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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



MSCP SUMMER AND WINTER SCHOOLS

The MSCP runs Summer and Winter Schools at the University of Melbourne during the university vacation breaks. Courses in the Schools consist of five two-hour lectures over a week and do not involve assessment or require any demonstrated prior knowledge of the topic in question. We aim for our registration costs to be minimal.

MSCP courses seek a detailed and scholarly encounter with philosophical thinkers and themes. In particular, our courses attempt to promote constructive ways of engaging with philosophy which are not widely represented in contemporary academic discourse. We aim to locate philosophy in the context of its historical and cultural milieu, and we encourage lively, academic debate, emphasising the interdisciplinary aspects of philosophy. Classes are informal but strive to be rigorous and faithful to the philosophers and texts being studied.

The current Summer School program can be found here.


PAST MSCP COURSES

What follows is a full list of the courses presented by the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy since its inception as a teaching institution in 2003.


Winter 2007 (poster)

The Philosophy of GWF Hegel
Andy Blunden

Derrida - Writing and Difference
Convened by Jack Reynolds, Various presenters

20th Century German Philosophy
Matthew Sharpe and Marc Hiatt

Deleuze's Difference and Repetition
Graham Jones and Jon Roffe

Introduction to the Philosophy of Schopenhauer
Paul Daniels

Summer 2007 (poster)

Postmodern Conservatism
Matthew Sharpe and Geoff Boucher

Contemporary Cultural Conundrums
Various convenors

French Feminism
Joanne Faulkner

Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus
Jon Roffe

Psychoanalysis - A Philosophy of Mind
?
Joanne Faulkner with Matthew Sharpe

MSCP History of Philosophy 6: Modern Empiricism
Jon Roffe

 

Winter 2006 (poster)

Hegel: The Whole Picture
David Rathbone

History of Philosophy V: The Modern Rationalists
Jon Roffe

Adorno: the defense of Geist
Bryan Cooke and Marc Hiatt

Deleuze and Guattari's Anti-Oedipus
Graham Jones and Jon Roffe

 

Summer 2006 (poster)

History of Philosophy IV: Medieval Philosophy (part 2)
Joint presentation, convened by Cameron Shingleton and Marion Tapper

History of Philosophy III: Aristotle
Craig Barrie and Bryan Cooke

Three Centuries of Aphorisms
Cameron Shingleton

Democracy, Elites and Violence
Matthew Sharpe

Lyotard: The libidinal and the figural
Ashley Woodward

Introduction to the Philosophy of Alain Badiou
Jon Roffe

 

Winter 2005 (poster)

History of Philosophy IV: Medieval Philosophy (part 1)
David Rathbone

Nietzsche, History, Democracy
John Greene (University of Tasmania)

The Thought of Martin Heidegger
Joint presentation, convened by Sean Ryan

 

 

Summer 2005 (poster)

History of Philosophy I: The PreSocratics
David Rathbone

History of Philosophy II: Plato and his contemporaries

Fiona Leigh (Monash University)

Introduction to Existentialism
Jack Reynolds

Introduction to Continental Philosophy
Joint presentation, convened by Ashley Woodward

Leo Strauss and the Neo Cons: Secrets, (Noble) Lies and Politics
Matthew Sharpe

Reading Nietzsche's
Zarathustra
Paul Daniels

The Thought of Michel Foucault
Jon Roffe

 

Winter 2004 (poster)

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze
Jon Roffe

Baudrillard, Bataille, Derrida: Marcel Mauss' gift to continental philosophy

Matthew Sharpe (with Ashley Woodward on Baudrillard and Jon Roffe on Derrida)

Summer 2004 (poster)

Jean Baudrillard
Ashley Woodward

Phenomenology of Embodiment
Felicity Joseph

Kant and Psychoanalysis
Matthew Sharpe

Derrida circa 1972
Jon Roffe

Philosophy as Public Art
Esther Anatolitis

 

Winter 2003 (poster)

Themes from Deleuze and Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus
Jon Roffe

Introducing Critical Theory
Matthew Sharpe

 

Summer 2003 (poster)

Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind
David Rathbone

Friedrich Nietzsche
Cameron Shingleton

Martin Heidegger: an introduction to his 'way' of thinking
Craig Barrie

Jean-François Lyotard: the sublime and the differend
Ashley Woodward

Ideology and Aesthetics
Matthew Sharpe

Capitalism and Schizophrenia
Jon Roffe