[citation needed] Angus's early intellectual formation began with a dual engagement with 20th-century phenomenology, particularly the work of Edmund Husserl, and the Frankfurt school of critical theory around the problems of technology and modern capitalism.
"[6] In 2013, Angus published a collection of essays on Canada under the title The Undiscovered Country: Essays in Canadian Intellectual Culture through Athabasca University Press in which he collected together his critiques of Canadian thinkers and emphasized that a philosophy which does not criticize empire becomes ideology.
[9] The contemporary university can be defined by "three separate questions focusing on teaching, research and application, and technological change.
"[11] This amounts to the university losing its "critical and self reflexive role"[12] because its main purpose is to feed the specific needs of the larger system.
This corporate arrangement of the university produces an anxiety as it relates to self-knowledge because of the explicit integration of education into the commodity form.