Deakin’s Dr Matthew Sharpe will be teaching a Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy Evening School class this semester on the work of Cicero.

Marcus Tullius Cicero: Philosopher, Statesman, Orator

Lecturer: Dr Matthew Shape

6.30-8.30pm Every 2nd Wed – Starts 24 March
(Note: first class only runs 6-8pm)
Classes: 25 March, 8 April, 22 April, 6 May, 20 May, 3 June

The works of Marcus Tullius Cicero exerted an extraordinary, continuous influence on Western thought and philosophy until the 19th century, and ‘Tully’ (as he was affectionately known even in the 18th century) was revered during the renaissance and the enlightenment.  An extraordinarily complex figure—philosopher, lawyer, orator, statesman, and historian; in parts Sceptic, Platonician, patriot and Stoic—Cicero was a fierce republican opponent to Cataline, Clodius, Julius Caesar and Marc Antony, as well as (in his ‘politically enforced leisure’) the author of works on rhetoric, law, politics, religion, ethics, and epistemology.  It is to these works, mostly still extant, that we owe a good deal of our knowledge of the Hellenistic and Roman thought (in comparison to which, ironically, his work has been devalued as unoriginal or derivative).  In this course, we will take a leisurely look at Cicero’s works on rhetoric, politics, epistemology (theory of knowledge), religion, ethics, the emotions and the good life.  Classes will mix lectures aiming to elucidate Cicero’s contexts, influences, interlocutors and concerns, with reading and commentary on specific passages.  In doing the course, students will be gaining insight into one of the most influential thinkers in Western history, living and writing in a moment in history oddly reminiscent of our own, and aiming everywhere to reconcile the life of the mind with ethical and political concerns.

Course Schedule

• Introduction: Cicero the statesman, the orator, and the rhetorician (on how to speak persuasively, and about philosophy, in Romulus’ sewers)
• The political works: Cicero’s (Roman) Republic, the dream of Scipio, and the Laws
• The Academica: Cicero, the Stoics and the sceptics on knowledge (and an introduction to the ancient philosophical schools)
• The religious works: on the nature of the gods, divination, and fate (and an introduction to the ancient religious context)
• Cicero on the good: De Finibus (of moral ends) & the Tusculan Disputations
• Cicero on reconciling principle and expediency: De Officiis (the last work)

Click here for more information.

Burwood Corporate Centre, Thursday 6th November 2014

This conference brings together speakers from around Australasia and the globe to look at the directions of European thought after 1914, with papers on Heidegger, Hegelianism, Marxism, critical theory, classical philosophy, and more.

Schedule

8:45-9:00 am     [greetings, welcomes]

9:00                       OFFICIAL WELCOMES (UNESCO PROF. FETHI MANSOURI, HEAD CCG) (Room 1)

9:15-10:15           Keynote 1: William H. F. Altman: “Singin’ in the Shade: An Introduction to Post-Post-War Thought”

10:30-11:30         Room 1: Weimar and beyond

Brown: The Sons destined to Murder their Fathers: Crisis in Interwar Germany

Jeffs: Hegel in dark times

Room 2: Weimar and beyond

Potter: The Spengler Effect

Vassilacopoulos: Death and Vision in ‘being-with’: Heidegger’s philosophical Dasein as a ‘response’ to history

11:45-12:45         Room 1: Weimar and beyond

Franke (Waikato): The ‘Secret Germany’ revisited: Karl Wolfskehl’s political correspondence in exile McDowell (Charles Darwin): Scheler’s Radical Pacifism Room 2: Philosophy in academe after 1914

Bloor: The Divide between Philosophy and Enthusiasm: Propaganda and Aporia in the Post-War Project and Now.

Reynolds (Deakin): World War 1 and the anlytic-continental divide

12:45-1:45           Lunch

1:45-2:45 Keynote 2: Prof. Miguel Vatter, War, Peace and Cosmopolitanism in Cohen and Rosenzweig

3:00-4:00             Room 1: Liberalism and Mythology

Zoido-Oser (LSE): Between Idealism and Realism (LSE): Isaiah Berlin’s dilemma

Brennan (Bond): World War One and European Mythology in the Thought of Jan Patočka

Room 2: Marxism and post-Marxism after 1914

Boucher: 1914: The Watershed in Marxism?

Pilapil (Ateneo de Davao): Honneth and the Moral Economy: A Non-Marxist Critique of Market Capitalism

4:15-5:15             Room 1: Towards post-post-war thought

Grimshaw (Canterbury): Ruptured Romans: the Pauline turn Kelly (UWS): What an Aleatory War!

Room 2: Towards post-post-war thought

Sharpe: the sceptical humanist enlightenment, another casualty of 1914

Ass. Prof. Rundell (Melbourne): Forbearance not bad faith (‘We begin in the mess’)

5:30-6:00 Closing discussion led by keynotes

Professor Jack Reynolds and La Trobe’s Ricky Sebold will be speaking on “The Existential Turn: Niezsche and French Existentialism” on 25th September 2014, 6:30-8:30pm as part of Melbourne Free University‘s “Philosophy and the Divine” series. For details, click here.

Matt Sharpe will be presenting the following as part of the Centre for Citizenship and Globalization Seminar Series:

Albert Camus’ Hellenism, Between Saint Augustine and Hegel

12 pm – 1 pm Thursday 4 September, Burwood Campus room C2.05

We do not believe any longer in God, but we believe in history.  For my part, I understand well the interest of the religious solution, and I perceive very clearly the importance of history.  But I do not believe in either the one or the other, in an absolute sense.  I interrogate myself and it vexes me very much that we are asked to choose absolutely between Saint Augustine and Hegel.  I have the impression that there must be a supportable truth between the two. –  Albert Camus, Essais, 1427-1428.

Much French thinking since 1960 has gravitated towards forms of decisionism or messianism which arguably secularises eschatological hopes and modes of thinking inherited from the Judaic and Christian tradition. Albert Camus is almost unique in French letters (alongside his friend, the poet Rene Char) in arguing for the need to reanimate motifs from the classical Mediterranean legacy: notably, the value of mesure (moderation), the notion of a constant human condition, the urgent need to recapture a non-instrumental, contemplative sense of our place in the natural world, and an opposition to all ideas of an ‘end of history’ or a single all-changing Event. According to Camus’ often-maligned “midday thought,” human beings are not solely historical, language-using, political beings. We are also mortal, natural beings in an ecosphere we did not create, but in whose profoundly interconnected (and now as we know profoundly threatened) recurrences Camus saw the basis for a new philosophy limiting human hybris, this side of thermonuclear or ecological collapse. In this paper, I’ll reconstruct the different registers of Camus’ hellenism: beginning from his own youthful experiences growing up in Algeria (for him, a ‘Greece in rags’) [1], passing through his mature defences of mesure, limit, and “a thought which would exclude nothing” [2], then his attempts to articulate a post-metaphysical virtue ethics [3], to his defence of artistic creation, style, and mythopoiesis as a practice of liberty [4].

Catch Dr Leesa Davis talking about “Buddhist Conceptions of Virtue” this Wednesday August 27, 7.00 – 9.00pm, at the Barking Dog Hotel, Pakington St, Geelong West.

This Sunday, 17th August, catch Deakin’s own Dr Petra Brown in conversation with Melbourne philosopher Dr Damon Young at this year’s Word-For-Word National Non-Fiction Festival at our Waterfront campus:

Well over two thousand years since Socrates drunk the hemlock, many contemporary philosophers argue that their ancient vocation is as essential than ever. Philosophy can help us to become more lucid, independent and just.

Click here for booking information.

Dr Leesa Davis will be on local radio The Pulse 94.7 FM on Thursday 14th August at 1.00pm, discussing Buddhism and Mindfulness, along with Stephen McKenzie from Deakin Psychology.

Deakin University, Burwood Campus, Friday, 14 November 2014.

In recent years, philosophers working in the Anglo-American tradition have paid a significant amount of attention to groups. Particular areas of focus have included collective intentionality, the ontology of collective action, and collective responsibility. On the other hand, while not necessarily sharing the same concerns, French philosophical thought in the 20^th and 21^st centuries has seen the proliferation of a number of novel ways of thinking about groups and other collective phenomena: Lacan’s work on the ‘big Other’; Sartre’s analysis of the formation and structure of groups in the Critique of Dialectical Reason; Simondon’s work on psychic and collective individuation; Deleuze’s and Guattari’s thinking about the relation between ‘collective assemblages of enunciation’ and ‘machinic assemblages of bodies’; Badiou’s (but also Rancière’s) work on collective political subjects, and so on.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers interested in exploring the contributions that contemporary French thought can make to recent philosophical theorizing about groups. In particular, we are interested in exploring novel ways to conceptualize the relation between individuals who can be said to ‘share’ intentions and agency. A small number of speaking slots are available. Prospective speakers are asked to email a short summary of their proposed papers (no more than 300 words) to [email protected] by Monday, 1 September 2014.

The workshop is hosted by the European Philosophy and the History of Ideas research group.

Burwood Corporate Centre, Deakin University, Melbourne Friday 7th November

Researchers across a number of disciplines have noted that the internet, and especially the increasing ubiquity of social media, is changing the ways in which the dead figure in the lives of the living. New means of commemorating, remembering, forgetting, interacting with and even denigrating the dead have emerged in online contexts, from online memorial sites, to new conventions of public mourning, to Facebook users continuing to post on the walls of deceased friends, to speculative new technologies that will create interactive avatars of the dead. Such practices raise important questions about the ontological, ethical, and social standing of the electronically-mediated dead and the digital ‘remains’ in which they are instantiated.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers working on this topic from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives, including philosophy, media studies, cultural studies and sociology. A small number of speaking slots are available. Prospective speakers are asked to email a short (<300 word) summary to [email protected] by Friday 5th September.

If you would like to attend this workshop please email Neil Henderson ([email protected]); attendance is free but registration is required for catering purposes.

This event is being held as part of “Online Interactions With The Dead,” a one-year research project funded by Deakin University. The workshop is hosted by the European Philosophy and the History of Ideas group.

 3rd-4th July,. Monash  University Caulfield Campus

This is the first of a series of workshops based on the Australian Research Council Discovery grant, ‘Reinventing Philosophy as a Way of Life’. The Discovery project investigates early modern and modern reinventions of the idea of philosophy as a ‘way of life’. In this workshop our speakers will investigate the salience and formative role of this ancient model of philosophy in the work of Spinoza, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Camus and Deleuze.

Details of the workshop can be found here.