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Welcome to the website of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy, an independent teaching and research school housed in the School of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne.

The MSCP is an institution dedicated to scholarly, extensive and engaged readings of key figures and texts in the history of modern European thought and contemporary discourse. Our aim is to bring this work to bear on significant events as they occur in our contemporary context, reflecting on them philosophically. Regular teaching sessions, research activities and conferences are all elements in our attempt to ask questions of our broad socio-cultural context, and our place in it today.

Click here for an introduction to the MSCP, its origins and background blip

The members of the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy are people committed to the dissemination of Continental thought, and the promotion of its study, from across Australia and in some cases overseas.

Our Members Page provides a list of MSCP members along with information about their research interests and current projects.

MSCP Members can access the admin site here blip

The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy has as one of its central focuses the teaching of the many traditions of continental European philosophy, and its roots in the more general history of Western philosophy. The courses that the MSCP runs do not involve any assessment, or any demonstrated prior knowledge in the topic in question. They require only an interest in engaging in a careful and rigorous fashion with the material under discussion.

MSCP teaching sessions are run in the two vacation breaks in the university calendar, in January/February and in June/July. A list of courses previously run by the MSCP is available here.

The current Summer School 2009 program can be found here blip

The MSCP website includes a number of textual resources, including

blip conference proceedings;
blip the proceedings of the intensive research days, published online as resources on specific philosophical points of debate or contemporary concern;
blip occasional translations.

Collected here under the title of Propositions are also the texts of a series of debates had in writing by members of the MSCP on a variety of topics, a collection which will grow over time.

All of the texts published on these websites remain the sole copyright of their authors. Our online texts are found here blip

A list of links to external philosophical resources on the Web can be found here.

This page provides visitors to the MSCP website with links to philosophy texts, online philosophy encycopaedias and other philosophical organisations and institutions operating in Melbourne.

Online philosophy texts are available in the public domain for most publications prior to the 20th Century. For the most part these texts are in the mother tongue of the philosopher in question, as translations have come about later, and those which do exist are usually regarded as outdated. Nevertheless, sites such as wikisource provide texts of the great thinkers in history to assist in an engagement with philosophy today.

We are always keen to add links to this page. Please email admin@mscp.org.au with any suggestions blip

Postal Address:
The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy
Department of Philosophy
Old Law Quad
University of Melbourne VIC 3010
AUSTRALIA

The MSCP Office (staffed part-time):
Room 146 of the Old Law Quadrangle,
Phone (03) 8344 3889
Fax (03) 8344 4280 (address to the MSCP)

The MSCP is a not-for-profit organisation, and our ABN is 16 828 471 413.

With questions about events, enrolments or general enquiries, please email admin@mscp.org.au. To contact the Convenor of the MSCP, please email convenor@mscp.org.au. If you have a technical problem with this website or the MSCP mailing list, please contact the website administrator at webadmin@mscp.org.au 

To keep up to date with MSCP events, but also other events concerned with Continental philosophy in Melbourne, please subscribe to our mailing list by clicking here. Aside from certain important MSCP announcements or late-breaking news, the mailing list will deliver a digest of current news once a week.

The MSCP does not distribute your contact details to anyone, and your email address will only be used for the purposes of distributing information about Continental philosophy blip

 

GLOBAL WARMING Science, Politics, Ethics 2008

COURSE OUTLINE - Images of Nature: Philosophical Introduction to an Environmental Ethics

PART 1: A NEW GENEALOGY OF MORALS

Week 1:
- Images of Nature - An Introduction
- Asceticism and its Meanings. Nietzsche and Morality

Week 2:
- Redner, An Introduction
- The Past and Present of Ethical Cultures. Ethos/Ethics

Week 3:
- Redner’s “Morality”
- “Buddhist Nature”

Week 4:
- Civic Ethics
- Ethics of Honour

Week 5:
- Ethics of Duty
- The Stoic Image of Nature

Week 6:
- Comparisons 1 (death, sex, commerce)
- Comparisons 21 (nature)

Week 7:
- Purism and Puritanism – The Ethic of Ascetic Protestantism
- The Spirit of Capital and the Transformation of Nature

Week 8:
- The Spheres Disjointed – Secularisation, Rationalisation
- Philosophical Tangent - Introduction to Spinoza

Week 9:
- Spinoza’s Pantheism: Nature or God, or Reason
- Modernity Hits Its Straps. Demoralisation, Disenchantment

PART 2 - PARADOXES OF ETHICS AND ENVIRONMENT

Week 10:
- The Spirit of the Laws – Ethics and The State
- Environment/State/Bureaucracy

Week 11:
- Ethics and Civil Society
- Mass Consummer Individualism, or - The Individual as Anti-Nature

Week 12:
- The Apotheosis of Technique
- Globalisation, Culture, Environment
- Conclusion


Texts:
The main text for the course will be:

H. Redner, Ethical Life: The History and Present of Ethical Cultures - significant selections from which will be included in the course reader. Redner’s text begins with the argument that the history of ethics can be understood from the point of view of 4 historical/ethical ideal-types, dubbed by the author morality, civic ethics, the ethics of honour and the ethics of duty. It then goes on to deal with the historical development of each and their unique unravelling in the modern era. Some acquaintance with any or all four “ethical traditions” would be an advantage for course-goers, though the course itself will attempt to provide systematic and vivid introductions to each, with special emphasis on the images/concepts of nature that each makes possible. In descending order of importance, other useful texts for advance reading would be:

G. Monbiot, “A Faustian Pact” and “Love Miles” from Heat: How to stop the planet burning

F. Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals Essay no.3

M. Weber, “Ancient Buddhism” from Indian Religion

M. Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and The Spirit of Capitalism

H. Redner, Conserving cultures: technology, globalisation, and the future of local cultures

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

P. Hadot, “Marcus Aurelius” from Philosophy as a way of life

M. Arnold, “Spinoza and The Bible”

Spinoza, Ethics

H. Jonas, The imperative of responsibility: in search of an ethics for the technological age


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