Dr John Mandalios (CTC Honorary research associate), “Beyond Nihilism: Christ the Enigma”

Abstract:

What is Nietzsche’s view of Christ beyond the standard interpretation of Christianity and the Church? Does Nietzsche have something more to say than the theologian’s blood poisons all our modern instincts and ideas? In this paper we examine the corruption that is historically foundational and formative of modern philosophy and ways of being. It focuses on his late work Der Antichrist and that which commentators most often ignore or miss, specifically the evangel. We shall have a look at two falsification theses in particular, each possessing a homology immanent to the text.

Bio:

John Mandalios has taught German metaphysics and ancient Greek philosophy for twenty years. He has worked in Paris and London and currently researches the work of Nietzsche, Leibniz and Plato. The question of atheism and post-secularism is a central research theme. He teaches philosophy at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy.

Where and when:

Tuesday 22 March, 4.00pm to 5.30pm, Burwood Campus, C2.05 (*** Please note the seminars are now back in C2.05 ***)

The seminar is free to attend and all are welcome.

For any inquiries, please email Sean Bowden: [email protected]

Hosted by the European Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Group (EPHI) and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

We are very pleased to welcome Prof. Richard Shusterman from Florida Atlantic University, who will kick off the 2016 Philosophy Seminar Series with his paper ‘Affective Thought: From Pragmatism to Somaesthetics’.

Where and when: Tuesday 8 March, 4.00pm to 5.30pm, Deakin Burwood Campus, Burwood Corporate Centre, Building BC, Level 2 (***please note the venue – the remainder of the seminars will take place in C2.05***).

Professor Shusterman is the Dorothy F. Schmidt Eminent Scholar in the Humanities and Professor of Philosophy at Florida Atlantic University, where he also directs the Center for Body, Mind, and Culture. He is the author of numerous books, including Thinking Through the Body: Essays in Somaesthetics (Cambridge, 2012), Body Consciousness: A Philosophy of Mindfulness and Somaesthetics (Cambridge, 2008), Performing Live (Cornell, 2000) and Pragmatist Aesthetics (Roman and Littlefield, 1992, 2nd edition, 2000, and published in fifteen languages).

Hosted by the European Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Group (EPHI) and the Faculty of Arts and Education, with support from the School of Communication and Creative Arts.

The seminar is free to attend and all are welcome. For further information please contact Sean Bowden: [email protected].

The program for Deakin’s Philosophy Seminar Series for 2016 can be found here.

The first philosophy study tour leaves for India on Christmas day!

3 weeks at the Central University of Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, India taking teachings on Buddhist Philosophy and Hermeneutics from Tibetan Buddhist Lamas.

Prof. Han Baltussen (University of Adelaide), “Philosophical ideas about emotions in antiquity: the case of grief and psychotherapy”

Han Baltussen was born in Maastricht, a Dutch city founded by the Romans as Mosae Trajectum (which means “crossing at the river Mosa”). Educated at the Henric van Veldeke College (starting ancient Greek and Latin), he went on to Utrecht University where he read Classics and Ancient Philosophy (BA, MA) and wrote his doctoral thesis on Theophrastus’ De sensu (PhD 1993; published in revised form 2000). Before coming to Adelaide he held prestigious postdoctoral research positions in Utrecht (Stoa edition), Washington D.C. (Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies) and Kings College London (Commentators on Aristotle Project, 1997-), and taught ancient Greek philosophy as Temporary Lecturer and Tutor (King’s College, Dept. of Philosophy 1998-2002). Since coming to Adelaide in 2002 he has made wide-ranging contributions to teaching and research in Classical studies and ancient thought. He has held further fellowships at the Institute for Advanced Study (Princeton 2006), at the Flemish Royal Academy (Brussels 2010), and at the Leiden University Centre for Arts in Society (Spinoza fellow 2014). He served as Head of Classics during 2009-2013. In 2011 he was appointed to the Hughes Chair of Classics, one of the University’s three foundation chairs, which had been vacant since 1992. In January 2015 he became co-Editor of Antichthon. Journal of the Australasian Society for Classical Studies (now with CUP).

Where and when:

Tuesday 27 October, 4.00 to 5.30pm, Burwood Campus, C2.05 (*** Please note that we are finally back in C2.05 ***)

Hosted by the European Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Group (EPHI) and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

For any inquiries, please contact Sean Bowden.

Dr John Morss (Deakin University), “The collective, the shared, and the plural: a broad and shallow interdisciplinary conspectus”

Abstract:

The collective, the plural, and the shared, among which there may be some family resemblances, play a range of roles and enjoy a range of status across the disciplines. There are diachronic as well as synchronic dimensions to this enquiry, for these features have a history and some of that history is shared. In this paper psychology (including psychoanalysis), law and a selection of other disciplines will be cursorily scrutinised with a view to shedding light on the shape and the significance of these issues and, it is hoped, stimulating some interdisciplinary conversation.

Bio:

John R Morss (Deakin Law School) obtained his degrees in Psychology in the UK in the last millennium and his degree in Law in NZ in this one. He has previously taught in the Universities of Ulster and Otago and has been a research fellow/visitor on three occasions at Cambridge, and at the EUI, Florence. He is the author of three and a half monographs and three co-edited collections among other publications. His current focus is the advocacy of a ‘collective turn’ in the theory of public international law.

Where and when:

Tuesday 13 October, 4.00 to 5.30pm, Burwood Campus, N3.11 (*** Please note the new room ***)

Hosted by the European Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Group (EPHI) and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

For any inquiries, please contact Sean Bowden.

A/Prof Matthew Sharpe (Deakin), “Bringing the Rhetorica ad Herrenium to the Rectoratsrede: Considerations on Heidegger’s National Socialist Rhetoric”

Abstract:

After an introduction (which I won’t read due to time) reflecting on the key role of Sein und Zeit‘s sections 27, 35-38, and their depictions of modern Gesellschaft in literature on the great philosopher’s Nazism, Part 2 of this paper justifies a specific look at Heidegger’s rhetoric in the period of his most extreme activism as Rector of Freiburg.  This has been skirted but never (as far as I am aware) systematically studied in the growing literature on the interconnection of Heidegger’s thought and politics.  Part 3 looks at the arrangement or dispositio of the famous Rectorship speech, drawing on the categories of the Roman rhetorical tradition.  It notes that Heidegger’s call to retrieve ‘the essence of science’ from the Greeks to animate University reform so the German University can assume spiritual Fuhrung in the new Reich enacts the ‘authentic historicity’ formally described in SZ division II (culminating at sec. 74).  In doing so, we will show, the speech actively calls forth and then enacts in the peroration that Kamfgemeinschaft (battle community) of teachers and students the great philosopher envisages for his Gefolgschaft. Part 4 looks at Heidegger’s ‘elocutio‘, if that Roman term can stand for Heidegger’s style in the speech.  We note here how the speech exemplifies at least 11 of the 13 features of the “fanatical language” of the Nazi leadership, as analysed by John M. Young in Totalitarian Language, before focusing on Heidegger’s (no less than) 16 biconditionals in the 47 paragraphs and the way that, coupled with his extraordinarily otiose language, Heidegger’s rhetoric operates by claiming exclusive access to vital but esoteric truths, presented less as contestable ‘ontic’ validity-claims than hieratic ‘ontological’ revelations.  The concluding remarks call for further rhetorical analyses of Heidegger’s national socialist speeches and lectures, as an under-explored field in understanding both the imbrication of his politics and thought and its continuing fascination, despite everything we (as against scholars two decades ago) now know.

Bio:

Matt Sharpe teaches philosophy at Deakin, and is the author of Camus, Philosophe (Brill 2015).

Where and when:

Tuesday 29 September, 4.00 to 5.30pm, Burwood Campus, C2.05 (*** Please note the seminars are now back in C2.05 ***)

Hosted by the European Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Group (EPHI) and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

For any inquiries, please contact Sean Bowden.

A/Prof David Macarthur (University of Sydney), “Liberal Naturalism and the Second-Personal Realm”

Abstract:

Scientific Naturalism is a widely popular position in contemporary metaphysics. Naturalists of this stripe are centrally concerned with what has come to be called “the placement problem”: how do we find a “place” for, e.g., mind, meaning, and morals, in the scientific image of the world? In this talk I mean to argue – on the basis of distinguishing theoretical and practical versions of the scientific image – that this problem is misconceived even from within the perspective of scientific naturalism. The default position for naturalism is not Scientific Naturalism but a Liberal Naturalism which opens up the hitherto neglected realm of non-supernatural non-scientific entities. This realm arguably includes those things that are presupposed in the practice of science, e.g., people (scientists), artifacts (e.g. tables) and meaningful communication (e.g. scientific conferences & journals). The claim that these things are non-scientific depends on the idea that the correct deployment of the relevant concepts constitutively depends on what “we” take-as instances of such things as fellow speakers within a linguistic community. Liberal Naturalism thus opens up into a philosophical exploration of interpersonal space or what we might call 2nd-personal realm.

Bio:

David Macarthur is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney.  His philosophical interests are wide-ranging.  He has written articles on scepticism, pragmatism, metaphysical quietism, the meaning of naturalism, Wittgenstein, and philosophy of art and architecture.

Where and when:

Tuesday 15 September, 4.00 to 5.30pm, Burwood Campus, Burwood Corporate Centre, Level 2 (***please note the new venue***).

Hosted by the European Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Group (EPHI) and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

For any inquiries, please contact Sean Bowden.

DEAKIN UNIVERSITY PHILOSOPHY SEMINAR SERIES, SEPTEMBER 1, 2015

Dr Robert Sinnerbrink (Macquarie University), “Empathic Ethics: Phenomenology, Cognitivism, and Moving Images”

Abstract:

Some of the most innovative philosophical engagement with cinema and ethics has come from phenomenological and cognitivist perspectives in film theory. This trend reflects a welcome re-engagement with cinema as a medium with the potential for ethical transformation, that is, with the idea of cinema as a medium of ethical experience. My paper explores the phenomenological turn in film theory (with its focus on affective, empathic, and embodied responses to cinema), emphasizing the ethical implications of phenomenological approaches to affect and empathy, emotion and evaluation, care and responsibility. My claim is that an ‘empathic ethics’ is at work in many films: film provides a powerful means of enacting the affective temporal dynamic between empathy and sympathy, emotional engagement and multiple perspective-taking. Taken together, these elements of cinematic ethics offer experientially rich, context-sensitive, and ethically singular forms of imaginative engagement in social situations that reveal the complexities of a cultural-historical world. I elaborate this thesis by analysing a key sequence from Ashgar Farhadi’s A Separation (2011), a film that offers a striking case study in cinematic ethics.

Bio:

Robert Sinnerbrink is Australian Research Council Future Fellow and Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. He is the author of Cinematic Ethics: Exploring Ethical Experience through Film (Routledge, forthcoming 2015), New Philosophies of Film: Thinking Images (Continuum, 2011), Understanding Hegelianism (Acumen, 2007), co-editor of Critique Today (Brill, 2006), and is a member of the editorial board of the journal Film-Philosophy. He has published numerous articles on the relationship between film and philosophy, and is currently a completing a book (with Lisa Trahair and Gregory Flaxman) entitled Understanding Cinematic Thinking: Film-Philosophy in Bresson, von Trier, and Haneke (Edinburgh UP, 2016).

Where and when:

Tuesday 1 September, 4.00 to 5.30pm, Burwood Campus, Burwood Corporate Centre, Level 2 (***please note the new venue***).

Hosted by the European Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Group (EPHI) and the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

For any inquiries, please contact Sean Bowden.