Category Archives: Uncategorized

March 24, Deakin philosophy welcomes Dr Andrew Inkpin

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Our next seminar, which is open to all, will take place on Tuesday March 24, 4.00-5.30pm, in room C2.05 on our Burwood campus.

Dr Andrew Inkpin (University of Melbourne), “What is, and to what end does one study, phenomenology of language?”

Abstract: Most philosophy of language in the English-speaking philosophical world is theory-driven in the dual sense of being based on broadly Fregean theoretical assumptions about the primacy of propositions and of aspiring to a systematic theory of meaning. Drawing on some of the main ideas in my forthcoming book (Disclosing the World), the aim of this talk is to introduce an alternative, phenomenological approach to philosophy of language, guided principally by the requirement to describe language accurately from the perspective of speakers’ lived experience. Based on my reading of the early Heidegger I suggest that such a conception of language should be characterized by an overall picture of the role of language as ‘language-in-the-world’ and by a specific view of linguistic signs as conjoining presentational with pragmatic functions. I go on to indicate how the work of Merleau-Ponty and the late Wittgenstein can be used to enrich Heidegger’s overall picture and to explicate these two functions of linguistic signs. Finally, I consider how such a phenomenological approach might be expected to contribute to philosophical understanding of language more broadly, in particular how it challenges today’s dominant theory-driven approach.

Bio: Andrew Inkpin is a lecturer  in contemporary European philosophy at the University of Melbourne. His research centres on phenomenological approaches to meaning, particularly with regard to language, practice, pictures and the visual arts more generally (including connections between phenomenology and recent embodied-embedded cognitive science). His book Disclosing the World: On the Phenomenology of Language is forthcoming in MIT Press.

The program for the coming weeks can be found here. For any inquiries, please contact Sean Bowden.

The seminar series is hosted by the European Philosophy and History of Ideas Research Group (EPHI), with the generous support of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences.

The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy – courses now on

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The course offerings for the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy’s Evening School (Semester 1, 2015) are now available.

Distance enrolment is available for all courses, check the website for details. Fees start at $90.

Enrolment:
http://mscp.org.au/courses/evening-school-semester-1-2015

6.30-8.30pm Tuesdays
Alain Badiou’s Being and Event
Dr A.J. Bartlett

6.30-8.30pm Wednesdays
Marcus Tullius Cicero: Philosopher, Statesman, Orator
Dr Matthew Sharpe

6.30-8.30pm Thursdays
Alain Badiou’s Interlocutors Part 2
Dr A.J. Bartlett

Enrolment:
http://mscp.org.au/courses/evening-school-semester-1-2015

The philosophy seminar series recommences this afternoon!

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The philosophy seminar series kicks off for 2015 on Tuesday March 10, 4.00-5.30pm, in room C2.05 on our Burwood campus.

Virtual Meeting Point: ARTSED VMP SHSS. Direct dial number: (+613) 5223 9354. On joining a VMP, see here.

Dr George Duke (Deakin University), “Aristotle’s Constitutional Theory”

Abstract: This paper seeks to develop and defend a broadly Aristotelian account of constitutional legitimacy. Section one maps out similarities and differences between the Aristotelian politeia and modern constitutions. Having established the applicability of Aristotle’s theory of the politeia to contemporary debates on constitutional legitimacy, in section two I argue that Aristotle’s appeal to the common advantage offers better material for a normative justification of the validity of the constitution than concepts such as constituent power and popular sovereignty.

Bio: Dr George Duke is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Deakin University. His current research interests include natural law jurisprudence and the legal thought of Aristotle.

The program for the coming weeks can be found here. For any inquiries, please contact Sean Bowden.

aristotle george duke

Matt Sharpe on Cicero, Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy Evening School

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sharpeDeakin’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 wciceroorks 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.

Collectives in Contemporary French Thought – November 14

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This Friday, November 14, there will be an international workshop on ‘Collectives in Contemporary French Thought’, hosted by the European Philosophy and the History of Ideas research group (EPHI) and the Faculty of Arts and Education, Deakin.

To register: please email Sean Bowden.

Speakers include: Prof. James Williams (Dundee); A/Prof. Russell Grigg (Deakin); Dr Simone Bignall (UNSW); and Dr Paul Hammond (Memphis).

Where: Room North 3, Level 2, Building BC, Deakin University, Burwood Campus

When: Friday November 14, 2014, 9am-5.30pm

Program:

9.00-9.10            Welcome

9.10-9.50            Russell Grigg (Deakin), “Thinking about groups psychoanalytically: the four discourses as social bonds”

9.50-10.30          Monte Pemberton, “Maurice Halbwachs and the Collective Memory”

10.30-11.00        Morning tea

11.00-11.40        Mark Howard (Monash), “Banging pots and doors: Rancière’s contempt for the sociology of social movements”

11.40-12.20        Sean Bowden (Deakin), “Thinking about Collective Agency: Insights from Anglo-American and Contemporary French Thought”

12.20-1.20          Lunch

1.20-2.00            Simone Bignall (UNSW), “Postcolonial Negotiations: Group Formation and the Politics of Cooperation”

2.00-2.40            Dale Clisby (Deakin), “Collective action in Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition: answering the critique of Hallward”

2.40-3.20            Paul Hammond (Memphis), “Social Groups as Deleuzian Multiplicities”

3.20-3.50            Afternoon tea

3.50-4.30            Emily Finlay (Monash), “Maurice Blanchot and the Collective Space of the Written Word”

4.30-5.10            James Williams (Dundee), “Collectives, groups and signs”

5.10-5.30            Discussion and close

‘Living with the Digital Dead’ with Dr Pat Stokes – November 7

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Tomorrow, Dr Pat Stokes will be hosting a workshop at the Burwood Corporate Centre titled ‘Living with the Digital Dead’.

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.

For further information, see this page.

Crisis and Reconfigurations: 100 years of European Thought Since 1914

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Crisis and ReconfigurationsBurwood Corporate Centre, Thursday 6th November 2014

Click here for online event registration

 

August 2014 marks 100 years since the outbreak of the first global war, and the beginning of what some historians have called a second ‘30 years’ war.’ The 1914 war itself, then the Russian revolutions of 1917, a contested peace after 1918, accelerating economic crises, the rise of fascism in Spain, Italy, then Germany, the systematic atrocities committed under these regimes, and the division of the world into the two blocs of the cold war following 1945 profoundly shocked European consciousness and culture. Many thinkers argued that there had been an irreversible breach in the continuing traditions of the West. Many others took these crises as proof positive of the redundancy, or culpability, of the ideals of the 18th and 19th centuries, centring around notions of progress, the beneficence of scientific advance, and the overcoming or taming of natural necessity. In academic philosophy, this period saw the opening up of the gulf between angloamerican, analytic and ‘continental’ modes of philosophising, a distinction which still has real currency today. Within European thought, while German post-war thinking largely saw a profound shift away from the figures of Nietzsche, Schmitt and Heidegger, held to have been implicated in their national disaster; in French thought, following 1960, Nietzschean and Heideggerian thought had a huge say in shaping the post-structuralist generation of thinkers whose wider influence around the world, and across disciplinary boundaries, is still felt today. Differently, the need to avoid any perceived proximities to the oppressive statism of the National Socialist and Stalinist regimes has had a huge role to play, via Hayek, Friedman and others in the economic thought that has widely reshaped the international economic and political landscape since 1979.

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

A seminar and workshop with Ian Hunter

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Next week, Deakin will host Prof Ian Hunter from the University of Queensland.

On October 7, from 4pm-5.30pm, Prof Hunter will give a talk titled ‘Secularisation: The Birth of a Modern Combat Concept’. The talk will be held in room C2.05 on the Burwood campus, and video linked to Geelong (ic3.315) and Warrnambook (J.2.22).

On October 8, there will be a workshop on Ian Hunter’s ‘History of Theory’ project. The workshop will be held in C2.05, from 12pm to 5.30pm.

For further information, please contact [email protected]

Or see the PhilEvents entries here and here.

ian hunter

Upcoming Symposium: The Return of Religion in Contemporary Continental Philosophy

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The below symposium may be of interest:

“The Return of Religion in Contemporary Continental Philosophy”

Wednesday, October 29th, 2014, in the 1888 Building, The University of Melbourne.

A Symposium sponsored by the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy and The Committee for the Study of Religion in the University of Melbourne.

9:30 am              Dr Justin Clemens (Melbourne): The Return to Religion in Contemporary Continental Philosophy.

10:30 am           Dr Petra Brown (Deakin): The Weakness of God: Divine Possibility Beyond Opposition.

11.15:am             Bryan Cooke (Melbourne): Economimesis: Capitalism as Religion in Benjamin and Agamben.

12.00: pm         Jason Freddi (Hon Research, UD) “Pure Violence”.

12:45pm            Lunch

1:45 pm              Professor Greg Barton (Monash) War in Syria and Iraq.

2:45 pm              Dr Nick Heron “Between Economical and Political Theology”.

3:30 pm             Panel and Open discussion

5:00 pm             Conclude

 

Inquiries            Ian Weeks   0418 565 552

Meals are not provided.