ABOUT

From Colombia to Israel to Canada, and in the process, from Judaism to apostasy via philosophy, Ariel Peckel is of no fixed identity. His background is a mashup, just like his career trajectory: he is a philosopher, satirist, and one-time bassist and vocalist in a rock n’ roll outfit called The Tailbreakers.

 

After completing high school in Bogotá, Colombia, and following years spent living in Israel and travelling in Europe and India, Ariel returned to Canada, his birthplace, to study philosophy. As an undergraduate at the University of Toronto, he double majored in Philosophy and English, obtaining an Honours Bachelor of Arts with High Distinction. He proceeded to get a Master of Arts in philosophy followed by a doctorate, both at the University of Toronto, specializing in philosophy of religion with a focus on the Enlightenment and on modern naturalism and atheism.
 

One year into his doctoral career, Ariel published his first academic article: “Inferential Orientation “Inferential Orientation and Religious Belief: Foundations of a Wittgensteinian Critique of Religion” (ARC, 2017). That same year, he was awarded the prestigious Joseph-Armand Bombardier CGS Doctoral Scholarship. In 2022, he obtained his PhD with a dissertation titled Irreligious Naturalism in Hume, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein (2022), which received high praise from the external reviewer as was accepted “as is” by the thesis committee following the oral defense.

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Upon graduating, Ariel held a postdoctoral fellowship in his home departments at the University of Toronto, during which he designed and taught a course that reflects his passion for the intersections of philosophy and iconoclasm, titled “Heretical and Irreligious Thought from Antiquity to the Modern Age.” He received a commendation of teaching excellence at the department and faculty levels for his instruction in this course. He also wrote an academic article for the journal Hume Studies titled “Hume beyond Theism and Atheism,” which would be unanimously awarded the Third Hume Studies Essay Prize (2024). He finished composing another piece of writing during this time, too: a social commentary satire aimed at contemporary cultural ideologies, Bertram’s Emporium of Things People Say, which would be picked up by Vine Leaves Press for publication in 2024—his first published book.

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Ariel has since published another article that blends his academic and creative writing interests in an iconoclastic takedown of contemporary philosophical ideology, titled “The Poverty of Postmodernist Constructivism: And a Case for Naturalism out of Hume, Darwin, and Wittgenstein” (Metaphilosophy, 2024). He now works as an academic consultant but continues writing, dividing his time between academic research and satirical social commentary, aspiring to refine the art of tipping sacred cows in both domains.

 

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Education

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Ph.D.

University of Toronto, Graduate Department for the Study of Religion, Anne Tanenbaum Centre for Jewish Studies, 2022. Dissertation: “Irreligious Naturalism in Hume, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein.”

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M.A.

University of Toronto, Graduate Department of Philosophy, 2016.

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Honours B.A. with High Distinction

University of Toronto, Undergraduate Faculty of Arts & Sciences, Major in Philosophy, Major in English, 2015.

 

Research and Teaching Interests

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Philosophy of religion in modern European thought; Enlightenment philosophy; naturalist epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics; traditions of liberal political philosophy; modern humanism and atheism; Hume; Nietzsche; Wittgenstein; Hobbes; Spinoza; Diderot; Darwin; Lucretius; Epicureanism.