A/Prof Matthew Sharpe and Dr Michael Ure (Monash) have just published their new book, Philosophy as a Way of Life: History, Directions, Dimensions (Bloomsbury, 2021):

In this first ever introduction to philosophy as a way of life in the Western tradition, Matthew Sharpe and Michael 

Ure take us through the history of the idea from Socrates and Plato, via the medievals, Renaissance and Enlightenment thinkers, to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Foucault and Hadot. They examine the kinds of practical exercises each thinker recommended to transform their philosophy into manners of living.

Philosophy as a Way of Life also examines the recent resurgence of thinking about philosophy as a practical, lived reality and why this ancient tradition still has so much relevance and power in the contemporary world.

A/Prof Matthew Sharpe was recently featured on the New American Baccalaureate Project podcast, discussing ‘The Shaping of Academic Subjectivity Through Bibliometrics'”

How has the proliferating use of bibliometrics as a means to evaluate academic research shaped academic subjectivity? How are bibliometrics being used as a new technology of neoliberal, biopolitical governmentality, alongside the host of other ‘metrics’ (led by biometrics) that have emerged in the last two decades? What of most importance has been lost in the use of marginalia by scholars as a personal and political act? Does the production of neoliberal subjectivity and the power of bibliopolitics within academia exaserbate the two tier system of tenured and adjunct labor in higher education? Are there  ways to resist the bibliometric regime and its multifarious form of surveillance and subjectivity formation? If so, what channels and modes of organizing should we be thinking about to resist our current trajectory?

The podcast is available for download here. 

Congratulations to Dr Andrew Kirkpatrick, who graduated with his PhD on 22 April after the successful examination of his thesis, “Whitehead and Merleau-Ponty: Toward a Process Phenomenology.” Well done Andy!

A/Prof. Matthew Sharpe recently appeared on Stoa Nova, hosted by Massimo Pigliucci and Rob Colter, to discus Stoic virtue ethics:

A/Prof. Patrick Stokes has just written, produced and presented a radio documentary, ‘The Lost Boys of Daylesford,’ for ABC Radio National’s ‘The History Listen’ program: 

On a clear, cold Sunday in June 1867, three little boys wandered away from their home near the town of Daylesford, on Dja Dja Wurrung country in central Victoria. Over the next six weeks the boys’ story gripped the colony, and made newspaper headlines around the world. Over a century later, the case continues to capture the imagination of locals and visitors to the region. Philosopher Patrick Stokes heads to Daylesford to find out why the lost children story has such enduring and haunting resonance.

The program can be downloaded here.

Lucian’s Hermotimus has attracted comparatively little critical attention. Yet it is one of Lucian’s longer texts, and of all of his texts, the closest in form to a Platonic, Socratic dialogue. Hermotimus, an aspiring Stoic, converses with the more sceptical Lycinus, who affects concern to understand how Hermotimus came to choose this philosophical way of life, and not others. Why did Hermotimus become a Stoic, rather than an Epicurean, or Platonist, etc.? If he knew enough to choose a philosophy wisely, wouldn’t that only be possible if he were already wise? He would then not need a philosophy at all. But if he didn’t know enough to be sure the Stoic path was the true way to wisdom, won’t his decision to become a Stoic have been little more than a stab in the dark? Philosophy will hence not be meaningfully different from a religion or superstition. By posing this dilemma, I will contend, this artful dialogue asks questions which remain relevant for young students today, as they are confronted with competing philosophical and theoretical perspectives which bid for their allegiance. In this way, it echoes and aims to complement Plato’s educational reflections, as certain signs in the text flag. The dialogue in addition poses dilemmas also for us as teachers, in differentiating between philosophical training and indoctrination to one or other sectarian perspective. If there is no good reason to become a Platonist rather than a Bourdieuian, a Camusian rather than a Agambenian, etc., or if any such reasons can only emerge having studied for many years in one perspective or another, aren’t we forced to admit that the love of wisdom is groundless, founded on an arbitrary leap of faith, perhaps nudged along by charismatic teachers? I argue that at several moments, Lucian’s dialogue suggests a different possibility, but one which turns upon a self-reflective turn from content to form: to learn to philosophise in a way which is distinguishable from what we would call ‘blind faith’ is to learn to be able to ask questions, and above all, to learn to question the epistemic bases of one’s own beliefs, and even to be courageous enough to retract them in the face of rebuttal. But this is uncomfortable, unglamorous, and social factors also push against it. So, it is telling that Hermotimus ends the dialogue by wishing to leave philosophising behind altogether.

Dr Cathy Legg will be giving a talk on 1st March 2021 to the International Centre for Enactivism and Cognitive Semiotics.

Discursive Habits: Peirce and Cognitive Semiotics

Prof. Jack Reynolds will be speaking as part of an online seminar on phenomenology hosted by NTU Singapore:

Date and Time: 

12 March 2021, 10.00–13.20 SGT. 

Schedule: 

10.00-11.00:   ‘Dufrenne, Kant, and Aesthetic Intentionality’, Dimitris Apostolopoulos (NTU)

11.10-12.10:   ‘Merleau-Ponty and the Expressiveness of Language’, Andrew Inkpin (University of Melbourne)

12.20-13.20    ‘Perception and Phenomenal Experience’, Jack Reynolds (Deakin University)

Registration on Zoom is required: 

https://tinyurl.com/3jlcd53j

Contact: 

Dimitris Apostolopoulos ([email protected]) 

Sponsored by the NTU Philosophy Programme

A/Prof. Patrick Stokes has just published Digital Souls: A Philosophy of Online Death (Bloomsbury, 2021):

Social media is full of dead people. Untold millions of dead users haunt the online world where we increasingly live our lives. What do we do with all these digital souls? Can we simply delete them, or do tehy have a right to persist?… This provocative book explores a range of questions about the nature of death, identity, grief, immortality, the moral status of digital remains and the threat posed by AI-driven avatars of the dead. In the digital era, it seems we must all re-learn how to live with the dead. 

Matt Sharpe and Federico Testa’s new translation Selected Writings of Pierre Hadot has received a glowing review from commentator Gregory B. Sadler: