Crisis and Reconfigurations: 100 years of European Thought Since 1914

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

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

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.

Ricky Sebold: Philosophy Seminar on Sept. 30

On September 30, Ricky Sebold from La Trobe University will give a paper titled  give a paper titled ‘Therapeutic Naturalism: Renewing an Ancient Tradition’. Ricky is the author of Continental Realism: A Critique (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2014).

The seminar will take place from 4pm to 5.30pm at our Burwood Campus, room C2.05. It will also be linked to Geelong (ic3.315) and Warnambool (D.2.30).

ricky sebold     For further information, please see the PhilEvents entry.

Philosophy Seminar on Sept 23: Sonam Thakchoe (UTas)

On September 23, Sonam Thakchoe from the University of Tasmania will give a paper titled ‘The Theory of Two Truths in Prāsaṅgika Madhyamaka Philosophy’. Sonam is is a former Tibetan monk trained in the Tibetan Buddhist tradition for fifteen years, and is the author of The Two Truths Debate: Tsongkhapa and Gorampa on the Middle Way (Wisdom Publications).

The seminar will take place from 4pm to 5.30pm at our Burwood Campus, room C2.05. It will also be linked to Geelong (ic3.315) and Warnambool (J2.22).

For further information, please see the Philevents entry.      Thakchoe-Sonam

Dr Matthew Sharpe: “Albert Camus’ Hellenism, Between Saint Augustine and Hegel”

Dr Matthew SharpeMatt 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].

Deakin Philosophy Seminar: Knox Peden, ‘Althusser’s Spinozism and the Problem of Theology’

On August 26, Dr Knox Peden from the Australian National University will give a paper on the tension in Louis Althusser’s work between his Spinozism and his interest in theological discourse.

The seminar will take place from 4pm to 5.30pm at our Burwood Campus, room C2.05.

For further information, please see the Philevents entry.

MAC2_4:ALTHUS.TIF                                              Spinoza