Deakin’s Dr Cathy Legg, Senior Lecturer in Philosophy, recently sat down with David Rutledge from ABC Radio National’s The Philosopher’s Zone for a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion of the post-truth condition, epistemology in the modern context, getting people to care about the truth, and how the tradition of American Pragmatism can help us get past the ‘post-truth moment.’

You can listen to the program here, on the ABC Listen App, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In  December 2024, Deakin hosted the Australasian Association of Philosophy Conference at  our Waterfront campus in Geelong. Deakin’s Dr Cathy Legg, along with Deakin graduate Dr Vincent Le, organised a stream on Wilfrid Sellars and the renewed interest in his work among continental philosophers.

This became the subject of a new episode of ABC Radio National’s The Philosopher’s Zone, featuring Cathy, Vince, and several other excellent philosophers from Australia, the US, and Greece. The episode is presented and produced by Deakin’s A/Prof Patrick Stokes.

You can listen to the program here or via the ABC Listen App, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In Episode 10 of Deakinstruction, Tim Deane-Freeman talks to Meg McCamley and Tim Neal about his new book , which places Deleuze’s philosophy in dialogue with both cinema and the concept of information. In this context, they discuss philosophy, film, TV and social control, and the broader challenge of embracing a kind of thought which eschews recognition in order to confront the radically new. Tim Deane-Freeman is a sessional lecturer in philosophy at Deakin, and Meg McCamley and Tim Neal are both Deakin PhD candidates.

Deakin Philosophy’s Dr Cathy Legg has just published a piece in The Conversation, titled “Your world is different from a pigeon’s – but a new theory explains how we can still live in the same reality“:

As we explain it, reality is grasped through pragmatic agreement. This means individuals align their expectations about what others will do in similar lived situations. […] This highlights a key characteristic of pragmatist philosophy. It does not define cognition as a kind of consciousness, an idea that has led to apparently insoluble philosophical problems. Rather, pragmatists view knowledge of reality as implicit in what we can do, most especially what we can do with others.

The article is based on Dr Legg and André Sant’Anna’s newly-published paper in Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, “Pragmatic Realism: Towards a Reconciliation of Enactivism and Realism” (Open Access), which argues for a Peircean model of inquiry-based enactivist realism, which makes the investigation of other species’ minds possible. 

The Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy provides a broad intellectual forum for scholars working within or in communication with continental philosophy and European philosophical traditions. We welcome proposals for papers, panels and streams from scholars working in any discipline, from diverse backgrounds, and at any stage of their career. 

The 2024 annual conference will be held at Deakin University (Geelong Waterfront) from the 2nd to the 4th of December. There will also be options for online participation.

Keynote Speakers:

• Camisha Russell (University of Oregon)
• Laura Roberts (Flinders University)
• Massimiliano Tomba (UC Santa Cruz)

Deadline for abstract submissions: 1 July. 

Conference fees, including Registration and Conference Dinner tickets are listed here
Registrations will open in the coming months.

For more details, as well as submission guidelines, please go to www.ascp.org.au/conference

All queries about the conference should be sent to conference@ascp.org.au

We’re pleased to release a new episode of our Deakinstruction podcast: “AI and the Future of Philosophical Labour,” featuring Christopher Mayes, Tom Corbin (Macquarie/Deakin), Marilyn Stendera (Wollongong) and Jean-Philippe Deranty (Macquarie):

In December 2023 Deakin University hosted the 47^th annual conference of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle. This conference featured 33 presentations, 3 invited lectures and 2 keynote addresses, and brought together some 90 scholars from around the world (both in-person and online) for some rich and lively discussion. Thanks to support from the Australasian Association of Philosophy, we’re pleased to be able to share the recordings for the conference’s two keynote lectures in the links below.

• Prof. Shaun Gallagher: Caught in the Fabric of the world: Between embryology and the tapestry of autopoietic nature

• Prof. Alia Al-Saji: Opacity, Sociality, and Colonial Duration: Is it time to think critical phenomenology through Palestine?

Warm congratulations to three Deakin philosophy PhD students who graduated at a ceremony held at the Waterfront Campus on Wednesday 14th February 2023: 

• Dr Danica Janse van Vuuren, for her thesis “A Phenomenology of Feelings of Worthlessness and Suicidality in Some Cases of Depression” supervised by Prof. Jack Reynolds and A/Prof. Patrick Stokes, with Dr. Tamara Kayali Browne
• Dr Brian Macallan, for his thesis “Freedom as a Centralising Motif in the Work
  of Henri Bergson” supervised by Dr Sean Bowden with Prof. Jack Reynolds
• [in absentia] Dr Max Lowdin, for his thesis “Sign and Idea: Spinoza and Deleuze” supervised by Dr Sean Bowden with Prof. Jack Reynolds

Dr Danica Janse van Vuuren (centre) with Prof. Jack Reynolds (left) and A/Prof. Patrick Stokes (right) after the ceremony (photo courtesy of Tim Neal)

Dr Brian Macallan celebrating his PhD conferral (photo courtesy of Brian)

Deakin is proud to host the 47th Annual Meeting of the International Merleau-Ponty Circle, 4-6 December 2023. The theme for IPMC47 is “Merleau-Ponty and Embodiment: Between the Cognitive, Aesthetic, and Socio-Political”:

Merleau-Ponty’s seminal work on embodiment has been of enduring interest and influence in a wide range of fields. It has, for example, played a significant role in research on embodied cognition and enactivism, subjectivity and intersubjectivity, affectivity, movement, art, place, and more. Although sometimes criticized for providing an account of embodiment that is too general, Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical foregrounding of embodiment has also facilitated critical phenomenological studies attending to the specificities of how particular bodies inhabit social and political environments, through considerations of race, gender, disability, aging, and illness. This year’s meeting of the IMPC seeks to bring together these rich and varied strands of enquiry, in order to think with, against, and beyond Merleau-Ponty’s own contributions on the lived body.

A full program for the event can be downloaded here.

To read abstracts for the General Program click here.

To read abstracts for the Rethinking Racism through Embodiment and Place stream click here.

For further details and to register please visit the conference’s Eventbrite Page.