Burwood Corporate Centre, Thursday 6th November 2014

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

The below symposium may be of interest:

“The Return of Religion in Contemporary Continental Philosophy”

Wednesday, October 29^th, 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.

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).

     For further information, please see the PhilEvents entry.

Professor Jack Reynolds and La Trobe’s Ricky Sebold will be speaking on “The Existential Turn: Niezsche and French Existentialism” on 25th September 2014, 6:30-8:30pm as part of Melbourne Free University‘s “Philosophy and the Divine” series. For details, click here.

Matt 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].

Catch Dr Leesa Davis talking about “Buddhist Conceptions of Virtue” this Wednesday August 27, 7.00 – 9.00pm, at the Barking Dog Hotel, Pakington St, Geelong West.

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.

Deakin’s Dr Matthew Sharpe will be running a course titled, ‘So, what was the Enlightenment?’, as part of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy’s semester 2 evening school. Information about enrollment, dates, times and location can be found here.