MSCP Summer School 2012

The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy is proud to present the 2012 Summer School Curriculum.  The Summer School offers nine ten-hour courses in two different formats.  Five of the courses will be taught during the day over five consecutive days, Monday to Friday.  Four of the courses will be taught during the evening over five weeks.  Please note that the MSCP has reduced fees for those enrolling in multiple courses.

When: January 30 - March 1, 2012

Where: Room GM17 (except for Foucault's Critique of Neoliberalism which is in room 0102),
Law Building, Pelham St.
University of Melbourne ( map )

You can see the course fees here.  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) or to pay on arrival in the first class you attend.

If you have any questions that aren't on our FAQ page, please This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it .

Day courses (Monday to Friday)

Evening Courses (6-8pm, over 5 weeks)

Day Course Details

The Early Wittgenstein – Mysticism and the Limits of Philosophy
Lecturer: Paul Daniels
Monday, Jan 30 - Friday, Feb 3.  11am - 1pm.
All classes are in room GM17, Law Building, Pelham st.

From Plato onwards, philosophers had often recognised language to be of philosophical interest, but only with Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889 – 1951) did language come to comprise a complete basis from which to critique and derive philosophy. The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein’s only published work during his lifetime, appeared in 1921 and measured a scant 70-odd pages, with its author promising, “I therefore believe myself to have found, on all essential points, the final solution of the problems [of philosophy].” The work exhausted the greatest minds of the day, and while Wittgenstein would move away from some of the central claims of the Tractatus, the text cemented itself as the groundwork for much of 20th Century continental and analytic philosophy.

The central premise of the work is that philosophers have fundamentally misunderstood the limits of language. Philosophising about ‘the good’, ‘the beautiful’, God and metaphysics transgresses the logical structure of the proposition and so results, Wittgenstein tells us, in nonsense. The deepest problems, he holds, are not able to be formulated as questions and nor are coherent answers possible. This revelation is liberating and compels us to engage with these most important topics beyond the limits of philosophy, and to regard them with somewhat of a mystical reverence.

The Tractatus is a strange and cryptic work. It was published in the milieu of Frege’s and Russell’s magnum opera and gained early fame with its positive reception by the intellectuals of the Vienna Circle. Yet as Wittgenstein read poetry aloud at Vienna Circle meetings rather than confer his good will upon their interpretations, it should have dawned upon them that the Tractatus was a different animal than they first thought. For all the logical apparatus and structured architectonic of the Tractatus, a chief motive of the text is to destroy itself – and early analytic philosophy with it. What can we say of this curious approach to philosophy? Is the destruction of philosophy the ultimate statement of the critical philosopher? Does Wittgenstein’s early philosophy indeed end with the final proposition of the Tractatus, or does it only mark the beginning of a deeper and more intimate understanding of ineffable subjects such as the ethical?

Course Schedule
Monday: Wittgenstein’s life and the motives of the Tractatus
This lecture gives an account of the culmination, writing and reception of the Tractatus through the lens of Wittgenstein’s early life. Born into one of the wealthiest families in Europe, young Ludwig was an enigmatic character whose natural intensity found expression in the pages of the Tractatus. In the space of a decade he fought in WWI, spent almost a year as a prisoner in Italy, announced to Bertrand Russell that he was wrong about everything, published the Tractatus, and believed of himself that he had solved all the problems in philosophy (with many believing it possible of him).

Tuesday: The picture theory of meaning
Following an epiphany while reading an account of a courthouse session about a traffic accident, Wittgenstein proposed that propositions are isomorphic to reality in much the same way that a topographical map represents the terrain of a mountain. Propositions are like a picture, and are a ‘showing’ as much as a ‘saying’. The general form of a proposition mirrors the general form of the reality.

Wednesday: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world”
Wittgenstein maintained that it was impossible to draw a limit to thinking, since doing so involves thinking what is unthinkable. Drawing the limits of language, however, demarcates the border between sense and nonsense. The limits of language, then, reflect our philosophical knowledge of the world. Arising from this is Wittgenstein’s solipsism – but far from constituting an epistemological cop-out, it forms the basis for a sobering position of the subject in reality.

Thursday: Mysticism and the limits of philosophy
The great paradox of the Tractatus comes with Wittgenstein’s declaration that the text itself is nonsense, or that it transgresses the very limits of language it sets out to demarcate. Wittgenstein believed, though, that the performative destruction of the Tractatus at its conclusion was instructive in showing the limits (and limitedness) of philosophy. The stunning conclusion to the Tractatus also ventures into diverse subjects including the mystical (das Mystische), God, value, ethics and aesthetics, and the nature of eternity – all in the space of only several pages, yet with groundbreaking importance.

Friday: Wittgenstein on ethics and aesthetics
Wittgenstein wrote to a friend that “my work consists of two parts: the one presented here [in the Tractatus] plus all that I have not written.” A lecture on what Wittgenstein did not write may seem odd, but the silence of the Tractatus provides an imperative to seek out what lies beyond the expressive power of the proposition: as Wittgenstein himself qualified of the above quote, it is precisely what he did not write which is more important. Through various posthumous writings and accounts we can piece together Wittgenstein’s more complete worldview, in which aesthetics and ethics are fundamental to the subject’s relationship with life – and it is here that Wittgenstein’s deeper conversation with Western philosophy takes place.

Readings:
No prior reading is necessary. A course reader will be provided which includes significant excerpts from the text alongside other primary and secondary reading. Having your own copy of the Tractatus is ideal. Two translations exist, both available in bilingual editions (highly recommended):

After its initial 1921 appearance in the journal Annalen der Naturphilosophie, the Tractatus was published in 1922 as a bilingual edition with a translation by C. K. Ogden and F. P. Ramsey. This edition can be purchased second-hand or can be found at Project Gutenberg (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/5740/5740-pdf.pdf) since it is in the public domain.

The translation by David Pears and Brian McGuinness was published in 1961 and is widely available, though the bilingual edition can be hard to find.

Level of Difficulty: This course is intended to be introductory, but some background in philosophy or of the history of philosophy (especially Kant, Schopenhauer or Nietzsche) would be an advantage. For Wittgenstein’sTractatus, no background knowledge in analytic philosophy or philosophical logic is necessary, as the lectures will be concerned with the overall structure and movement of the text.

The ‘Singular Universal’: Jean-Paul Sartre’s ‘Existential Biographies’
Lecturer: Robert Boncardo
Monday, Jan 30 - Friday, Feb 3.  3pm - 5pm.
All classes are in room GM17, Law Building, Pelham st.

Jean-Paul Sartre is not only one of the most formidable philosophers of the 20^th Century, he is also among its most important novelists, playwrights and political polemicists. He is less well-known, however, as a biographer, despite the fact that he spills more ink on his ‘existential biographies’ of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Genet and Flaubert than on any other part of his work.

As he writes in Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, “I have tried to do the following: To indicate the limit of psychoanalytical interpretation and Marxist explanation and to demonstrate that freedom alone can account for a person in his totality.” His ‘existential biographies’ are thus testament to his commitment, across four decades of intense intellectual life, to the creation of a philosophical anthropology that would accord a central place to the subject – or, as he prefers to call it, the singular universal. They are also a decisive battleground for his encounter, as originally an Existentialist, with two of the dominant doctrines of 20th Century French intellectual life – Marxism and Psychoanalysis. Accordingly, his ‘existential biographies’ attempt to account for the weight of the individual’s objective determinations, whilst also bearing witness to their decisive margin of freedom. However, as his thought moves from Existentialism to Marxism, this margin of freedom gradually dwindles.

This course proposes to give an introduction to Sartre’s ‘existential biographies’. We will have as our focus Sartre’s methodology. While we will use as exemplars his four ‘existential biographies’ (on Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Genet and Flaubert), our main aim will be to abstract from their particular content a relatively coherent and compelling philosophical anthropology. Thus, we will follow him from his first phenomenological writings to his more Marxist works and finally to his monumental and monstrous three-volume, three-thousand-page study of Flaubert. The course will thus also be a broad introduction to Sartre’s thought in its entirety.

Throughout the course, we will seek to strike a balance between, on the one hand, an appreciation for the force and coherence of Sartre’s project in his ‘existential biographies’ – namely, to preserve and explain human freedom – and, on the other hand, a critical vigilance concerning its flaws. Does his commitment to showing how Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Genet or Flaubert achieve a margin of freedom from the constraints of their epoch turn into a constraint of Sartre’s own?

Course Schedule

• Lecture One, 'The Early Works, part 1: The Transcendence of the Ego, The Imagination,The Imaginary, Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions, Nausea': This first lecture will address Sartre’s first conception of the subject and his aesthetics, his two concerns that are most important to his ‘existential biographies’. We will aim to appreciate his key concepts of the pre-reflexive and reflexive consciousness; his conception of the ego; his theory of the imaginary and its concepts such as the irrealizing function of consciousness, ‘sens’ (meaning) and signification, and his ontology of the artwork. We will look at his first criticisms of Psychoanalysis and some early, cryptic references to Marxism.
• Lecture Two, ‘The Early Works, part 2: Being and Nothingness, Baudelaire’: In this second lecture, we will dive into Being and Nothingness and deepen our understanding of the Sartrean subject. Our aim will be to understand the strange beast Sartre calls ‘existential psychoanalysis’. We will also explore his first notorious and brilliantly polemical ‘existential biography’ of Baudelaire.
• Lecture Three, 'The Transitional Works: Mallarmé, or the Poet of Nothingness, Saint Genet: Actor and Martyr, Questions of Method’: On the third day, we will turn to Sartre’s early encounter with Marxism and his attempts to integrate it into his Existentialism in Questions of Method. We will also look at his little-read biography of Mallarmé and his thrillingly bizarre biography of Jean Genet, which both also takes steps towards this integration.
• Lecture Four, 'The Late Works, part 1: Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vols. 1 and 2, The Family Idiot, Vols. 1, 2 and 3': In the first of our last two lectures, we will look at Sartre’s mature integration of Existentialism and Marxism in the Critique alongside his monumental study of Flaubert. The latter draws on the theoretical apparatus of the Critique, but also represents Sartre’s most mature engagement with Psychoanalysis. In another point of interest, it is also the sequel to his early work The Imaginary, where the insights of the early work are blown up to socio-historical proportions.
• Lecture Five, 'The Late Works, part 2: Critique of Dialectical Reason, Vols. 1 and 2, The Family Idiot, Vols. 1, 2 and 3': This final day will continue with the our work from day four. We will also attempt to come to a conclusion about Sartre’s achievements in his ‘existential biographies’, particularly in relation to his better-known body of work.

Readings:
Despite the fact the course will follow Sartre from the beginning to the end of his career, it will certainly not be expected of students to do the same in their reading. Of course, I would not discourage anyone from diving into any book by Sartre. Nevertheless, it would be helpful to have at least read his Questions of Method. It seems to me to be the work that best encapsulates the content of the course. The following (very limited) list is of secondary sources that are of significant value:

• Existential Marxism in postwar France: From Sartre to Althusser by Mark Poster
• Sartre and Flaubert by Hazel Barnes
  
• Sartre, Foucault and Historical Reason: Towards an Existentialist Theory of History by Thomas Flynn
  
• Reading Sartre by Joseph Catalano
  
  

Changing Images of Knowledge in Modernity
Lecturers: Dr Kristian Camilleri (Unimelb HPS) and Dr Matthew Sharpe (MSCP, Deakin)
Monday, Feb 6 - Friday, Feb 10.  11am - 1pm.
All classes are in room GM17, Law Building, Pelham st.

Course Schedule: (all lectures will be co-taken by KC and MS)

Monday: dominant images of science and modernity
Tuesday: Theology, Magic, and Mathematics: Rethinking the scientific revolution
Wednesday: Styles of scientific reasoning
Thursday: Relativity, incommensurability, instrumentality ... evaluating the postmodern critiques of science
Friday: Science, philosophy, modernity

Readings:

• A. Koyre, Metaphysics and Measurement
• C. Norris, Epistemology and Philosophy of Science in the Two Traditions
• I. Hacking, Historical Ontology, Harvard University Press, 2002.
  
• A. Koestler, The Sleep-walkers: A History of Man's Changing Vision of the Universe
• D. Lindberg * R. Westman (eds.) Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution

Cancelled: Hitchcock and Theory: The French Connection

Introduction to Freud
Lecturer: Dr Jason Freddi
Monday, Feb 13 - Friday, Feb 17.  11am - 1pm.
All classes are in room GM17, Law Building, Pelham st.

This course will provide an introduction to Freud's thought. Beginning with Freud's origins in Darwinian evolution and empirical science, students will be introduced to Freud's model of the mind and the practice of psychoanalysis. We will see the relation of psychoanalysis to Freud's worldview and that of his Viennese contemporaries. Of particular interest to students will be the intersection of psychoanalysis with other cultural and intellectual movements of the twentieth century including Feminism, Marxism, anthropology and art.

Course Schedule:
Session 1: Doctor of love
We introduce the basic structure of neurosis and the psychology of dreams. This is intrinsically linked with the method of psychoanalysis: we introduce the basics of technique and compare psychoanalysis with other available psychotherapies such as suggestion, hypnosis and behavioural.
Reading: ‘On Psychotherapy’ (1904) – 22pp & ‘Contributions to the Psychology of love: Degradation in Erotic life’ (1912)  - 10pp

Session 2: The model of the mind
This session introduces each of the models of the mind developed by Freud in his practice. It consists of a number of points-of-view, from which every psychic event may be interpreted: the topographic or dynamic (conscious and unconscious quality); the structural (id, ego and superego); the economic (pleasure and unpleasure); the genetic (a developmental point of view); and the neo-Freudian model of adaptation, which sought to encompass ‘normal’ or academic psychology within the general psychoanalytic model of the mind.
Reading: ‘Some psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Difference between the Sexes’ (1925) – 12pp

Session 3: The Psychology of Normality Pt 1
The question of what is ‘normal’ remains—rightly or wrongly— at the forefront of clinical discussions of mental health. We look at Freud’s concept of normality, and the educative or moral dimension of psychoanalytic practice. His concept of sublimation and the relation of id, ego and superego and integrally related to this question of the normal, and what should be the aim of psychoanalytic treatment and cultural critique.
Reading: ‘Screen Memories’ (1899), - 30pp

Session 4: The Psychology of Normality Pt 2
We continue the study of Freud’s thought as a study of analogy and symbol. From the Darwinian roots of his concept of instinct—or ‘drive’—and his psycho-anthropology to the study of childhood, variant sexuality and works of art, we find Freud constructing and deconstructing what it is to be human. In this session we look at the theory of art by analogy to the dream, and the place of science in Freud’s worldview.
Reading: ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’ (1925)  - 12pp

Session 5: Psychosis, psychoanalysis and twentieth century culture.
We turn finally from neurosis to psychosis, which confronts psychoanalysis with its other: philosophy. We examine the major divisions of culture and personality as set out in his major work, Civilisation and Its Discontents. In passing, we will note how these later cultural views relate to a modified understanding of the limits of psychoanalytic treatment as represented in his late papers, and we try to make some evaluation, in broad terms, of the currency of the psychoanalytic diagnosis of modern man.
Further Reading: ‘Negation’ (1925)  - 8pp

Background Readings
The Case of Elizabeth von R (1893). Chapter 3, Studies in Hysteria.
Mourning and Melancholia (1917)

History of Mathematics: Stories Retold, Stories Forgotten
Lecturer: David Sweeney
Monday, Feb 13 - Friday, Feb 17.  3pm - 5pm.
All classes are in room GM17, Law Building, Pelham st.

This course will look at the history of mathematics. At stories that have been retold so many times that they have lost all but the barest of meanings and at some stories that have not been told often.

Each day we will look at a different event or time in the History of Mathematics. Different stories will be looked at and compared. I will attempt to tell new stories about these events, or at least stories that do not figure too prominently in most history of mathematics text books. We will to do some of the mathematics, we will count and draw. We will look at the different ways in which mathematics is performed in the different times and in the different stories.

Course Schedule:
Monday: Number in Classical Greece
Here we will get a feeling for the Greek concept of Number. This is a very different conception to our own. For the Greeks a number was always a definite number of definite things. Thus five sheep, 120 boats. We will work with pebbles to gain a consciousness of number as performative and embodied. We will see how the relations between numbers (20 sheep and 4 sheep are 24 sheep, one quarter of 100 stones is 25 stones) prefigure the mathematical operations of addition and multiplication, subtraction and division. We will look at the Greek concept of the kinds of numbers, the even and the odd. This classical attempt to classify all numbers and so move away from number as embodied.
Readings: Shorts texts will come from Plato, Aristotle, Nicomachus, and Jacob Klein “Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra.”

Tuesday: Geometry and the Angles of a Circle
Euclid’s The Elements of Geometry is probably the most successful text book of all time. Much of the modern idea of not only what mathematics should be, but also what logic and science should be, stems from an attempt to emulate the deductive reasoning of this work. However the success of this work has meant that very little remains of the works of Geometry as it was practiced before The Elements. What has been lost? On this day we will look at one idea in Geometry that Euclid cut out. The angle between a circle and a straight line. At least one proof using this concept remains in the work of Aristotle. I will give some of my ideas on the use of this concept and we will draw some basic proofs. Comparing the proof in Aristotle to Euclid’s proof of the same theorem which does not use such angles will give an idea of how mathematics can change and what can be lost and gained.
Readings: Short texts will come from Euclid and Aristotle.

Wednesday: Numbers for the Moderns
With the Renaissance the Greek idea of number was changed and interpreted and the modern ‘symbolic’ number was born. I will tell both the ‘normal’ story that is told regarding this development and I will give an outline of Klein’s telling of these events. We will try to get at the different feeling that results from thinking in terms of the embodied numbers looked at in the first day and the symbolic numbers that now surround us.
Readings: Shorts texts will come from Jacob Klein “Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra.”

Thursday: Calculus and Infinitesimals
Calculus is the study of, among other things, how to find the area of a curved object. For instance, how many square units are there in half a circle? The classical approach to such problems gave a different procedure for each shape. During the Renaissance a method was sought that would answer all such problems of area and volume with one single procedure.  The key was the idea of Infinitesimals. Infinitesimals are infinitely small geometrical objects or infinitely small numbers. For about two hundred years infinitesimals were the foundation of this new procedure which was called the Infinitesimals Calculus, or The Calculus. We will look at some of Kepler and Newton’s simpler proofs and have a go at drawing and using infinitesimals. Then we will look at Lagrange’s Calculus without infinitesimals and my own work with calculus with and without infinitesimals.
Readings: Short texts will come from Kepler, Newton, and Lagrange.

Friday: The Modern World
What stories are we to write about Modern Mathematics? Why is the world split into those who feel an affinity for mathematics and those who do not? What is modern mathematics? How big is it? Why does modern mathematics look so different to its predecessors? What difficulties face modern mathematics? What is the modern mathematician afraid of?
Readings: Shorts texts will come from Jacob Klein “Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra.”

One of my questions of the History of Mathematics
Mathematics has always, it seems, been both a way to do something and a certain ‘something else’. There has always been a story with the doing, whether that story comes from Plato as ‘mathematics is the way to the thought of the gods’ or whether that story is ‘man, I don’t want to do maths, everyone says its sooo hard’. It is a story that marks out mathematics as something special either greater than or worse than many other human activities.

Why do the different stories and retellings of mathematics and its history so often point to mathematics as in some way special?

Evening Course Details

Mallarmé and the Philosophers
Lecturer: Dr Mark Hewson
Mondays, 6-8pm, Jan 30 - Feb 27.
All classes are in room GM17, Law Building, Pelham st.

This course will provide an introduction to the French poet, Stephane Mallarmé.  The course will work through Mallarmé’s career, focussing on his theory of poetry, on key hermetic poems and sketching an approach to his final poem, “A throw of the dice”. A key theme will concern Mallarmé as a specifically modern poet – as a poet responding to the question of the meaning of poetry in the modern (urban, industrial, scientific, democratic) age.

The course will combine the study of Mallarmé with examination of some of the philosophical texts that have made use of his work in order to develop their own questions.  Philosophers who have given a significant place to Mallarmé in their work include Blanchot, Foucault, Derrida, Badiou and Rancière.  Extracts from these writers will accompany the study of key texts by Mallarmé.

Course Schedule:
This is a schedule of the writings of Mallarmé to be studied in the course.  The writings of various critics and philosophers on his work will be considered at intervals in this sequence, mainly in the latter weeks. The titles here are from the English versions in Weinfeld’s translation: they may be slightly different in Blackmore’s or in other translations: I include the French for some that are likely to vary. All of these texts will be made available as PDFs.

1. Early Poems:

• The Windows
• The Azure
• ‘Weary of Bitter Sleep’ (‘Las de l’amer repos’)
• Sea Breeze
• The Flowers

2. Hérodiade and the Metaphysical Crisis:

• ‘Scene’ from Hérodiade.
• A Phenomenon of the Future
• Mallarmé’s Letters of 1866-1867 (on his ‘metaphysical crisis’)
• ‘Her pure nails on high displaying their onyx’ (‘Ses purs ongles très haut dédiant leur onyx’): also known as the Sonnet in X.

3. Poems

• ‘When the shadow menaced with its fatal law’ (‘Quand l’ombre menaça de sa fatale loi’)
• ‘The virginal, vibrant and beautiful dawn’ (‘Le vierge, le vivace et le bel aujourd’hui’)
• Funereal Toast to Theophile Gautier (‘Toast funèbre)
• The Tomb of Edgar Poe
• For the sake of voyaging – heedlessly (‘Au seul souci de voyager’)

4. Prose-texts on Poetry, Art and Culture

• Art for All
• Restricted Action
• The Mystery in Letters
• The Crisis in Verse

5. The last poem:

• A Throw of the Dice

Readings:
All readings will be in English.  
The best translation of the poetry and prose-poems is Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems.  Translated with commentary by Henry Weinfeld.  University of California Press, 1996.  The translator includes good commentaries, and this makes it an especially useful work.  Also good, less expensive and easier to obtain, is Stéphane Mallarmé, Collected Poems and Other Verse, Translated by E.H. Blackmore. Oxford World Classics, 2008.  A good, readable introduction to Mallarmé’s life and work is the biography by Gordon Millan, Mallarmé: A Throw of the Dice, Secker, 1994.

A Reader will be distributed in the first class, containing the main poems to be studied, as well as extracts from various philosophical readings of Mallarmé.

Philosophy in Ancient Greek Theatre
Lecturer: Steven Churchill
Tuesdays, 6-8pm, Jan 31 - Feb 28.
All classes are in room GM17, Law Building, Pelham st.

This course seeks to engage with philosophical themes presented in ancient Greek tragedy and comedy, as well as to consider the way in which the significance and value of ancient Greek theatre has been interpreted and critiqued by philosophers. Initially, the historical context of dramatic performance in ancient Greece will be addressed. We will consider the evolution of the theatre-space from its roots in initiation rituals associated with the cult of Dionysus, the Greek god of wine, excess, and creative subversion. We will ultimately arrive at the advent of the dramatic chorus, and its position as a crucial cultural institution. We will then reflect upon how philosophical issues may be situated in this historical context of performance and ritual; we will then consider two philosophical perspectives on the origins, meaning and value of Attic drama, from two philosophers - Aristotle (Poetics) and then Nietzsche (The Birth of Tragedy). Whereas Aristotle argued that tragic theatre provided the possibility of catharsis (the "permission" to discharge and contend with our deepest fears, desires concerns and so on in response to the tragic plight of the characters involved), Nietzsche argued that tragic theatre offered the possibility of ecstatic life-affirmation in the face of tragedy.  Their contrasting accounts will provide us with a critical/evaluative (though never absolutely definitive) lense through which to address the philosophical themes at issue in the works we will consider. Specifically, we will engage with Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes, Euripides' Helen (both tragedies) and Aristophanes' Clouds (a comedy). Nietzsche's perspective on Euripides' works in particular will be pertinent here, given his disdain for what he viewed as the usurping of the exquisite sublimation of the Apollonian and Dionysian impulse inherent in the "old" tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles, by the explicitly philosophical rationality of Euripides' works.

We will employ Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes in examining the philosophical dichotomies he establishes between justice and injustice, the sacred and the profane, foreigner and citizen and so on. The cultural significance of these themes will be assessed in relation to the links able to be drawn between Aeschylus' implementation of them and their position in ancient Greek philosophy generally, with particular reference to Plato's dialogues, especially The Republic. Next, we will consider Euripides' Helen, paying particular attention to its occupation with the philosophical debate surrounding "Seeming" and "Being" that was a major feature of the intellectual landscape in Athens at the time of its release. This will also enable us to more fully consider Nietzsche's claim that the encroachment of explicit philosophical ideas and themes (such as the debate over "Seeming" and "Being", for instance) led to the "death" of tragedy in its grandest form, given that we will have compared an example of "old" tragedy from Aeschylus, with Euripides' "rational" style.  Finally, we will consider Aristophanes'Clouds. In particular, we will examine its portrayal (and parody) of philosophy and the figure of Socrates in particular, and we will evaluate Aristophanes' "distinction" between philosophy and sophistry and the implications this has for our understanding and practice of philosophy.

Course Schedule:

Introduction

• Course Outline, Aims, Texts
• The Historical context
• The position of philosophy in tragedy and comedy
• Aristotle and Nietzsche

Section 1: Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes

• Aeschylus' life and works
• Philosophical themes in Seven Against Thebes
• Commonalities between these themes in Aeschylus and in Plato 
• Reading the play through Nietzsche and Aristotle's perspectives

Section 2: Euripides' Helen

• Euripides' life and works
• Philosophical themes in Helen
• Comparing Helen with Seven Against Thebes in light of Nietzsche's perspective

Section 3: Aristophanes' Clouds

• Aristophanes' life and works
• The figure of Socrates
• Philosophy and Sophistry

Readings:

• Aeschylus, Suppliants and Other Dramas: Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Suppliants, Fragments With Prometheus Bound Traditionally Ascribed to Aeschylus (trans., & ed., Michael Ewans, The Guernsey Press Co. Ltd, 1996.)
• Euripides, Helen. (trans., Bella Zweig) New York: Routledge, 1999
• Aristophanes, The Clouds (trans., Marie C. Marianetti) Maryland: University of America Press, 1997
• Plato The Republic (trans., & ed., I.A Richards) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972
• Plato Gorgias (trans., James A.  Arietti) Focus Publishing, 2006
• Nietzsche,The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings (trans., Raymond Guess & Ronald Spears) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999
• Aristotle Poetics (trans., S.H Butcher) New York: Cosimo, 2008

Course Difficulty Level: Beginner/Intermediate level

The Inhuman Condition : Nihilism / Information / Art
Lecturer: Dr Ashley Woodward
Wednesdays, 6-8pm, Feb 1 - Feb 29
All classes are in room GM17, Law Building, Pelham st.

This course explores the related themes of nihilism, information, and art in the thought of French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard. Lyotard explored the contemporary conditions of culture and in particular the impact of information technology on the political, cultural, and existential dimensions of human life. He was also an aesthetician and art writer, and aesthetics plays a central role in his analysis of life in an information culture. In addition to his extensive writings, Lyotard co-currated one of the first major exhibitions of new media art (Les Immatériaux at the Centre Georges Pompidou, 1985). Lyotard’s uniqueness and importance with respect to the cultural analysis of information is that he can be seen as treading a “middle road” between a critical reaction to the dehumanising effects of new technologies on the one hand, and a naïve, unreflective celebration of such technologies on the other. The subject will explore Lyotard’s investigations of these issues through various of his rich texts, interpreting them and contextualising them within the wider discourses of information theory and new media art, as well as examining them through various other contemporary theorists who have engaged with Lyotard, such as Bernard Stiegler and Jacques Rancière. The aim of the course is to uncover what Lyotard has to offer to philosophy, social theory, aesthetics and the arts today.

Course Schedule:
Seminar 1 : the Idea of the Inhuman
Introduction to Lyotard. After the postmodern condition: the inhuman condition. The problem of nihilism. Nihilism in the information age.

Seminar 2 : Information theory
Introduction to information theory (Shannon, Weiner, etc.). Lyotard’s philosophy of language in The Differend. Language and information. Lyotard’s critique of information.

Seminar 3 : New media arts
Introduction to Kantian aesthetics. Lyotard’s critique of new media arts. The exhibition Les Immatériaux.

Seminar 4 : Solar catastrophe
The fable of the exploding sun as a ‘post-metanarrative.’ Transhumanism. Leibniz’s monad. Artificial intelligence. Time. On technics: Lyotard and Steigler.

Seminar 5 : Art contra nihilism
The value of entropy. Lyotard’s recourse to psychoanalysis. Art as unpresentable: Lyotard and Rancière. The ‘art-phrase.’ Lyotard on specific arts: painting, music, cinema, etc. Conclusions.

Readings:
Primary
J.-F. Lyotard, “A Postmodern Fable” in Postmodern Fables, trans. G. Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
______, “Time Today” in The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. G. Bennington and R. Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991).
______, “Les Immatériaux,” Art & Text 17 ( 1985): 47-57.
______, “Rules and Paradoxes and Svelte Appendix,” Cultural Critique 5 (1986-1987): 209-219.
______, “Oikos” in Political Writings, trans. Bill Readings and Kevin Paul (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
______, “Freud, Energy, and Chance: A Conversation with Jean-François Lyotard,” Tekhnema 5 (1999).
_____, “Sublime Aesthetic of the Contract Killer” in The Assassination of Experience by Painting: Monory, ed. S. Wilson (London: Black Dog, 1988).

Secondary
A. Woodward, “Nihilism and the Sublime in Lyotard,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities vol. 16, no. 2 (2011): 51-71.
______, “New Technologies and Lyotard’s Aesthetics,” Litteraria Pragensia  vol. 16, no. 32 (2006): 14-35.
______, “Immaterial Matter” in Sensorium: Aesthetics, Art, Life, ed. Barbara Bolt, Felicity Colman, Graham Jones, Ashley Woodward (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2007).

Foucault’s Critique of Neoliberalism
Lecturer: James Muldoon
Thursdays, 6-8pm, Feb 2 - March 1.
All classes are in room 0102, Law Building, Pelham st.

This course aims to give an introduction to Foucault's lectures given at the Collège de France from 1977-9:  Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics. These lectures contain some of Foucault's most interesting unpublished work and develop his now well-known concepts of biopolitics, governmentality and the dispositif [apparatus]. They continue his earlier Nietzschean inspired studies of disciplinary power in new directions, analysing the rise of “societies of security” and tracing the emergence of governmentality back to the pastoral power of the early Christian church. Foucault also undertakes an analysis of liberalism as a mode of governance and examines the complex relationship between classical liberalism and the emergence of neoliberalism in the latter half of the twentieth century. Foucault’s analysis of neoliberalism deserves particular attention because over the past thirty years neoliberalism has become the dominant political and economic ideology of Anglo-American societies and a reference point for new critiques of capitalism. This course will locate Foucault in relation to previous critiques of political economy by Marx and also explore his relation to his contemporaries and followers such as Deleuze, Negri, Lazzarato and Wendy Brown.

Course Schedule
Seminar 1: Introduction: Reading Foucault and an Introduction to Neoliberalism
Seminar 2: From Disciplinary Societies to Societies of Security
Seminar 3: Governmentality and Pastoral Power
Seminar 4: Liberalism as a Technique of Governmentality
Seminar 5: From Liberalism to Neoliberalism

Readings: excerpts from Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics.

Course difficulty level: introductory