philosopher (born 1959)

Correspondence, annotated notebooks and portrait silhouettes prepared for research
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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 27, 2025
Entity authorityQ4964074 ↗
Source-derived summary

Brian Holmes is a professor of philosophy at the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland, where he teaches an intensive summer seminar. He has worked with the French graphics collective Ne Pas Plier (Do Not Bend) from 1999 to 2001 and the French cartography collective Bureau d'Études.

He holds a doctorate in Romance languages and literatures from the University of California at Berkeley and is the author of the book Hieroglyphs of the Future. He was the English editor of publications for Documenta X, Kassel, Germany, 1997. Holmes gives lectures widely in Europe and North and South America, and is a frequent contributor to the international mailing list Nettime, the art magazines Springerin (Austria) and Brumaria (Spain), and the interdisciplinary journal Multitudes (France).

In recent years, Holmes has been co-organizing a series of seminars with the New York City–based reading group 16 Beaver Group under the title Continental Drift, working on the issues of geopolitics and geopoetics. He maintains a blog under the same name, with the subtitle "the other side of neoliberal globalization".

References

External links

Brian Holmes faculty profile at the European Graduate School.

Editorial summary

Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Brian Holmes” is american philosopher (born 1959). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Brian, Holmes and American, not as a finished interpretation.

Editorial reviewA useful biographical orientation record, particularly for establishing names, roles and a first chronology. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1999, 2001, 1997—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1959. For this dossier, Brian, Holmes and American is the immediate research focus.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

The phrase “american philosopher (born 1959)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.

Evidence profile

The entry’s evidential value lies in the named roles, institutions and publications that can be tested against primary documentation. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 27, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q4964074. VIAF identifies the subject as 304974857. The Library of Congress control number is nb2015019262. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1999, 2001 and 1997.

Critical limits

Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Read biographical claims against dates, named institutions and the cited references. Distinguish a subject’s later reputation from evidence produced during their lifetime.

Best used for
  • Establishing names and roles
  • Building a first chronology
  • Locating cited institutions
Verify next

Personal papers, civil or court records, institutional files and the scholarship cited by the source.

Three-step research path

  1. Establish the record: confirm the title “Brian Holmes”, its source revision and the description used here.
  2. Expand the search: follow Brian Holmes primary sources, Brian Holmes archive and Brian research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

Questions for further research

  1. Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “Brian Holmes”?
  2. How has the subject’s reputation changed across later accounts?
  3. Which primary records establish identity, chronology and institutional ties?
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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Brian Holmes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.