Summer School 2011

Aesthetics: A Philosophical Introduction

Convened by Cameron Shingleton

"Aesthetics: A Philosophical Introduction" aims to achieve three goals: (1) to introduce students to some of the basic conceptual repertoire of aesthetics, (2) to sketch some of the main theories, interpretations and problems that aesthetic concepts open out onto and (3) to present a small number of key texts in which the problems of interpreting art have been addressed by major thinkers.

To begin with we will make a distinction between the constitution (composition, creation), the presentation (performance) and the reception of art; we will also survey a wide range of basic aesthetic qualities that provide the raw material of our experiences of art, including humour, beauty, form, design, expression (musical and dramatic) and verisimilitude – all with a view to answering some vital aesthetic questions: What is a work of art? What is the relationship between works of art and everyday aesthetic experience that falls short of the creation of artworks?

Each day of the course will explore in some depth a different aesthetic quality; students will be encouraged to focus their attention on the particular dimension of aesthetic life that speaks best to their own artistic interests. The traditional aesthetic quandary about the objective/subjective constitution of art will be reviewed in order to be rejected. The argument students will be asked to evaluate is that aesthetic experience is quintessentially intersubjective (thus neither objective nor subjective): beauty, humour, form etc are neither statically "in the eye of the beholder" nor in the object s/he beholds, rather they come to inhere in the beholder and the object because of the way evaluative standards are supplied by a wider culture. The wider culture thus becomes what gives art a primary meaning, without mechanically determining the aesthetic experiences of individuals.

However, students will also be encouraged to respond to a series of problems that have fallen beyond the bounds of aesthetics as traditionally defined. From a critical social perspective, we will move on to examine such questions as: What is the place of art in social modernity? How does art relate or fail to relate to other domains of social activity – particularly economic life? Does art play more of a role in modern human life or is it becoming more marginal? How has art changed in response to the sustained assaults on received notions of the nature of art/artworks throughout the twentieth century? What difference has been made to the possibilities of artistic creation and experience by the calculated aestheticisation of everyday life as part of contemporary capitalist economic life?

The reader will include selections from
Theodor Adorno, The Culture Industry
Walter Benjamin, "The Story-Teller"and "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical

Reproduction"

Sigmund Freud, Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious

Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes

Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgment

Harry Redner, Aesthetic Life: The History and Present of Aesthetic Cultures

Tolstoy, What is Art?

Difficulty
Introductory

Convened by Bryan Cooke

Alain Badiou once remarked that today, no philosophy could be worthy of the name that had not first survived a confrontation with the "anti-philosophy" of Lacan (who Badiou also refers to) as the 'greatest of our dead'.

Agreeing with Badiou that a budding philosopher must – if she is to earn her Aeolian harp, Piet Mondrian spectacles and subscription to New Left Review – spend at least some time in a bare-knuckle fist-fight against the man who has been dubbed the 'greatest psychoanalyst since Freud' (as well as a mad, matheme-drawing charlatan with a Napoleon-complex) this course will attempt to introduce Lacan's dizzying, hermetic, mercurial, and (in every sense of the word) stunning body of work, by offering a (necessarily limited) tour of some of Lacan's 'key concepts': desire and demand, the various senses of the "Big" Other, the objet petit a, truth as that which makes a hole in knowledge, tuche and automaton, the ethics of psychoanalysis, transference, the Freudian concept of 'cause', the mirror-phase and above all the three registers of the "imaginary, symbolic and real."

The course will also attempt to show why, Lacan has, in the last few decades been read not (as in the reading put forward by Les nouvelles philosophes) as a figure combining a 'no exit' structuralism with Burkean prophecies that all revolutions inevitably end in the replacement of one Master with another, but as an anti-historicist, anti-relativist theorist of the subject in the Cartesian tradition whose Platonic habit of bringing desire to the centre of philosophy does not only lead to a tragic pessimism, but also of the gaps in any given order of society through which something of "the great outdoors" (Meillassoux) can break through.

Lecture One
The first class will talk about Lacan's early work on "the imaginary", taking in his scattered remarks on the nature of paranoia, projection, aggression in regards to images of the self and other. I will also try to discuss a kind of psychogenesis of the subject in terms of the Other's desire (thus explaining the difference, at least as I see it, between need, desire and demand), as well as some of the philosophical implications of disputing the sovereignty of the ego, and of asking questions about philosophy's own desire.

Lecture Two
Day two will continue with the notion of symbolic versus the imaginary, describing the Big Other, symbolic castration and also the strange notion of psychoanalytic causality, that underlines Lacan's theory of the objet petit a.

Lecture Three

Here we will continue with some remarks about the Lacanian "Real", clinical practice, the goal of Lacanian psychoanalysis, the infamous "passe". I will also attempt to show the extent to which Lacan differs from figures like Barthes (on the one hand) and Foucault on the other, and why the interpretation put out by Guy Ladreau among others is disputable.

Fourth and fifth lectures

The content of these final lectures will turn around a series of issues raised in the first three lectures.

Recommended Preliminary Reading
Joan Copjec, Read my Desire: Jacques Lacan Against the Historicists.
Slavoj Zizek, Enjoy your Symptom!
The cartoon introduction to Lacan is also better than many other books in the same series, if you can make yourself seen to be reading it. I advise that you slip it between the covers of the French edition of the Écrits.

The reader will include selections from
Reader will include extracts from various seminars, the Écrits and also some secondary material.

Difficulty

Intermediate. Although the course is introductory in the sense that no prior knowledge of Lacan is assumed, and that it attempts to prevent a sense of some Lacan's key ideas rather than to justice to the nuances of his (incredibly rich, as well as frequently bizarre and oracular corpus) the course will move quickly through difficult material. In addition, some knowledge of any of the following will be useful: Freud, Saussure, Plato or Badiou, but not necessary.

Convened by Maurita Harney

Note: This is an updated repeat of the course run in February 2010.

Recent developments in the neurosciences raise new questions for philosophers about mind, brain, and consciousness. They challenge long-held assumptions, many of them deriving from Descartes and his dualism of mind and body. In this course, we explore a ‘non-Cartesian’ approach to these topics, one which draws inspiration from the phenomenological philosophy of thinkers like Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty, and which is developed more fully in recent ‘embodiment’ philosophies. As part of this exploration, we draw on findings and insights from the neurosciences, ecology, evolutionary biology and ethology to see how they prompt new ways of thinking about traditional problems in the philosophy of mind and consciousness.

Topics include: (1) Introduction – philosophical understandings of ‘mind,’ ‘brain,’ ‘behaviour,’ and ‘consciousness’; the philosophical quest for a ‘science’ of mind. (2) the phenomenological standpoint: perception, knowledge and learning; the primacy of movement; (3) other minds; intersubjectivity, empathy; the explanatory potential of mirror neurons; (4) the biological bases of feeling and emotion; implications for concepts of reason, judgement, selfhood and agency; (5) consciousness – is there a problem? corporeal cognition in humans and other organisms.

The course is designed for a mixed-disciplinary audience. Most day-to-day reading for the course is internet-based, although a comprehensive bibliography will be issued giving further (optional) reading at both beginners’ and advanced levels.

Recommended Reading

Doidge, Norman, The Brain That Changes Itself, Scribe 2008.
Ramachandran, V.S., “The Emerging Mind”, BBC Reith Lectures 2003.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/print/radio4/reith2003.

Gallagher, Shaun, and Zahavi, Dan, 2008, The phenomenological mind : an introduction to philosophy of mind and cognitive science. London, New York: Routledge, 2008

Thompson, Evan, “Empathy and Consciousness”

http://www.imprint.co.uk/pdf/Thompson.pdf

Damasio, Antonio R., Looking for Spinoza. Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Harcourt, 2003

Difficulty

Introductory

Convened by Jon Roffe

In 1983, with all but no earlier indication of his interest in film, Deleuze published Cinema 1: The Movement-Image, followed two years later by Cinema 2: The Time-Image, which, taken together, form the most substantial philosophical engagement with cinema yet prosecuted.
The Cinema books remain somewhat enigmatic moments in Deleuze’s already diverse oeuvre, due to their easy mastery of hundreds of films, a variety of philosophical doctrines (above all Henri Bergson's) and a range of other disciplines, including neuroscience and semiotics. Moreover, the reader is confronted with a bewildering elaboration of new concepts, which form the elements of a large scale taxonomy of cinematic images.

The goal of this course is to provide an initial survey of this complex and fascinating landscape. We will work through the main categories of both books, with frequent reference to examples from throughout the history of cinema. In addition, each day a third hour will follow the two hours of lecturing, in which a large portion of a film relevant to the course will be screened.

Monday
Introduction
The Bergsonian framework of the Cinema books: movement, time, light, the sensori-motor schema

Frame, shot and montage: the three basic elements of the cinematic image

Examples will include Kieslowski and Ozu

Tuesday

Cinematic images, compositional signs, genetic signs

Main varieties of the movement-image and their correlative signs: perception-image, affection-image, action-image, relation-image

Examples will include Beckett, Leone and Hitchcock

Wednesday

The double collapse of classic cinema

Four transitional signs: opsigns, sonsigns, mnemosigns and onirosigns
Examples will include Hartley and Minnelli

Thursday

The direct time image: hyalosigns and chronosigns

Examples will include Resnais, Renoir, Lynch and Welles

Friday

Lectosign and noosign
Reasons to believe in this world
Conclusion

Difficulty

Introductory to intermediate. Some familiarity with classic cinema (either academic or amateur) would be helpful, though not obligatory.

Convened by Gilles Bouche

Brandom's Linguistic Rationalism will offer a reconstruction of most of Brandom's published work, including Making It Explicit, Articulating Reasons, Tales of the Mighty Dead, Between Saying and Doing, and Reason in Philosophy, with the aim of giving participants an overview of Brandom's system, an idea of both its structure and its scope.

Brandom's linguistic rationalism about conceptuality
Brandom's philosophy begins with the question of who we are. Who are the beings whom we recognize as belonging to us in the most fundamental sense? Brandom's short answer is that we are conceptual beings, beings which apply concepts in thinking and talking, believing and acting. (An obvious alternative answer would be that we are human beings. Importantly, Brandom's conceptual beings need not be human beings.) Brandom's work as a whole aims at developing the short answer into a longer one by developing a theory of what it is to be a conceptual being.

Brandom's topic is conceptuality. His position is a form of linguistic rationalism about conceptuality, the view that any conceptual being must be a linguistic and rational being in the sense that engagement in rational linguistic practice is necessary for engagement in any conceptual activity.

More precisely, Brandom first endorses linguisticism about conceptuality as the view that conceptual practice is linguistic practice, not in the sense that every conceptual act is a linguistic act, but in the sense that even nonlinguistic acts, actions in the narrow sense, are conceptual acts only in the context of an engagement in linguistic practice. Only beings which can talk can act. Brandom then endorses linguistic rationalism about conceptuality as the view that engagement in rational linguistic-conceptual practice, the practice of making assertions as what reasons are given for and against and as what reasons are given as, is necessary for engagement in any linguistic-conceptual practice.

According to linguisticism about conceptuality, conceptual practice is linguistic practice, the practice of using linguistic expressions. Linguistic expressions have meanings. Brandom endorses pragmatism about conceptuality as the view that linguistic expressions only have meanings to the extent that meanings are conferred on linguistic expressions by the use of linguistic expressions.

Brandom claims that the practice of using linguistic expressions confers meanings on linguistic expressions by instituting norms governing the use of linguistic expressions. Norms determining whether linguistic acts are correct or incorrect are instituted by practice-implicit attitudes of taking linguistic acts to be correct or incorrect. Importantly, Brandom insists, and claims to be able to show, that practice-implicit attitudes of taking acts to be correct or incorrect can institute norms which are objective, that is, which determine whether acts are correct and incorrect independently of whether they are taken to be correct or incorrect.
To sum up, at the center of Brandom's system is a specification of rational linguistic-conceptual practice as necessary and sufficient for conferring meanings on linguistic expressions by instituting objective conceptual norms. This may not sound like much. But, to my knowledge, Brandom is the very first philosopher to have shown, in detail and with clarity, what a subject must do in order to count as using linguistic expressions in a way which confers meanings on linguistic expressions, what a subject must do in order to count as a linguistic and hence conceptual being. According to Brandom, most importantly, a conceptual being must be a rational being. I do not know of any more sophisticated theory of the foundations of rationality, linguisticality, and conceptuality.

Brandom wants to explain not only how subjects can consciously use linguistic expressions, but also how subjects can come to self-consciously use linguistic expressions in talking about themselves as subjects consciously using linguistic expressions, thus making explicit what is implicit in conscious linguistic practice. Like every theorist, Brandom wants to help the reader to a shift from inadequate to adequate theoretical self-consciousness, but he does so precisely by showing how self-consciousness arises from consciousness, how subjects can effect a shift from conscious to self-conscious linguistic practice.

In all these respects (endorsement of linguisticism, rationalism, pragmatism, normativism, and expressivism as commitments about conceptuality), Brandom claims to be following Hegel more than anyone else. Indeed, Brandom's work can be read as advocating a shift, within analytic philosophy of language, from the empiricism of Locke and Hume to the rationalism of Kant and Hegel, which will be more obvious once Brandom's book about Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, on which Brandom has been working for almost three decades, will have been published.

Why take an interest in Brandom's work?
Most evidently, Brandom's work is of immediate interest to anyone interested in theories of rationality, linguisticality, and conceptuality, in explanations of how linguistic expressions must be used to express meanings and of what subjects must do to count as rational, linguistic, conceptual subjects.

Brandom's work is also of interest to anyone interested in rationalist discourse ethics. Brandom's concerns are not just theoretical, but also practical, in the sense that he hopes to ground an ethics on his rationalist theory of conceptuality, roughly an Hegelian version of Habermas's Kantian discourse ethics.

Finally, Brandom's work is of interest to anyone interested in answering the question of who we are, but not as the question of who we are as conceptual beings. It is important to understand that Brandom's conceptual beings need not be human beings. Conceptual beings as such need not live or die, reproduce or work, engage in politics or write novels. Brandom's methodology consists in abstracting from any features which are not necessary features of conceptual beings. On the one hand, this methodology allows Brandom to study conceptuality in its purest form. On the other hand, it is clear that a theory of us which abstracts from any features which are not necessary features of conceptual beings will not have much to say about many issues mattering to beings which are not just conceptual beings. Brandom himself does not tell us how to bring about a shift from a theory of us as conceptual beings to a theory of us as not just conceptual beings. Such a shift is beyond the scope of Brandom's system. Still, what matters is that any theory of us as not just conceptual beings will have to be informed by a theory of us as conceptual beings.

Is Brandom an analytic philosopher?
Brandom understands himself as an analytic philosopher, situated in the tradition of analytic philosophy of language. (Though he understands himself as an Hegelian just as much.) But the fact that Brandom's work arises from the tradition of analytic philosophy of language does not at all prevent us from relating it to work arising from other traditions. There are obvious connections between Brandom's linguistic rationalism and structuralism. Both understand meanings of linguistic expressions in terms of relations between linguistic expressions. Both endorse semantic holism, the view that the meaning of any linguistic expression depends on the meanings of many other linguistic expressions. Whereas structuralists focus on relations of difference, Brandom focuses on relations of inference and incompatibility ("square" stands in a relation of inference to "rectangle", in a relation of incompatibility to "circle"), which allows him to develop a rationalist theory of conceptuality. Relations of inference and incompatibility are rational relations: An assertion stands to another assertion in a relation of inference if it is a reason for that assertion, in a relation of incompatibility if it is a reason against that assertion.

Philosophy of language as such is neither analytic nor continental. What might at first appear as a difference between analytic and continental philosophy, corresponding to a respect in which Brandom's philosophy is analytic, is better understood as a difference between theories of us as conceptual beings, which abstract from all features which are not necessary features of conceptual beings, and theories of us as not just conceptual beings. Within the family of rationalist theories of what we are, this difference separates "analytic" rationalists such as Brandom from "continental" rationalists such as Hegel and Habermas, whereas all three philosophers share the aim of upholding a rationalist understanding of what we are against both positivist and romanticist counter-currents.

The aim of Brandom's Linguistic Rationalism would be to reconstruct Brandom's theory of us as conceptual beings. The shift from theories of us as conceptual beings to theories of us as not just conceptual beings is beyond the scope of Brandom's system and hence would be beyond the scope of the reconstruction. Brandom's engagement with Hegel and Habermas however suggests one way of approaching such a shift, namely through a contrastive reading of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Brandom's yet unpublished book on the Phenomenology, and Habermas's Theory of Communicative Action. Reconstructing Brandom's linguistic rationalism lays the foundations for such a contrastive reading.

Difficulty

Intermediate

Convened by David Sweeney

Jacob Klein's great work Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra (1934-1936) is one of the major works in the history of mathematics in particular and the history of ideas in general. This text puts modern science in its place historically and conceptually.
 
We must start, Klein argues, by understanding what number and mathematics were for the Ancient Greeks. Thus the first half of the text, and the course, covers the mathematical concepts and questions of Plato and Aristotle, the neo Platonists, and the Pythagoreans.  Questions such as what are the numbers? what is the role of the unit? how are fractions to be understood? Through this exposition Klein gradually opens a window on Greek mathematical thought, its ideas, goals and limitations that reveal a conceptual world completely different from our own. A primary difference being that for the Greeks a number, or arithmos, was, or rather intents, a definite number of definite things. Thus "three sheep" or "five bowls". While for us a number now is, or intents, a symbol. Thus "3" and "5". This attention to the ancient perspective seems to be almost unique to Klein within the history of
mathematics.
 
How did this change come about? The second half of the text, and the course, studies the development of the concept of arithmos (number), through the Renaissance and up to the present day. The development is traced though the works of Diophantus, Vieta, Stevin, Descartes and Wallis. Here Klein shows how during the Renaissance the history of Greek mathematics was 'rewritten' at the same time as a new (symbolic) concept of number was developed.
 
The resulting understanding of the development of mathematics allows for a more mature critique of modern science.
 
This text and course should be of interest to anyone who has interests in: the Greek conception of mathematics and how mathematical ideas were used by the Greek philosophers; the historical development of mathematics; the phenomenology of mathematics; the nature and meaning of modern science.
 
No prior knowledge of mathematics or the history involved is required.
The course will be focused on the text, with the time divided between explanations and discussion of the readings.

Recommended Reading
The 1961 translation of Klein's Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra is inexpensively available in various editions.

Difficulty

Intermediate

Convened by Cameron Shingleton

Week One

"The Justice that cannot be said" – Andrea Leon-Monterro (MSCP) will examine the relationship between social systems of law and the idea of justice in the thought of Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas' whole approach is to think of the social aspect of the law as being necessarily outside, or indeed beyond, justice as ethically conceived. The resultant concept of justice is a negative one that denies and acts to counterpose the self-satisfaction of any positive exercise of the power of the state in post-industrial democratic societies. The lecture will attempt to bring out an answer to a key question: how can we understand Levinas' notion of a "justice that cannot be said"?

"Niklas Luhmann's Sociology of Law" – Bryan Cooke (MSCP) will introduce Luhmann's controversial approach to law as a social system. The uniqueness of Luhmann's sociology of law – Mr Cooke will argue – lies in his attempt not only to locate law within a given theoretical model of modern society, but also in his efforts to account for the perspective of law as a self-creating ("autopoietic") social system – one that is both reliant upon though simultaneously closed off from the total social environment in which it is embedded.

"Weimar: The Jurisprudence of Exception" – Matt Sharpe (Deakin University, MSCP) will begin with a look at Carl Schmitt's influential authoritarian critique of liberalism and the rule of law, and his defence of legal exceptionalism. What will follow this is an examination of two of Schmitt's social democratic students and critics: Otto Kirchheimer's work on National Socialist jurisprudence and Franz Neumann's qualified defence of the rule of law as necessary but not sufficient for political freedom.

Week 2

"Max Weber's Sociology of Law" – Cameron Shingleton (MSCP) will look at the importance of law for Weber's theory of the development of modern capitalism and provide a reflection about the relationship between law and ethics as a light aperitif.

"Some Ideas of Law in Agamben" – Connal Parsley (Melbourne Law School) on some figurations of law in the work of Giorgio Agamben, and the jurisprudential texture of Agamben's writing.

"Doing Jurisprudence with Deleuze" – Ed Mussawir (Griffith Law School) on the sense in which Deleuze's philosophy asks the question "what is jurisprudence?"

Convened by AJ Bartlett, Justin Clemens and Jon Roffe

Alain Badiou is without question one of, if not the, most important philosophers writing today in European philosophy. His work, principally expounded inBeing and Event (1988) and Logics of Worlds (2007) aims at nothing less than a reinvigoration of the Platonic moment in thought, according to which philosophy places itself under the single (and singular) aegis of truth. Equally surprising and innovative are the links he forges between mathematics and ontology, politics and subjectivity, love and novelty.

The goal of this course will be to provide an overview of this at once formidable and powerful thinker's work. The first week will be devoted to Being and Event and the books surrounding it, while the second will address Logics of Worlds, and Badiou's more recent texts that engage with questions of contemporary life, politics, love, and the nature of the philosophical enterprise itself.

Suggested prior readings

Badiou, A Manifesto for Philosophy

Bartlett and Clemens (ed), Badiou: Key Concepts

Difficulty

Introductory to Intermediate