A/Prof. Patrick Stokes has just written, produced and presented a radio documentary, ‘The Lost Boys of Daylesford,’ for ABC Radio National’s ‘The History Listen’ program: 

On a clear, cold Sunday in June 1867, three little boys wandered away from their home near the town of Daylesford, on Dja Dja Wurrung country in central Victoria. Over the next six weeks the boys’ story gripped the colony, and made newspaper headlines around the world. Over a century later, the case continues to capture the imagination of locals and visitors to the region. Philosopher Patrick Stokes heads to Daylesford to find out why the lost children story has such enduring and haunting resonance.

The program can be downloaded here.

Lucian’s Hermotimus has attracted comparatively little critical attention. Yet it is one of Lucian’s longer texts, and of all of his texts, the closest in form to a Platonic, Socratic dialogue. Hermotimus, an aspiring Stoic, converses with the more sceptical Lycinus, who affects concern to understand how Hermotimus came to choose this philosophical way of life, and not others. Why did Hermotimus become a Stoic, rather than an Epicurean, or Platonist, etc.? If he knew enough to choose a philosophy wisely, wouldn’t that only be possible if he were already wise? He would then not need a philosophy at all. But if he didn’t know enough to be sure the Stoic path was the true way to wisdom, won’t his decision to become a Stoic have been little more than a stab in the dark? Philosophy will hence not be meaningfully different from a religion or superstition. By posing this dilemma, I will contend, this artful dialogue asks questions which remain relevant for young students today, as they are confronted with competing philosophical and theoretical perspectives which bid for their allegiance. In this way, it echoes and aims to complement Plato’s educational reflections, as certain signs in the text flag. The dialogue in addition poses dilemmas also for us as teachers, in differentiating between philosophical training and indoctrination to one or other sectarian perspective. If there is no good reason to become a Platonist rather than a Bourdieuian, a Camusian rather than a Agambenian, etc., or if any such reasons can only emerge having studied for many years in one perspective or another, aren’t we forced to admit that the love of wisdom is groundless, founded on an arbitrary leap of faith, perhaps nudged along by charismatic teachers? I argue that at several moments, Lucian’s dialogue suggests a different possibility, but one which turns upon a self-reflective turn from content to form: to learn to philosophise in a way which is distinguishable from what we would call ‘blind faith’ is to learn to be able to ask questions, and above all, to learn to question the epistemic bases of one’s own beliefs, and even to be courageous enough to retract them in the face of rebuttal. But this is uncomfortable, unglamorous, and social factors also push against it. So, it is telling that Hermotimus ends the dialogue by wishing to leave philosophising behind altogether.

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.