Evening School Semester 1 - Distance Enrolment
The MSCP is proud to offer two 8-week evening classes, and one 5-week class in Semester 1, 2012 for distance enrolment. The courses can be enrolled in separately or together at a discount. Please see below for course descriptions.
Distance Enrolment means that you will have access to both online readings and audio recordings of the lectures. The courses are not specifically designed as an audio only format; the audio files are simply recordings of the lectures as they are given, including class discussion. Lectures are uploaded sporadically during the course, so please be patient once you have enrolled. Distance enrolment and access to the online recordings remains open for a few weeks after the courses have concluded.
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Mondays, 6.30pm - 8.30pm, |
Contingency, Irony, and Trust: An
Introduction to Rorty and Brandom |
|
Tuesdays, 6.30pm - 8.30pm, |
Hegel: Philosopher
of the Modern - A reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit |
|
Thursdays, 6.30pm - 8.30pm, |
Occupolitics: Political Theory and Practice in the 21st Century |
Where?
University of Melbourne Law School, Parkville, Melbourne.
How much will it cost? Well that depends, doesn't it.
|
Either Rorty + Brandom only or Hegel only |
Student/Unwaged $120 |
|
Occupolitics only |
Student/Unwaged $80 |
|
Both Rorty + Brandom and Hegel |
Student/Unwaged $160 |
|
Occupolitics and either Rorty + Brandom or Hegel |
Student/Unwaged $140 |
| All three courses |
Student/Unwaged $180 |
Distance Enrolment only:
Once you submit your details using our online enrolment form you will be asked to choose to pay online using paypal (you don't need a paypal account - you can use a credit card). If you have any questions that are not answered on our FAQ page, please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it or use the form on the contact page.
Contingency, Irony, and Trust: An
Introduction to Rorty and Brandom
Lecturer: Gilles Bouche
8 Mondays, 6.30pm-8.30pm, March 12 - May 7 (no class Easter Monday: April 9)
The course provides an introduction both to the work of Richard Rorty and to the work of his most prominent student, Robert Brandom. The course reconstructs Rorty’s conception of philosophy, his criticism of analytic philosophy and promotion of a neopragmatist combination of private ironic and public liberal philosophy, then reconstructs Brandom’s neohegelian rationalism as a reaction to this conception. The hope is that understanding the dialectics between Rorty and Brandom will contribute to a better understanding of the relations between very different ways, possibly continental and analytic ways, of doing philosophy and thereby to a better understanding of what it is that one is doing when one is doing philosophy.
The course begins with a reconstruction of Rorty’s criticism of analytic philosophy. In Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Rorty identifies a tradition reaching from Plato to analytic philosophy which understands philosophy as epistemology, as a body of knowledge on knowledge which adjudicates the claims to knowledge of other bodies of knowledge, and which understands knowledge as objective knowledge opposed to mere subjective pseudo-knowledge, objective knowledge as representation of the objective world, and representation on the model of perception.
Rorty criticizes the conception of philosophy as epistemology by rejecting the platonist conception common to Descartes, Locke, and Kant of us as subjects representing the objective world, as minds mirroring nature, for the pragmatist conception common to Dewey, Heidegger, and Wittgenstein of us as subjects coping with an environment. Whereas the platonist conception privileges natural science over art as generating the most fundamental representation of the objective world, the pragmatist conception understands natural science and art as two very different ways of coping with an environment, each useful for some purposes and less useful for others. Making much of Kuhn’s notion of paradigm shifts, Rorty tries to undermine the platonist contention that the difference between natural science and art (or art criticism) is a difference between objective knowledge and mere subjective pseudo-knowledge by making plausible that the knowledge generated by the former is less objective, and the knowledge generated by the latter less subjective, than the platonist conception suggests.
Rorty rejects the conception of philosophy as epistemology for the conception of philosophy as conversation and understands the problem of subjectivity as the problem of how to continue the conversation which is philosophy in the context of increased awareness of the extent to which the conversation is permeated by contingency and of the extent to which philosophers do not transcend contingency toward necessity, but give contingency the mere appearance of necessity. Should one strive to limit the conversation to fields of conversation in which contingency seems manageable, at the risk of expressively impoverishing the conversation? Or should one strive to keep the conversation as expressively rich as possible and find a way to accept contingency which neither gives up on the philosophical pretension to transcend contingency toward necessity nor gives in to the tendency to give contingency the mere appearance of necessity?
Rorty takes analytic philosophy to try the former, ironic philosophy to try the latter, understanding irony as a means to continue talking in certain ways without fully identifying with these ways of talking, without giving up on transcending them and on revealing the contingency deposited in them. In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, Rorty takes ironic philosophy to begin with ironic theory and to culminate in a form of writing which does no longer aspire to any form of theorizing, which Rorty sees best exemplified in Derrida’s Post Card.
The course reconstructs Brandom’s neohegelian rationalism as a reaction to Rorty’s neopragmatism. Brandom himself criticizes analytic philosophy, mainly for lacking in systematic ambition and historic vision, for failing to link detailed work on technicalities, which Brandom is very far from denigrating, to the systematic-historic context which gives work on technicalities its point. Like Rorty, Brandom criticizes analytic philosophy for its platonist-empiricist tendency to understand conceptual activity in terms of representation and representation on the model of perception. What Brandom criticizes, however, is not the commonsensical claim that there is conceptual activity which is activity of representing the objective world, but the tendency to understand representing on the model of perceiving and hence to understand the fact that there is conceptual activity which is activity of representing the objective world as a fact which does not stand in need of further explanation.
Unlike Rorty, Brandom takes philosophy to have its own distinctive task. Not the task of epistemology, but the task to give an account of conceptuality – an account of subjects, which are conceptual qua engaging in conceptual activity, as being in and representing the objective world, which can be represented by engaging in conceptual activity because it is itself conceptual qua exhibiting conceptual structure. Brandom understands conceptual activity like Rorty as a way of coping with an environment, but unlike Rorty as a specifically rational way of coping, as rational experience, an ongoing learning process of integrating new beliefs into sets of prior beliefs, of adopting and disadopting, including and excluding, inhaling and exhaling beliefs – a process in which concepts are not only applied, but also instituted and made determinate. Brandom gives an immensely detailed account of conceptual activity as rational experience, then shows that conceptual activity as rational experience is also always already activity of representing the objective world. Brandom gives an account not only of the objective world as giving rise to conscious subjects representing the objective world, but also of conscious subjects as rising into self-conscious subjects representing themselves, ultimately by developing an account of conceptuality such as Brandom’s. In all these respects, Brandom’s rationalist account of conceptuality is neohegelian.
Brandom reacts to Rorty’s philosophy not only by showing that there is still much constructive philosophy to be done, but also with his own discussion of contingency and irony, contained in A Spirit of Trust, Brandom’s yet unpublished book on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Understanding conceptual activity as activity in which concepts are not only applied, but also instituted and made determinate, Brandom understands irony as a reaction to increased awareness of the extent to which the determination of concepts is permeated by contingency – the reaction of understanding the determination of concepts as an activity in which there is only contingency and no necessity, where contingency is given the mere appearance of necessity, to be unmasked as contingency by giving genealogical accounts of the determination of concepts. The result of this reaction is irony, the attitude of subjects applying concepts without ever fully identifying with them.
Following Hegel, Brandom understands irony as the pinnacle of modern alienation – and as based on a misunderstanding of conceptual activity, itself based on a misunderstanding of necessity as incompatible with contingency, of being necessary as being pure of contingency, which closes off any understanding of the determination of concepts as activity not of excluding contingency from concepts, but of incorporating contingency into concepts in a way which turns contingency into necessity. Still following Hegel, and taking over Hegel’s theological vocabulary, Brandom understands the determination of concepts as an activity of turning contingency into necessity which is an activity of confessing and forgiving, an activity in which subjects form a community of trust.
Brandom understands the determination of concepts on the model of the determination of laws in common law, where laws are not instituted as determinate before being applied, but instituted and made determinate by being applied. Each application of the law involves a rational reconstruction of past applications of the law which divides past applications into those which are precedents and those which are not and which exhibits the past applications which are precedents as necessary qua conform to the law. Each rational reconstruction of past applications of the law and hence each application of the law involves an element of contingency. In particular, the way in which past applications are divided into those which are precedents and those which are not is not determined by the past applications themselves. Taking over Hegel’s theological vocabulary, Brandom understands the element of contingency as what the judges have to confess and what future judges have to try to forgive, precisely by giving rational reconstructions of past applications of the law according to which past application are precedents and hence necessary qua conform to the law. Failures to forgive are failings of the future judges, which must be confessed in turn. The judges form a community of trust: Judges confess the contingency involved in their applications of the law and trust that future judges will try as best as they can to forgive them by turning their applications of the law into precedents, thereby turning contingency into necessity.
Brandom’s account of conceptuality has an edifying dimension. On the one hand, it shows that, as a matter of fact, engaging in conceptual activity at the most fundamental level is forming a community of trust. On the other hand, it wants, by showing this, to make us engage in conceptual activity at a more substantial level in ways which are trustful rather than ironic. Brandom himself tries to do philosophy in a way which is trustful. His reading of Hegel is an attempt to forgive Hegel, a reading which does not emphasize Hegel’s failings and blind spots, but tries to exhibit Hegel’s work as rational and progressive.
Rorty and Brandom give us two very different understandings of philosophy, the problem of contingency, and the role of irony. The course will try to clarify the relations between these two understandings. It will try to answer questions such as: Is Brandom’s criticism of irony as pinnacle of modern alienation a criticism of irony as Rorty understands it? Does irony as Rorty understands it have a positive function which Brandom does not consider? Does Brandom’s conception of philosophy as account of conceptuality contain a limitation of the conversation to fields of conversation in which contingency seems most easily manageable, at the risk of expressively impoverishing the conversation – a limitation which allows Brandom to forego irony as a means of managing contingency?
Recommended readings:
Note: While a course reader will be made
available, attendees will be able to follow the discussion without making use
of the reader.
- Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, (Princeton University Press: 1979, Special Edition: 2008), Chapters 3, 7, and 8.
- Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (Cambridge University Press: 1989).
- Robert Brandom, Reason in Philosophy (Harvard University Press: 2009), Chapters 1 to 3: Animating Ideas of Idealism, downloadable as the 2007 Woodbridge Lectures at http://www.pitt.edu/~brandom/index.html
- Robert Brandom, A Spirit of Trust, (unpublished), Chapter 8: From Irony to Trust: Modernity and Beyond, downloadable at http://www.pitt.edu/~brandom/hegel/index.html.
Difficulty Level: Introductory to intermediate
Hegel: Philosopher
of the Modern
A reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology
of Spirit
Lecturer: Bryan Cooke
8 Tuesdays, 6.30pm-8.30pm, March 13 - May 8 (no class on Easter Tuesday: April 10)
This course will introduce students to the philosophy of G.W.F. Hegel. The course is organised around a reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit – that baroque, magisterial, occasionally mystifying book which generations of philosophers have considered to be both the great propadeutic to Hegel’s system as well as a masterpiece of speculative construction in its own right. While following the structure of the Phenomenology, the course will also, necessarily, make use of ancillary material from Hegel’s broader corpus, drawing on the Lectures on the Philosophy of History, the Introduction to Aesthetics and the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion as well as the early monographs Faith and Knowledge; the Difference between the systems of Fichte and Schelling, the Spirit of Christianity and any material whatsoever that might help students to navigate the Phenomenology’s maelstrom.
Given its limited time and scope, the course will necessarily wrestle with the twin imperatives to a) give a sense of thePhenomenology within an historical context and to b) show how Hegel’s work is important for the world of the twentieth century. In emphasising this latter aspect (i.e. the contemporaneity of Hegel’s thought or, as the French would say ‘the actuality [actualité] of Hegel’, I will draw upon Catherine Malabou’s recent work on the “Future of Hegel” and other contemporary scholarship dedicated to making sure that Hegel’s status as a ‘great figure of the history of philosophy’ is not equivalent to the mummification of thinking that it is the purpose of dialectics to struggle against.
Course Schedule:
The First lecture “The Insistence of the Dialectic” will attempt to give a
sense of Hegel’s project, his lifelong concerns, and how he came to write the Phenomenology of Spirit and a discussion
of some aspects of the famous “Preface” to the Phenomenology. I
will also attempt to give a provisional answer to the question ‘Why read Hegel
today?'
Lecture 2 will begin the reading of the Phenomenology in earnest, continuing with a discussion of the “Introduction” and the section on consciousness. I will attempt to show how this section is used by Hegel to position himself against other philosophers, particularly of a vaguely “Kantian” disposition.
Lecture 3 will discuss the section on “Self-consciousness” and will be primarily concerned with the famous ‘Master/Slave dialectic' (glossing its surprising importance in twentieth-century French philosophy). Time permitting I shall also discuss Hegel’s portrayal of this conflict’s ‘sublation’ into the dialectic between Stoicism and Skepticism which itself resolves into the motif of the Unhappy consciousness.
Lecture 4 and (possibly part of 5) will be dedicated to the section on “Reason”, culminating in the dialectic of reason and action, ‘the law of the heart’ with the search for ‘spirit’ in external manifestations.
Lecture 5 and 6 begins the long, labyrinthine discussion of “Spirit” with the discussion of ‘ethical life’ (or substance) and morality (which is also the beginning of a discussion on social and political institutions) and which culminates in the discussion of Enlightenment and Counter-Enlightenment the French revolution and Romanticism.
Lecture 7 is dedicated to religion and to ‘absolute spirit’.
The final lecture of the course is dedicated to continuing the discussion on Absolute Spirit and opening Malabou’s question about the ‘Future of Hegel’.
Suggested Reading:
There is only one reading for the course (but it is a vast and intimidating one that will probably not be finished during the 8 weeks of the course), namely:
Hegel, G.W.F., The Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A.V. Miller.
If students have any time to read for the course, I do hope that they spend it wrestling with the Phenomenology of Spirit – even if it is only with a few sections pertinent to the week’s lecture. My hope is that the lectures will at least allow students, while reading, to be able to glimpse some of the conceptual riches of the book that lie beneath its infamously tortuous locutions. In not setting other readings, my thought here is that it is better to wrestle with a great text (even one whose reputation for punishing obscurity is entirely justified) than to stick to secondary materials which gain in coherence at the price of partiality. Because the lectures themselves are already secondary materials suffering from the very problem I have just mentioned (i.e. they will simplify and distort in the attempt to make accessible), it would be all the better if students could at least have some experience of swimming in the Phenomenology’s own icy waters.
For the perplexed, however, or for those who wish to read further, I recommend the following books:
Frederick Beiser’s Hegel (especially if read alongside his The Fate of Reason) makes for a fine, solid, readable introduction to Hegel’s system as a whole. Its fair-handedness and scrupulousness also means that it is a pedestrian and rather uninspiring book, but it is still a good survey of basic Hegelian ideas.
Charles Taylor’s Hegel is, in many ways more interesting than Beiser’s, but it is also less reliable. The best thing about Taylor’s book is that its early sections on the historical background to Hegel’s thought will be very useful for any students who might be thinking “but why would anyone bother with all this?, i.e. what motivated someone like Hegel to undertake the seemingly crazy project to which he dedicated his life”. On the downside, the book is slightly (if endearingly) rambling (it is very long) and the interpretation of Hegel that it puts forwards is at odds with that which will be put forward in the course.
Alexander Kojéve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel is an ingenious, idiosyncratic and incredibly influential reading of Hegel, that will be of great interest to students interested in what made ‘Hegel’ both an obligatory passage point and a philosophical enemy to an entire generation of French philosophers. The English translation (by Allan Bloom) is, however, considerably abridged. Not recommended as a reliable source on Hegel in general, but interesting in its own right and a text which we will discuss at length in looking at the section in the Phenomenology on ‘Self-Consciousness’. (For more on the ‘French Hegel’, Jean Hyppolite’s work is also of great importance, but, I would warn, that it is also far less accessible to the new student.)
Slavoj Zizek is a brilliant, original, occasionally mad reader of Hegel and thus serves as an excellent foil to Beiser. However, Zizek’s fragmentary, digressive style makes it difficult to nominate a particular text in which Zizek’s ‘Lacanian’ Hegel can be found. As a compromise, the best thing to read for Zizek on Hegel would probably be a combination of passages from the two early works: For they know not what they do: enjoyment as a political factor and Tarrying with the Negative.
For contemporary Hegel scholarship, the recent collection, edited by Zizek called Hegel and the Infinite offers good essays by original thinkers rather than scholar-bureaucrats. (Bruno Bosteels' essay on Hegel and South America is a stand-out).
Finally, Catherine Malabou’s The Future of Hegel, though difficult and assuming familiarity with Hegel’s work is an event in the micro-universe of Hegel scholarship. To quote Badiou it is a ‘fragile scintillation’ of another world.
Note: these last readings in particular will take the student far beyond the (introductory) level of the lectures.
Addendum to “Further Reading” 07/03/2012:
Given that, with Hegel only a few days away, you are all probably thinking: “but wait, how can 8 lectures possibly be enough to fill the Hegel shaped void in our lives?!?”, I just thought I’d take the time to add some more material to the ‘Further Reading’ list.
First, four books on the background to Hegel’s philosophy:
While I mentioned earlier that I find Frederick C. Beiser’s Hegel to be both well-rounded and scholarly (if a little uninspired) his two books on the philosophy of the period between Kant and Hegel are creatures of an entirely different order of luminosity (and, on an unrelated note, very good.) Even if they were not as excellent as they obviously are, these books would still be indispensable for students of German Idealism, just because they attempt to deal with thinkers who are almost never discussed in Anglophone philosophy departments (who today talks about Schulze, Reinhold or Salomon Maimon?). Nonetheless, for clarity, energy, and reasonably friendly explanations of thought that is famous for both being formidably difficult and frustratingly obscure, I heartily recommend (at least for those students interested in Hegel’s philosophical background):
a) Beiser’s The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte
As well as its sequel German Idealism: The Struggle Against Subjectivism 1781-1801 (2002)
Some of this material is also discussed (albeit in much less detail) in Terry Pinkard’s excellentHegel biography: a book whose only real flaw is that its author passed up the opportunity to call it My Big, Fat Hegel Biography.
For a different perspective on the thinkers discussed by Beiser, I would also recommend Dieter Henrich’s thought-provoking and influential lecture course Between Kant and Hegel. (Warning: the lectures get progressively more difficult after the introduction of Fichte, who is, in many ways, the protagonist of this series.)
(N.B.: all of the above-mentioned material is ancillary, i.e. only for people whose appetite for Hegeliana grows with each metonymic satiation, i.e. these are not compulsory readings they are for those who (ideally after the course) who -- to paraphrase Niklas Luhmann in a (typically) waggish mood -- ‘do not wish to die without having a taste of Hegel scholarship.’ Just to make this clear: while I will almost definitely touch upon thinkers like Fichte, I will definitely not have time to give them the attention that they deserve...
And, more relevant to the Phenomenology itself:
1) Susan Buck-Morrs’s Hegel and Haiti is provocative, fascinating and a ‘must-read’, for anyone thinking about Hegel and politics.
For commentaries on the Phenomenology itself:
2) Frederic Jameson’s (very short) new book The Hegel Variations is full of insights, interesting asides and occasionally fascinating expositions of some (admittedly scattered) passages of the Phenomenology. It is also, however, like most of Jameson’s work in its own idiosyncratic genre: neither a primer nor a commentary it is also not really an introduction. Recommended if you like other things by Jameson, although I think that it is inferior to Jameson’s fascinating (but vast) book Valencies of the Dialectic. The latter is more of a kind of ‘Discourse on Method’ by an unrepentant dialectician.
3) For blow-by-blow commentaries, both Jon Stewart’s The Unity of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and Jean Hyppolite’s Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit come highly recommended. We will not, of course, have the time to talk about the Phenomenology at anything like the level of detail found in these books, but this might make them all the more useful to students who would like to go further into the Hegelian labyrinth.
N.B. Repeating: all of these texts count as ‘further reading’ and not as essential reading for the course. For weekly readings, I will assign passages of the Phenomenology at the end of each lecture. Additional readings will also be submitted online (details to be advised.)
Difficulty Level:
Intermediate
The course is designed to be introductory in the sense that
I a) do not assume that students will have any prior knowledge of Hegel or the Phenomenology and b) I will attempt to
keep the presentation as broadly accessible as possible. For this reason, serious Hegel scholars are
advised to stay away lest they choke on simplifications, reductions, glib
glosses and other flaws derived from my desire give a panoramic view of the
phenomenology even at the expense of a detailed analysis. However, Hegel is a difficult thinker and I
choose the ‘intermediate’ designation in the hope that the reader has at least
some minimal acquaintance with European philosophy in general and continental
philosophy in particular (e.g. the student might have done one or two other
MSCP courses.) Having said this, totally
inexperienced students are welcome as long as they have patience, an open-mind and
some courage in the face of abstraction!
Occupolitics: Political Theory and Practice in the 21st Century
Lecturer: James Muldoon
5 Thursdays, 6.30pm-8.30pm, April 19 - May 17
Course Schedule:
- Week 1: What is an Occupation? (History of a Movement)
- Week 2: The End of Democracy
- Week 3: Arendt and Constituent Power
- Week 4: Foucault, Agamben, Zizek and Ranciere
- Week 5: The Future of Occupy
James Muldoon is one of the organisers of Occupy Melbourne and the litigant of the Occupy Melbourne Federal Court challenge against Melbourne City Council and Victoria Police.
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