About the MSCP Members

Sherah Bloor (Administrator) is an MA candidate at La Trobe University. Her thesis gives a reading of Plato's the Sophist alongside a dramatic reconstruction of the analytic - continental divide. She holds a BA (honours) in philosophy and social theory from the University of Melbourne (her honours thesis was on the distinction between phenomena and noumena in Kant and Nietzsche). She has tutored at La Trobe and she is also the Editorial Manager of Sophia (International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysical Theology and Ethics). This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Bryan Cooke (Secretary) is a doctoral candidate in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Social Inquiry at the University of Melbourne. He is currently writing a thesis about the relationship between the traditional motifs of critical theory (utopia, memory, the subject) and the 'infinite thought' of Alain Badiou . Bryan has taught four full courses for the MSCP: “Introduction to Lacan" (2011), The Problem of Socrates: Plato and Xenophon (2010) Dialectics of Enlightenment (On Adorno)" (2009) and “The Pleasures: Of Political Philosophy and Other Interruptions” (2008). He has tutored at Newman and St. Mary's College for some years and has lectured in political philosophy at Deakin University, Geelong. Apart from Plato, he is heavily influenced by Adorno, Hegel, G.K. Chesterton, Slavoj Zizek, Kevin Hart, Ernst Bloch, Philip Goodchild, Frederic Jameson and St. Augustine. After years of indifference to metaphysics, he was recently awakened from his Kantian slumber by Jon Roffe’s 2009 course on ‘speculative realism’. His erratically updated blog can be found here This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Paul Daniels has studied philosophy at the University of Melbourne, UNSW and Monash University, and is an Honorary Fellow of the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne. His research has focused on Nietzsche's early and late writings, Schopenhauer's critique of Kant, and Wittgenstein's early philosophy of language. More broadly, his interest lies with the intersections of art, language and the limits of philosophy. Paul has taught several MSCP courses: 'Reading Nietzsche's Zarathustra' (2005), 'An Introduction to Schopenhauer' (2007), 'Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy' (2008) and 'Meaning and Metaphor in Nietzsche and Wittgenstein' (2009). He also lectured at the 2009 Winter School course 'Kant's Critical Philosophy', which he convened. He has written on Kant's aesthetics and ethics, and is the author of Nietzsche and The Birth of Tragedy (Acumen, 2012). Paul was Convenor of the MSCP from 2007 - 2009.

Apart from philosophy, Paul enjoys playing piano, composing music, restoring furniture, and kicking back with the odd cigar. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

James Garrett (Convenor, Webmaster, Publicity Officer) is a PhD candidate in the School of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. His thesis is on the early Heidegger's reading of Aristotle. He has an MA in critical theory (on Plato's reading of Heraclitus) from Monash. His areas of interest are in Greek and German Philosophy. He has taught MSCP courses on the Presocratics, Plato, Aristotle and Heidegger. He wishes his knowledge of ancient Greek and PHP were more comprehensive. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

As well as a translator and sometime scrivener, Marc Hiatt is a student of theories with an emancipatory intent. He has studied in Melbourne, Berlin and Freiburg in Breisgau, taught at Monash and La Trobe universities and holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Arts, with honours in German and social theory, from the University of Melbourne. MSCP students have known him mainly as an interpreter of the traditions of dialectics, but Marc is also an inconstant amateur of the violin. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

After doing her undergrad studies in Colombia, Andrea Leon Montero did her MA and PhD studies at the New School for Social Research and also at Potsdam Universität. Her attention is focused on practical subjectivity, aka "the ethical subject". To that effect, the road has been complicated: Hegel, Habermas, Honneth and the classical Frankfurt School lead to psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan) and in the last years, she has been working through the work of Emmanuel Lévinas. She has taught philosophy at Universidad de Antioquia, La Trobe and MSCP, all in late modern and contemporary philosophy. At the MSCP, she has taught two introductory courses on Lévinas and keeps mentioning a book on responsibility based on Weber, Jonas, Derrida and Lévinas.. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Dr David Rathbone (B.Sc. M.Sc., M.A., Ph.D.) has run M.S.C.P. courses on Hegel, on Feuerbach, on the preSocratics and on Medieval Philosophy, and has also taught in courses in the Melbourne University School of Philosophy on Nietzsche, on Kant, on Heidegger, on Derrida, on Foucault, and even on Sartre. His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled The Imperative to See the Whole traced the vicissitudes of that imperative from Parmenides to Heidegger and back again. He has written or will soon be writing articles on the problem of misogyny in Nietzsche; on Derrida's readings of Hegel; on Blanchot's friendship with Camus; on Heidegger's silences; on the conception of Chinese Philosophy in the writings of Malebranche, Leibniz, Wolff and Voltaire; on Kant's doctrine of metaphysical illusion; and on some resonances between Parmenides and the Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Sean Ryan has lectured and tutored French and German philosophy at the University of Melbourne for the past 10 years. He holds an MA from the University of Melbourne, and is currently attempting to terminate an interminable PhD on the topic of Heidegger's Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsche. He has so far met with little success. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Matthew Sharpe is a Lecturer in Philosophy and Psychoanalytic Studies at Deakin University, the author of Slavoj Zizek: A Little Piece of the Real, co-author of Understanding Psychoanalysis and the co-editor of Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Essays on Zizek. He has published numerous articles on Camus, Castoriadis, Baudrillard, Derrida, Zizek, Lacan, Marcuse, Kant and film theory, and his current research interests centre around Leo Strauss and the recent rise of neo-conservatist political doctrines. He completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne in social theory and philosophy in 2003, writing on Zizek's political and critical theory. Since that time, he has taught several courses at the MSCP, together with sessional appointments in the Philosophy departments of Auckland and Melbourne Universities. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Cameron Shingleton completed an honours thesis in German on Nietzsche's reading of the Pre-Socratics in "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks". He is the author of a PhD on Nietzsche's many and varied conceptions of philosophy, a collection of aphorisms, and translations from the German of Karl Kraus. As convenor of the MSCP from 2005 to 2007, he kick-started the MSCP's History of Philosophy series, as well as inventing and teaching MSCP's inaugural Evening School series, "Global Warming: Science, Politics, Ethics". An assortment of his writings is to be found at his blog, "The Great Stage". This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Dr Marion Tapper has lectured in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne for over two decades and formally joined the MSCP in 2004. Her interests include the history of philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology (in particular, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre). As a senior lecturer in the School of Philosophy she supervised the postgraduate work of most present day MSCP members. She currently runs the Lives of the Philosophers public lectures and has co-organised MSCP events including the Sartre Colloquium in October of 2005, which included a performance of Huis Clos (held in conjunction with the Department of French, Italian and Spanish Studies and the Department of Philosophy). This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Mark Tomlinson (Treasurer) is a post-graduate student in the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at The University of Melbourne. He holds a BA (Hons.) in English and Philosophy, as well as a Diploma in Modern Languages (French). He has been teaching philosophy at Melbourne since 2007. His chapter, 'Nehamas's Nietzsche', recently appeared in Interpreting Nietzsche: Reception & Influence (Continuum, 2011) This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

Jessica Whyte completed her doctorate on the political thought of Giorgio Agamben in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, Monash University in 2010. She has published widely on contemporary continental philosophy (Agamben, Foucault, Rancière), theories of sovereignty and biopolitics, critical legal theory and critiques of human rights. She is a co-editor of the Theory and Event Symposium “Form of Life: Giorgio Agamben, Ontology, Politics” (2010), of the Australian Feminist Law Journal special edition “Law, Crisis, Revolution” (2010) and of the Agamben Dictionary (Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming, 2011.) She is currently lecturing in the subject "Introduction to Critical Theory" in the School of English, Communication and Performance Studies, Monash University.

Ashley Woodward received a B.A. (hons.) from LaTrobe University and a PhD in philosophy from the University of Queensland. His philosophical interests focus on problems of value, particularly existential meaning and aesthetics, and his research has dealt particularly with Lyotard, Baudrillard, Vattimo, Deleuze, and the interpretation and influence of Nietzsche. His books include Nihilism in Postmodernity (Davies Group 2009), Understanding Nietzscheanism (Acumen, forthcoming), the edited collection Interpreting Nietzsche (Continuum 2011), and the co-edited volumes Sensorium (Cambridge Scholars 2007), The Continuum Companion to Existentialism (Continuum, forthcoming), and Gilbert Simondon: Being and Technology (Edinburgh UP, forthcoming). He is also an editor of the journal Parrhesia. He currently teaches philosophy and art theory at the Victorian College of the Arts, Swinburne University, and RMIT. His website can be found here. This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it