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:

A/Prof. Matthew Sharpe will be giving a Zoom lecture on Wednesday 3rd February (3:00-4:30pm): 

Marketization of Higher Education and Crisis Tendencies: Australia & Germany Compared

Marketization of Higher Education, although presented as a neutral means to achieve ‘efficiencies’, inescapably produces “problem tendencies” (cf. Habermas, 1992; Crioni et al, 2015) within teaching, between casualisation and reduction of teaching staff and quality of instruction; within research, between free inquiry and applied, quantifiable research; and within institutional culture, between the uncommodifiable, collegial dimensions of academic work and the culture of auditing and compliance promoted by neoliberalism, as well as its attendant costs (Power, 1997; Craig et al, 2014). In this talk, I contextualise and examine figures from Germany and Australia, and try to explain why the Australian experience has been so much worse, as the responses to COVID-19 since March 2020 have highlighted.

Click here to register to attend

Nietzsche: Aristocratic Rebel

Responses to Dominic Losurdo’s Nietzsche

The release in translation of Dominic Losurdo’s Nietzsche: The Aristocratic Rebel (2020) comes as Nietzsche is again being claimed by leaders of the global antiliberal Right as a spiritual inspiration.  Losurdo’s work, which uses the methodologies of intellectual history, challenges Nietzsche’s widespread reception as an apolitical, untimely, individualistic thinker.  It claims we can only coherently read all of Nietzsche, without omissions and elisions, once we acknowledge his metapolitical project of overthrowing the egalitarian ideals and legatees of 1789, and the societies of the “last men” he claims they birthed.

This global convocation, conducted by Zoom, brings together N. American, European, and Australian experts to debate, critique, and weigh Losurdo’s book, and the different subjects it raises.

For further information, pls contact [email protected]

Schedule:

Wed 24 Feb 2021, 9 am EST

• Robert Holub (Columbia)
• Ronald Beiner (Toronto)
• Harrison Fluss (New York)

Thu 25 Feb, 7 pm EST

• Nicholas Martin (Birmingham)
• Martin Ruehl (Cambridge)
• Ishay Landa (Open U. of Israel)

Fri 26 Feb, 7 am EST

• Vanessa Lemm (Deakin)
• Ruth Abbey (Swinburne)
• Michael Ure (Monash)

In a context where non-white migrant communities are perennially held in suspicion and at the margins — that is, until our cultures and cuisines become trendy enough to consume — to “be” or “dwell” in our language becomes a lot more fraught.

Dr Helen Ngo has written in the Conversation about the importance of first languages, in the context of Footscray Primary School’s controversial decision to drop bilingual Vietnamese teaching in favour of Italian.

The Stoics considered anger to be the main focus of their therapy of the soul.  We’re lucky enough to have an entire text by Seneca, On Anger, but Marcus Aurelius also talks extensively about anger in The Meditations.  In one key passage, he lists ten distinct cognitive strategies for coping with anger, which can be compared to strategies employed in modern cognitive-behavioural therapy (CBT).  In this paper, I will examine the Stoic conception of anger, and how we might manage anger, as these subjects are treated in Seneca, Marcus, and the other extant texts.

Tuesday 18 August 2020, 4-5:30pm via Zoom. All welcome, for Zoom login details please contact [email protected]

Katsunori Miyahara (Center for Human Nature, Artificial Intelligence, and Neuroscience (CHAIN), Hokkaido University, Japan), “Re-thinking Empathy: From Simulation to Reception”

On one common sense of the term, empathy refers to a form of mental act in which one understands another by sharing in her perspective on the world. Simulation accounts of empathy conceive of this in terms of imaginative perspective-taking: that is, the act of imagining what it would be like for the other to be in a specific situation. In this talk, I challenge this view of empathy in three steps. First, I illustrate that empathy in practice sometimes depends heavily on the act of listening to the other. Four distinctive features of this type of empathy will be identified. Second, I argue that this form of empathy depends on the capacity to engage receptively with the other in question. Third, I show that these cases of empathy cannot be adequately explained within the simulationist framework. In sum, I advance a novel conception of empathy, which envisions it not so much as a matter of internal simulation, but rather as an embodied practice of engaging with the other while paying her due epistemic respect.

Deakin Philosophical Society will be presenting a discussion on security vs privacy on Monday 27th July 2020: