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This subject is an introductory survey of the works of two French philosophers who have prioritised the existential dimension of philosophy - that is, the idea that philosophy contemplates the meaning of life and is itself pursued as a way of life. This approach is explored in the well-known late works of Michel Foucault on the “ethics of the aesthetics of existence” (the second and third volumes of The History of Sexuality and related seminars and interviews). Foucault examines practices of self-constitution in ancient Greek and Roman thought, and suggests the relevance of such practices to contemporary life. One of Foucault’s influences in these works is the historian of philosophy Pierre Hadot. Supported by his numerous translations and commentaries on ancient philosophical writings, Hadot contends that there are six basic philosophical approaches to life, represented by Stoicism, Epicureanism, Platonism, Aristoteleanism, Cynicism, and Pyrrhonism. He argues that much modern philosophy is poorer for the fact that it has lost contact with its original existential priority and been reduced to an essentially theoretical discourse. Moreover, Hadot criticises Foucault for restricting the existential significance of philosophy to ethics, arguing that all parts of philosophy (physics and logic as well as ethics, according to the ancient classification) are fundamentally grounded in an existential motivation.

This subject examines the various “spiritual exercises” that Foucault and Hadot discern in the ancient philosophies, but also questions the relevance of these to contemporary life. Counter to common misunderstandings and criticisms, it will emphasise the fact that such spiritual exercises were/are never undertaken by isolated individuals – philosophy, in short, when considered as a way of life, always has a political dimension. Through Foucault’s work in particular, the course seeks to question the place that the notion of philosophical “ways of life” have in the present political, cultural, and intellectual worlds.

Level: Introductory

While the history of philosophy is becoming increasingly difficult to study systematically within Australian universities, a good grounding in the history of philosophy (and a grasp on the meaning of philosophy in the history of culture) is a pre-requisite for understanding much post-classical European thought. Thinkers such as Hegel, Nietzsche and Heidegger address themselves to the whole history of philosophy, speaking self-consciously of it in its totality. With the History of Philosophy series, the MSCP aims to address this lack.

This second instalment of Part IV of the MSCP’s History of Philosophy series follows on directly from the 'History of Philosophy IV: Medieval Philosophy (Early Medieval Era)' course run at the MSCP Winter School 2008, though no prior knowledge of the earlier period is assumed. In the earlier course all of the philosophers under examination were from Northern Africa (Philo of Alexandria, Plotinus and St Augustine) or Central Asia (al-Farabi). In this course we will cast the historical net wider and look at philosophers from Spain (Ibn Rushd or Avicenna and Maimonides), Central Asia (Ibn Sina or Averroes), Italy (St Thomas Aquinas), Scotland (John Duns Scotus), England (William of Ockham) and Germany (Meister Eckhart). The main topics we will deal with through these authors include the nature of God, the relationship of God to the world, the nature of language and the changes in understandings of the limitations of human knowledge and invention. Our argument will be that philosophical and religious thought on such topics is related to the emergence (in some cases lack of emergence) of a de-sacralised understanding of the world - what in the so-called West eventually issued in the scientific revolution.

Level: Introductory

Suggested preliminary reading:
Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Vol3. pp 1-155; Leo Strauss, 'How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy' in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism ed. Thomas L. Pangle. pp 207-226; Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy Volume 3, Parts 1 and 2; Jacob Klein (Trans. Eva Brann), Greek Mathematical Thought and the Origin of Algebra, The MIT Press, Massachusetts, 1968.

This course offers a brief survey of political theory as it has been applied to environmental concerns and explores new thinking in political theory relevant to the environment and globalisation. It will begin with an examination of two aspects of the philosophy of Spinoza – his radical turn away from Descartes’ mind/body dualism and the nascent idea of democracy as it expresses itself in his work, long before the liberally inclined politics of Locke, Rousseau and Voltaire. Moving forward towards the present age, the course then goes to ask two main questions - why environmental philosophers took Spinoza as a point of departure for a new environmental ethic in the 1970’s and what environmentalists can gain from recent European interpretations of Spinoza’s philosophy such those of Gilles Deleuze and Antonio Negri.

Seminar 1: The political implications of Spinoza’s metaphysics for liberal environmental philosophy and deep ecology.

Seminar 2: Deleuze on Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence.

Seminar 3: Negri on Spinoza’s potential for the radical politics of the multitude.

Seminar 4: Spinoza in relation to contemporary environmental politics and the anti-globalisation movement.

Level: Intermediate

This course, the fifth instalment in the MSCP's History of Philosophy series, will be dedicated to the modern philosophical tradition known as rationalism. The course will centre on discussion of the three classic rationalists, Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. Each will be placed in the context of three comparisons: of rationalism with the scholastic philosophy that proceeds it (and with which it has an intimate if antagonistic relationship), of rationalism with empiricism (its alleged enemy in modern philosophy), and with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, which can be read as an attempt to synthesise numerous aspects of all these traditions.

Seminar 1: Introduction

Seminar 2: Rene Descartes

Seminar 3: Baruch Spinoza

Seminar 4: Gottfried Leibniz

Seminar 5: Conclusion

Level: Introductory

This course will give a critical but sympathetic introduction to The Logic of Sense, Gilles Deleuze’s most important work on language and ethics and the main source of his radical philosophy of the event. Our primary aim will be to explain the originality of Deleuze’s work via careful delineation of all his many innovative basic terms and a detailed description of the complex structure he constructs with the help of them. We then branch out by making connections to Deleuze’s ground-breaking work on literature, to his dual critical/progressive stance vis-à-vis the sciences, and to his controversial denial of the priority of standard logics and values. All in all, we will be seeking to give a clear account of a highly difficult but also highly rewarding philosophical text.

Level: Introductory

Suggested advanced reading:
Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, any edition; James Williams, A Critical Introduction to Logic of Sense, Edinburgh: EUP 2008

Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927) is so influential that much subsequent philosophy in Europe can be read either as an extension or as an alternative to it. And yet it is highly questionable whether Heidegger himself would have considered its contents anything more than provisional. Being and Time is thus better treated as an index of problems that continue to prompt philosophical questioning and as a foundational work that cannot be avoided by anyone interested in continental philosophy, rather than as the source of an orthodox Heideggerian position. This course examines several of the main moments of Heidegger’s text in order to understand the fundamental questions that Heidegger sought to renew philosophical interest in as well as the tentative solutions his text proposes.

Seminar 1: Who is Dasein? What are things?

Seminar 2: Being-in-the-World

Seminar 3: Death and Authenticity

Seminar 4: Care and Temporality

Seminar 5: The unfinished Being and Time

Level: Introductory – Intermediate. Some philosophical background an advantage.

Slavoj Zizek is the 'It' guy of contemporary theory (Lacanian pun intended). He lectures to packed houses world-wide, perhaps in part because his work engages so energetically with a wide range of fields, from cultural studies to philosophy, literary theory to political theory, film studies to psychoanalysis. With seeming ease Zizek has given a wide currency to highly complex theoretical ideas, first and foremost those of German idealism and Lacanian psychoanalysis.

'On Slavoj Zizek’s Political Theory' sets itself two tasks: firstly, to introduce students to Zizek's thought and its sources and give them a picture of why Zizek burst onto the theoretical scene with such force in the 1990s; secondly to critically assess Zizek's approach to politics by placing his work in the context of ongoing debates within political thought about the nature of justice, democracy, the relationship between politics and economy, and the dis/junction between politics and theory in general and between politics and psychoanalysis in particular.

Level: Intermediate

This course will introduce students to a series of questions about politics and philosophy, and about the limits of rationality and the limits of religion. Throughout we will examine such contested terms as “enlightenment”, “nihilism”and “irrationality”, framing discussion of them within a larger question about how political philosophy is possible.

Beginning with the idea of modernity as a “ghost world” (using a metaphor from Derrida’s Spectres of Marx) and echoing the concerns of many philosophers and social theorists, the course will ask: how could the age of enlightenment become an age of obfuscation? How could the seeming triumph of reason (as measured by the extraordinary success of the natural sciences) lead to unprecedented levels of social and political irrationality? What role can philosophy play in the realm of politics, if any? Can reason still make claims to a universal, ecumenical or catholic status that could transcend boundaries of history or culture?

Although there are many (indeed many mutually hostile) accounts of “dialectics of enlightenment” both inside and outside the philosophical canon, the course will focus on two particularly subtle, powerful and influential such accounts.

Following an introductory hour introducing the themes of the course, the first one and a half sessions will be devoted to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Here we will try to demonstrate how these two thinkers attempt to occupy the position of an “excluded middle” in at once charting the enlightenment’s “originary” descent into the mythic universe from which it emerged, only to remain faithful to the project of “enlightenment” as the overcoming of irrationalism and myth.

The second part of the course will examine the early work of Leo Strauss, up to and including his critique of Carl Schmitt. Starting with Strauss’s early Jewish writings, and his first two books (Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, and Philosophy and Law) we will try to show the way in which Strauss’s interest in Twentieth Century theology and religion - and his consequent interest in the work of Rosenzweig, Kierkegaard, Karl Barth - led him to believe that the anti-modern tendencies of the Twentieth Century had already been irrevocably and deleteriously shaped by the tendencies they took themselves to have rejected.

Level: Beginner — Intermediate

Suggested preliminary reading:
The course presumes no background reading, although some background in philosophy is preferable. The course will be particularly suitable for those who have taken 'The Pleasures: Of Political Philosophy and other Interruptions' (MSCP Summer School 2008) and/or Matt Sharpe’s various courses on political philosophy.

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Lecturer: Cameron Shingleton
Time: Monday and Wednesday, 6 - 8.30pm

Please note:
A $70 surcharge applies to this evening school course. If you wish to enrol in this course, please tick the appropriate box in the Course Fees section and remember to add the surcharge to your payment.

Few people would dispute that the issue of climate change raises serious questions for political life, both in democratic and non-democratic societies and for global civilisation at large. Global Warming: Science and Politics in Troubled Times attempts to articulate some of those questions by looking at the political contexts in which science is practised. It examines in detail the difficulties besetting the relationship between scientific prediction and public policy, the presentation of scientific issues in the media and the broader dilemmas that follow from the fact that, in the absence of a sudden dawning of universal enlightenment, mass societies can and do take the pronouncements of scientific experts on faith. The problems will be posed in a local context as well as in the abstract: how can we account for the general unwillingness in a mass democracy such as Australia to address the issue of global warming with the seriousness scientific analysis seems to require?

1. Science, Politics, Ethics
Theoretical introduction. What very general features of modern mass societies determine the specific ways in which science and politics are practised in relation to climate change?

2. Climate Change in Australian Journalism – A Case Study
After examining the forces that shape media discourse in a broad social context, we turn to a case study of the arguments about climate change that have made their appearance in the Australian media in recent years. How good are the arguments, how they are set up, how are they received and what do the tone, tenor and substance of the arguments tell us about society?

3. Systemic Denial, Systemic Symbolism - Climate Change in Australian Politics - Case Study no. 2.
The ongoing difficulty of the Australian political mainstream to deal with global warming with the seriousness climate science seems (implicitly) to require has been evident for well over a decade. Session 3 charts the history of the Howard government’s climate change scepticism, and in particular the sort of relationship between scientific prediction and public policy that was generated by that scepticism and further generated it and the shorter history of the Rudd Labour government’s tentative first steps to negotiate the same troubled relationship between science and policy.

4. Knowledge and Authority or: On faith in science.
Scientific arguments to the conclusion that climate change is occurring at a dramatic rate in the present and political arguments to the conclusion that this justifies sweeping action in the immediate future are criticised from numerous points of view. One particular line of criticism recurs to the argument either that science in general or the broad consensus among climate scientists in particular (viz. that climate change is a man-made phenomenon and occurring at a much faster rate than previously acknowledged) is reliant on blind and doctrinaire faith in science (or blind faith in the deliverances of climate science). What is wrong with this sort of argument from common sense?

5. Actualities and Possibilities
Is a politics which takes climate science unflinchingly on board possible in a bureaucratised, technically advanced, economically driven mass society? What sorts of social currents operating beneath and around the stage of the contemporary political theatre might support such a politics? What sort of relationship between scientific prediction and public policy should we be aiming for, what might its conceptual and ethical underpinnings be?

Level: Introductory

An expanded course outline, including a list of suggested preliminary readings, is available here.