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What is the best way of life?  What is the best political regime?  How could we decide such questions? And how could we persuade others to accept our wise prescriptions? This course will consider the three great political texts of Aristotle: the magisterial Nichomachean Ethics, the Rhetoric, and the Politics.  Emphasis will fall on the links between the three texts, mediated as they are by Aristotle's understanding of physis (nature) and the human psyche (soul/mind) in particular.  In considering the Politics, different possible readings of Aristotle on monarchy and politeia (the mixed regime) will be weighed against the background of Aristotle's Platonic heritage.

Monday: Nichomachean Ethics I
Tuesday: Nichomachean Ethics II
Wednesday: The Rhetoric
Thursday: The Politics
Friday: Interrelations in the Aristotelian philosophy

Level: This is an introductory course. Some prior knowledge of philosophy or the history of philosophy is preferred, but not essential.

Friedrich Nietzsche has been one of the most influential figures in continental philosophy, and his work continues holds a powerful fascination. Yet his writings are notoriously ambiguous, and have given rise to many radically different interpretations. The aim of this subject is to survey some of the most influential interpretations of Nietzsche throughout the Twentieth Century, which have often been offered by philosophers who are highly significant thinkers in their own right. Each day focuses on a different major philosopher's interpretation, and is taught by a lecturer with special expertise on that topic.

Monday - Heidegger's Nietzsche (Sean Ryan)
Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche was an immense and prolonged affair. The twenty five years that Heidegger devoted to Nietzsche produced half a dozen lecture courses, several seminars, two important essays, and finally, in 1961, a two-volume book. Yet at the end, in an illuminating aside, Heidegger also confessed to Hans-Georg Gadamer that “Nietzsche destroyed me.”

The first hour of the lecture will be devoted to those theses of Heidegger's interpretation of Nietzsche that still remain provocative, in particular: the relationship between nihilism and the question of being; and the assertion that Nietzsche's thinking is the end of metaphysics. In the second hour we shall look at Heidegger's final and most considered work on Nietzsche, the essay “Who is Nietzsche's Zarathustra?” in which that interpretation is developed in relation to the following: the relationship of humanity and divinity, of poetry and philosophy, and of propositions and riddles; the themes of life, suffering and revenge; and the meaning of the demand that we assume mastery of the earth.

Tuesday – Deleuze's Nietzsche (Jon Roffe)
Gilles Deleuze's Nietzsche and Philosophy, published in 1962, was a major landmark in the revival of interest in Nietzsche's thought in France. Not only did this text provide a key point of reference for a number of other thinkers in this milieu (including Derrida, Klossowski and Foucault), but it also presents the initial formulation of a number of Deleuze's own distinctive philosophical claims.

In the first hour of this lecture, we will examine the strategies of Nietzsche and Philosophy itself as a fascinating systematic reading of Nietzsche, focusing in particular on the account of the will-to-power. In the second, we will turn to Deleuze's key work, Difference and Repetition, to examine how the structural account of the will-to-power from the earlier work evolves into what Deleuze calls virtual multiplicities, but also to look at the profound meditations on the theme of the eternal return, which underpin the entirety of the project of Difference and Repetition.

Wednesday – Klossowski's Nietzsche (Ashley Woodward)
Along with Deleuze, the philosopher, writer, translator, and artist Pierre Klossowski (1905-2001) was one of the key interpreters associated with the “Nietzsche revival” in France in the 1960s and 70s. Klossowski translated Heidegger's lectures on Nietzsche, and authored the celebrated book Nietzsche and the Vicious Circle (1969). This seminar focuses on the surprising reading of Nietzsche Klossowski develops in this book. Dwelling on the relationship between Nietzsche's ill health and his philosophical thought, Klosowski develops a radical theory of the relationship between the body, thought and language. For Klossowski's Nietzsche, conscious thought expressed in language (the “code of everyday signs”) is a misinterpretation of the body's impulses. The philosopher needs to develop a “semiotic of impulses” which treats thoughts as signs, and allows us to correctly interpret the bodily impulses from which they arise. Klossowski's Nietzsche thus takes the side of the body, against conscious thought and language, as the true locus of philosophical significance. Furthermore, Klossowski develops an influential reading of the eternal return as a thought which radically disrupts the unity of subjectivity.

Thursday – Strauss's Nietzsche (Mathew Sharpe)
Due to his political influence on the neoconservative Right, Leo Strauss is presently emerging as one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the twentieth century.  Strauss's attitude to Nietzsche is particularly intriguing.  In “What is Political Philosophy?” and elsewhere, Strauss criticises Nietzsche as the culmination of a “third wave” of modern thought (cf. Plato, REP. Book V: someone whose thought leads in the direction of nihilistic relativism, and away from political life.  Yet Strauss grew up enamoured with Nietzsche.  Leading Strauss students such as Lawrence Lampert and Stanley Rosen have noted, and drawn from, Strauss's own debt to Nietzsche, in terms of Strauss's understandings of modernity, philosophy, religion, and esoteric writing.  In Strauss's last book, Studies in Platonic Political Philosophy, his remarkable “Notes on the Plan of Beyond Good and Evil” literally has the central place.  Strauss argues that this text--apparently wholly aphoristic--is Nietzsche's most “beautiful” or even “Platonic,” in its form: and every bit the “Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future” its subtitle announces.

The first half of this lecture will be devoted to dealing with what it is tempting to surmise is Strauss's exoteric dismissal of Nietzsche, in terms of his understanding of modern thought.

The second half will look at “Notes on the Plan to Beyond Good and Evil,” and see what it is that Strauss and his students espy in Nietzsche, in contravention of the other moderns.

Emphasis will be made throughout to how Strauss's reading of Nietzsche compares and contrasts with the other readings we look at in the course, with a view to the politics of (Nietzschean) philosophy in particular.

Friday - Nehemas's Nietzsche (Mark Tomlinson)
While it has most often fallen to the Continent, to France and to Germany, to produce the most thoughtful readings of Nietzsche, the last three decades have seen a number of interesting interpretations emerge from the Anglo-American tradition. One of the most important and influential of these has been Alexander Nehemas's Nietzsche: Life as Literature (1985).

The first half of this lecture will trace the major contours of Nehemas's book. In particular, it will focus on the role that the question of Nietzsche's style plays in Nehemas's reading. In the second half, we will cast a more critical eye over the text. Here it will be suggested that the apparent strength of Nehemas's work – its ability to present a coherent, single Nietzsche – is perhaps its biggest weakness.

Please note: While all are welcome to attend, this course is not designed as a first introduction to Nietzsche, and is most suitable for those who already have some acquaintance with his work.

This course will look at early medieval philosophy (with a second course on the later medieval period to follow at MSCP's 2009 Summer School). Medieval Philosophy I will focus on two main issues: firstly, the presence of classical philosophical schools and texts in the Mediterranean region and the Middle East and secondly the relationships between philosophy and the dominant religious currents of the age. Four main philosophical streams of thought will be shown to define the intellectual temper of the late Roman Empire - Platonism, neo-Platonism, Aristotelianism and Stoicism and it is these we will see entering into the collision of monotheism with polytheism and in various ways giving shape to the rise and persistence of various religious circles of ideas. An outstanding figure in the earlier part of the period is St Augustine (354AD – 430AD), whose works include The Confessions, The City of God, De Trinitate, and On the Freedom of the Will, will come in for close attention. The course's overall aim is to allow students to appreciate in detail how philosophy was appropriated in early Medieval times by Judaism, Christianity and Islam, how it provides a basis for culture and religion within the post-Roman dispensation and how ultimately it plays a part in founding the later world of modernity.

Monday: Medieval philosophical traditions among the religions of the ages
Tuesday: St Augustine's conception of knowledge
Wednesday: The persons of the Trinity and the will
Thursday: The origins of evil and the necessity of government
Friday: Judaism, Christianity and Islam – their relations to medieval philosophy

Background reading:
Spade, Paul Vincent, “Medieval Philosophy,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy [Link]

Hegel, G. W. F., Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990) pp. 1 – 155

Strauss, Leo, “How to Begin to Study Medieval Philosophy,” in The Rebirth of Classical Political Rationalism, ed. Thomas L. Pangle (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 207 – 226

Level: This is an introductory course. Some prior knowledge of philosophy or the history of philosophy is preferred, but not essential.

Monday: The Secularisation-Debate – Blumenberg's critique of Karl Löwith (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, I, 1 – 5)
Löwith's thesis that 18th and 19th century concepts of progress consist in a secularisation of Christian eschatology. Blumenberg's critique of Löwith (and other critics of modernity) as a point of departure.

Tuesday: Political theology – Blumenberg and Schmitt (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, I, 6 – 9)
The assumptions about history at issue in the secularisation debate, with special attention to Blumenberg's critique of Carl Schmitt's Political Theology.

Wednesday: Modernity and Gnosticism (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, II)
Blumenberg's proposal that modernity is the “second overcoming of Gnosticism”, after the failure of the Christian struggle with the Gnostic heresy. His account of the attraction of Gnosticism and his re-interpretation of Descartes, whose philosophy is seen as shaped by the crises and imperatives of late medieval thought.

Thursday: The Ethics of Knowledge in Pre-Modern Thought (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, III, 1 – 6)
Blumenberg's history of Greek, Roman and Christian conceptions of knowledge and their different ethical valuations of “curiosity”.

Friday: Modernity and the Knowledge-Drive (The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, III, 7 – 11)
A continuation of the history of curiosity, focussing on the rehabilitation of theoretical curiosity that marks the transition to modernity. The significance of the figure of knowledge as it appears in Descartes, the Enlightenment, Feuerbach, Freud, and others. Conclusion - a summation of the underlying traits of the distinctively modern ethics of knowledge.

Suggested Reading:
Pippin, Robert, “Blumenberg and the modernity problem,” in Modernism as a Philosophical Problem : On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999)

Level: This is an introductory course, but will draw on common thinkers in the history of philosophy. Some prior knowledge of philosophy or the history of philosophy would be an advantage.

Hegel and Kant are the great founding figures of modern philosophy, and many would argue that, when confronting the problems of modernity, few thinkers are more important than Hegel. But is it possible to be an Hegelian today? Some of Hegel's methods and emphases are in some ways quite foreign to the contemporary mind; to turn him to good account in a contemporary context, we have to know how to appropriate him, and for that it is essential to understand the Logic.

Until the 1930s, it was predominantly the Logic that was known outside Germany, providing a focal point both to English translators and Marxists of the Second International. Kojève's lectures at the Sorbonne in the later 1930's and a new French translation of the Phenomenology by Hyppolite in 1939 led to a shift in the focus of interest. Yet though early transitional works such as the Phenomenology help us understand what it is that Hegel is talking about, it is in the Logic that we find the Hegelian method worked out in detail.

The Logic's almost sole concern is with concepts; there is little empirical content such as are to be found in Hegel's histories of religion or art or his speculations about natural science and for this reason the Logic has stood the test of time much better than Hegel's other works. Although abstract in form, all that is necessary to understand the Logic is life experience, together with a willingness to break through the arcane style of presentation and think against grain of Hegel's absolute idealism.

Monday:
Part I – The young Hegel and what drove him
Part II – The Phenomenology and ‘formations of consciousness’

Tuesday:
Part I – The Subject Matter of the Logic
Part II – The three divisions of the Logic: Being, Essence & Notion

Wednesday:
Part I – The Doctrine of Being, or Ontology
Part II – The Doctrine of Essence: Mediation or the Truth of Being

Thursday:
Part I – The Subject: Universal, Particular and Individual
Part II – Subject, Object and Idea

Friday:
Part I – The Subject and Culture: logic and ontology
Part II – Critique of the Hegelian dialectic

Suggested Reading:
The following works are far more than you need to read for the course:

Hegel texts (from Hegel-by-HyperText)
‘Preface’ to the Phenomenology of Spirit http://marx.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phprefac.htm
Final paragraph of the Phenomenology (§808) http://marx.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/ph/phc4.htm#m808
Introduction to the Shorter Logic http://marx.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slintro.htm et seq.
Preface to the Science of Logic http://marx.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlprefac.htm
Introduction to the Science of Logic http://marx.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/hl/hlintro.htm

Commentary on Hegel from Andy Blunden's home page
Getting to know Hegel http://marx.org/reference/archive/hegel/help/iup.htm
The Subject Matter of Hegel’s Logic http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/subject-logic.htm
The Nature of Hegel’s Spirit http://home.mira.net/~andy/works/hegels-spirit.htm

Level: This is an introductory course. Some prior knowledge of the history of philosophy is preferred, but not essential.

Robert Brandom's philosophy is becoming increasingly influential within the anglophone tradition. It also promises a broad convergence between analytic-pragmatist philosophy and the continental tradition, which we think is one of the most exciting developments in contemporary philosophy. Mind and Society: Robert Brandom and the Continental Tradition provides an accessible but thorough introduction to Brandom's philosophy and a critical examination of its relation to two main currents of continental philosophy, namely German idealism (Kant and Hegel) and hermeneutics (Heidegger, Gadamer, and Habermas).

Monday: Introducing Brandom's philosophy - Part I
We introduce Brandom's philosophy as an attempt to reconcile analytic and pragmatist philosophy. We explain both Brandom's inferentialist semantics, according to which concepts have their meanings in virtue of their roles in an inferential network, and his normative pragmatics, according to which the meanings of concepts are negotiated in a communicative practice of challenge and justification.

Tuesday: Introducing Brandom’s philosophy - Part II
We show in more detail how Brandom brings together inferentialist semantics and normative pragmatics in his deontic score-keeping model of communicative practice. Finally, we examine Brandom's most controversial claim that the normative social practice is sufficient to ensure the objectivity of meaning and truth.

Wednesday: Brandom and German idealism
Brandom appropriates Kant as recognising that conceptual content is normatively constrained and Hegel as recognising that the normative constraint is generated by a social practice. We consider Brandom's selective reading of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit and explore some dimensions and consequences of Brandom's shift from Kant to Hegel, which strongly shapes his own philosophy.

Thursday: Brandom and hermeneutics
Brandom reads Heidegger as anticipating a number of his own positions, such as privileging the practical over the theoretical and grounding explicit rules in implicit norms. We consider Brandom's interpretation of Heidegger's categories of “present-at-hand” and “ready-to-hand,” and Brandom's controversial claim that assertional language is an essential structure of the basic constitution of Dasein. We then consider Brandom's reconstruction of hermeneutics in terms of de dicto and de re ascriptions and some critical responses to it. Finally, Brandom's relative neglect of the relationship between language and power is discussed with reference to the debate between Gadamer and Habermas.

Friday: Taking up the threads
Navigating around the markers of body, mind, person, and society, we explore two directions in which Brandom's system may be expanded: In order to do justice to the person and its mind, should Brandom's accounts of the body as the locus of intra-subjective causal processes and the person as the unit of inter-subjective normative practice be supplemented with a proper account of the mind as the interface between body and person? In order to do justice to the person and its society, should Brandom's theory of linguistic communication be supplemented with a theory of the social coordination of action?

Level: This course will introduce Brandom's philosophy but is intended for students who are reasonably acquainted with the movements leading up to his work.