Evening School Sem2 2025

Three courses running August - October

The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy is proud to present the Evening School Sem2 2025 curriculum. Two courses run for 12 weeks, the other runs for 5 weeks. As always significant discounts apply for those enrolling in multiple courses. If you have any questions which aren't in our FAQs please email This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

Evening School Programme

2 hours per week for 5 weeks

Course Descriptions

Reading Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

Lecturer: Gregory Marks

These lectures will present a cover-to-cover commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, with the goal of making clear the argument, structure, and reference points of this notoriously difficult work. As we attempt to decipher the intricacies of the Phenomenology step-by-step, we will take as a guiding theme Hegel’s modernity, or the question of how we now live and what forms of thought are necessary for making sense of our present ways of life. One side of this is Hegel’s concern with the social and economic basis for philosophy, which presents in its metaphysics a mirror of the legal and class relations that govern society, producing forms of thought fitted to the historic shapes of servitude, governance, and ownership. Hegel’s account of modern life and modern thought therefore involves a great excavation of the history of human culture, the shapes of ‘ethical life’ that have emerged and disappeared over the centuries, and asks what lessons we may take from them for the fate of our present epoch. 

We will also see how the Phenomenology not only examines the sources of modernity, but presents in its style a modernist impulse to new forms of literary representation. Rather than a history of spirit, which would narrate the cultural past from an objective, third-person perspective, Hegel writes his phenomenology in a novelistic manner, presenting the many forms of consciousness on their own terms. This free indirect discourse is one reason for the difficulty of Hegel’s text, but it is also the key to its dramatic irony, as it takes us through a philosophical picaresque, inhabiting one mental model after another, revealing how each undermines itself in its attempts to become stable and self-sufficient. Though the endpoint is ‘absolute spirit,’ we will find that there are no shortage of textual, conceptual, and literary hurdles which Hegel tries to surmount in his attempted inauguration of philosophical modernity. 

Readings – The only prescribed readings will be selections from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. Inwood). This text and supplementary commentaries by Jean Hyppolite, Gillian Rose, and H.S. Harris will be provided. 

Course Schedule

Week 1 – The Project of the Phenomenology (Preface & Introduction, §1-89)

The first week will introduce the project and goals of the Phenomenology of Spirit as outlined in its paratextual opening chapters. We will see how Hegel situates his work within the revolutionary context of Napoleonic Europe and states his goal of presenting a comparable revolution in thought. In this sense, the Phenomenology may be understood as a work of cultural revolution, of bringing the life of the mind up to speed with modern political and economic life. To achieve this goal, Hegel attempts to work through the amassed detritus of modern philosophy, with all its formalisms and its abstractions, to show that the time is ripe to sweep away the old regime of thought. But at this stage of the book, in its introductory material, this transformation of thought can only be stated as a result in need of demonstration, and so must be accompanied by a discourse on style and method, laying out the manner in which the rest of the work will present this revolutionary narrative. 

Week 2 – Ain’t It Just Like the Night (chs. I-III, §90-165)

As we enter into the Phenomenology proper, we are dropped into the thick of Hegel’s literary style. Rather than present a treatise on the forms and faculties of thought, the chapters on consciousness introduce us to ‘sense-certainty,’ ‘perception,’ and ‘the understanding’ as figures in a comic drama of misunderstanding and epistemic embarrassment. Though each of these subjective positions claims a privileged access to the objective world, each is shown to undermine itself and transform into the next figure. What the senses are supposed to simply show, is then perceived as filtered though mental categories, and still later understood as reflections of hidden laws. As satiric portraits of the empiricists, rationalists, and idealists, these chapters show the follies of modern philosophy’s search for a sovereign faculty of thought, because each form of consciousness only presents its object as it has been shaped by the predominant faculty. 

Week 3 – Blood and Guts in High Theory (ch. IV, §166-230)

Continuing the satire of modern thought that began in the chapters on consciousness, the chapter on self-consciousness takes on the forms of social thought that predominate under modern economic life. Though the chapter begins with an apparent scene of the state of nature, followed by the infamous depiction of society’s beginnings in servitude, it is a mistake to read ‘self-consciousness’ as an anthropology. Rather, we will see how Hegel reconstructs the basic social divisions imagined by modern, bourgeois culture, which projects its relations of use, value, and contract into the primordial past. Hence, we will read ‘self-consciousness’ as an ethnology of economic man, which traces the forms of social relation that govern modern life and culminates in a critique of the ideological subject-positions that hold sway over its isolated individuals. 

Week 4 – Critique of Natural Reason (ch. V #1, §231-346)

The fifth chapter of the Phenomenology returns us to the discussion of the mental faculties begun in the section on consciousness. Whereas in those chapters the faculties of sensation, perception, and understanding laid claim to the certainty of the objective world while presenting only their own forms of objectivity, here we find the faculty of reason offering another solution: that thought and reality are not separate domains but rather that rationality inheres in the world. However, this unity of reason with reality tends toward a bare identity, in which the laws of thought are considered unfounded unless matched to their exact counterparts in the natural world. And so, this chapter enumerates the ways that reason oversteps its claim to reality, searching through the natural world for some sign of itself, making reality rational but itself unreal. 

Week 5 – The Individual and the Universe (ch. V #2, §347-437)

This week we will examine the second half of the chapter on ‘reason,’ where Hegel turns from the natural and psychological sciences to the social realm and the hypocrisies of public life. By way of literary figures seemingly borrowed from Cervantes, Moliere, and Goethe, Hegel shows how the antinomies of reason intercede on and undermine individual attempts to create stable social relations. To understand this section we will pay special attention to the economic character of its social portraits, which reveal the bourgeois ideals of propriety, utility, and autonomy as rationalisations of unethical life. 

Week 6 – Because We Suffer (ch. VI #1, §438-483)

In week six, we turn from the first half of the Phenomenology – the five chapters on ‘Subjective Spirit’ – to the massive sixth chapter that makes up the section on ‘Objective Spirit.’ Hence, we depart from the mental faculties of consciousness and reason to examine their historical counterparts in the institutions of political life, beginning with the classical forms of community, cult, and state. Rather than look to the ancient world as a model for the ideal state, and against any classicism that would dare attempt a return, Hegel wants to show the contradictions that lay suppressed in the Greek polis and brought its ruin under the legal empire of Rome. 

Week 7 – Courts and Courtesy (ch. VI #2, §484-537)

This lecture continues Hegel’s history of ‘objective spirit’ into the feudal era, where the personal relations of the court become the basis for political life. In this setting, it is no longer the decayed legal empire that holds sway, but the complex of feudal obligations whereby each subject swears fealty to another. But what is the value of an oath? What ensures the translation of words into action? In Hegel’s account, the royal court must be understood as a culture of willed self-alienation, composed of subjects who give their allegiance to a sovereign, knowing that the sovereign’s power extends only as far as their performance of vassalage allows. In thought, this alienation is redoubled by the confessions of religious faith, which takes solace in representations of a beyond, ensured only by the word of God’s intermediaries on earth. In this manner, the first and second estates – the clergy and nobility – are given their places in a regime that is as cynical as it is untenable...

Week 8 – Doomed to Freedom (ch. VI #3, §538-595)

This week we will see how Hegel accounts for the moment of intellectual and political modernity in the collapse of the old regime. On the one side, the culture of faith finds its nemesis in the interrogations of the Enlightenment, which demands proofs for the other-worldly only in the signs of this world. But in stripping faith of its beyond, enlightenment turns upon itself: pitting the godless piety of Deism against the pious atheism of the materialists. On the other side, the political life of the nobility is overthrown, replaced by a confederation of equal citizens. But whereas the nobility sublimated their lust for power in their allegiance to a sovereign, the bourgeoisie can only take power as individuals over and against a collective mass. Hence, the revolution of the third estate begets the Terror, which removes the heads of any who would raise them above the revolutionary crowd. 

Week 9 – Confessionals (ch. VI #4, §596-671)

The chapter on ‘spirit’ draws to a close with a portrait of Hegel’s contemporary world: not the life of revolutionary France but that which the Reformation had created in Germany. Rather than turning outward to abolish the culture of the old regime, this form of life takes its professions of faith and alienation further inward, seeking a purer relation between the self and the beyond. What results is a dialectic of morality and hypocrisy, as each subject claims insight into the proper form that ethical life ought to take, while denouncing the insight of all others. Hence, the final figure of ‘objective spirit’ is the ‘beautiful soul,’ who forsakes the world for their private confession, though without a world to speak of this confession must be as empty as it is absolute. 

Week 10 – In Monuments and Marble (ch. VII #1, §672-747)

Hegel’s history of ‘objective spirit’ concluded with the form of absolute spirit sans content. To supplement this empty form, a second history is provided, which runs back through world history from the perspective of religious consciousness. For Hegel, religion describes the ways that the absolute is represented, whether in artwork, doctrine, or acts of devotion. Because these representations do not provide direct visions of the god, but are images fashioned by human hands, religion must be understood as the reflection of a culture upon its own notions of the absolute. Refusing the pious atheism that would dismiss religion as mere superstition, Hegel wants to show that the image of divinity is an alienated image of the humans who made it, who present to themselves an absolute ideal that they do not yet recognise as their own creation. 

Week 11 – The Kingdom is Within (chs. VII #2, §748-787)

The penultimate lecture will take us through the final section on ‘revealed religion.’ Here, we will see how Hegel treats Christianity not as the pinnacle of religious consciousness but its self-sublation. Though represented in icons, ritual, and the prose of the gospels, the teachings of Christ transpose the divine from a ‘beyond’ into the community of believers, who live in imitation of a god who became human. Decades before Nietzsche, Hegel declared ‘god is dead’ – and ‘man’ has taken his place! A critical reading of Hegel’s recuperation of Christianity as humanism will allow us to place the Phenomenology as a precursor both to Nietzsche’s Genealogy and to Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, where the spirit of religion is shown to persist in the ‘disillusioned’ ideologies of modern, secular culture. 

Week 12 – Conclusion (ch. VIII, §788-808)

Finally, we will take a look at the brief chapter on ‘absolute knowing,’ where Hegel attempts to summarise his project and knit together the form of the absolute found in ‘spirit’ (chapter VI) with the absolute content of ‘religion’ (chapter VII). We will see how Hegel brings the lessons of these last two chapters together to answer the problems left unresolved in chapters one to five. That is, the contradictions of ‘subjective spirit’ (chapters I-V) cannot be resolved by theoretical reason alone, but necessitate a reformation in philosophical culture and a revolution in practical thought. The Phenomenology therefore attempts to place thought in history, revealing the basis of theoretical reason in the real transformations of collective life. Concomitantly – and problematically – it brings this history to thought, surveying the past to find a rational structure even in its long stretches of destruction and disorder. If the modern spirit of the Phenomenology is realised, it must be the redemption of history in thought, which is finally able to look upon the shapes of the past and recognise them as stages in its long journey toward absolute self-knowledge.

Badiou’s Big Books: The True Change of Logics of Worlds

Lecturer: A.J. Bartlett

Logics of Worlds, published in 2006 (2009), is the follow up to Alain Badiou’s defining work, Being and Event. In Being and Event, Badiou seeks nothing less than to re-found philosophy itself – for the time of our time. For Badiou, any philosophy – and there are only philosophies, plural –orients itself to three elements: being, truth, subject. In regard to being, Being and Event draws the consequences in philosophy of a hitherto philosophically unheralded discovery in mathematics: Georg Cantor’s demonstration of actual infinity and the subsequent axiomatisation of the consequences of this in Set Theory. The upshot being that being as such is pure multiplicity: every ‘one’ is multiple, and as such the One is not. Mathematics is the discourse of pure multiplicity and, as Badiou therefore argues, is ontology itself. From this new thinking of being qua being, a new thinking of what being is not, namely, the Event, is required. Most importantly for Badiou, philosophy must think, above all else, true change, which requires that new conceptions of truth and subjectivity must also be forged. As is now well attested, Being and Event, this ‘re-foundational work’, spawned a remarkable series of books, interventions and activity, both by Badiou and his new cohort of readers.

However, several of Badiou’s readers—most importantly for him Jean-Toussaint Desanti—noted a lacunae in Badiou’s fundamental ontology: while Badiou’s ‘minimal, intrinsic ontology’ can think being as such, it by no means restricts being to its minimal determination in and through mathematics. Thus a maximal approach is required that can give an extensive or ‘extrinsic’ account of being, given that every being is, ontologically not only marked as a being (a pure multiple of a multiple) but as ‘being-there’; in short, to the extent that being as such appears, it has has no say in it. Taking his direction from Desanti, Badiou spends many years investigating what mathematics is available to support such a maximal approach, and then many years interrogating Category Theory as the onto-logy of appearing (see Mathematics of the Transcendental). The result is Logics of Worlds. In this text, Badiou’s thinking moves from the intrinsic to the extrinsic, or from being qua being as the theory of the pure multiple to a complementary theory of being-there (which is coextensive with being itself) as the topological localization of a being, which is its appearing in a world.

It is accurate to say that nothing of what was proposed Being and Event is changed in this transition, except that what it is for being to appear is now thought coextensively with the intrinsic determination of what is as such. Whereas in Being and Event, mathematics as set-theory is ontology for today, in Logics of Worlds, (categorial) logic is the appearing of that ontology. The set-out and demonstration of this claim forms a central part of this second part of the trilogy commenced by Being and Event.  

But as mathematics frees philosophy from a certain ontological malaise, allowing philosophy to think again the truths of its time, so category theory frees philosophy from the onto-logic of thinking appearing as such. This means that philosophy remains the thinking of truths for Badiou, as sited, evental and subjective. But in Logics of Worlds, truths and subjects and the situations or worlds by and for which they are (im)possible, are all re-thought relative to what it is to be-there or to what appearing is. Hereby their relations are established. Truths are reformulated as what within a world is ultimately in most maximal exception to that world. This requires a new reformulation or ‘meta-physics’ of the subject; a new theory of objects or a phenomenology without a subject; the introduction into Badiou’s work of a theory of relations and their modalities or intensities – maximal and minimal; a theory of the body as the material support of a truth in a world; and of worlds as such in terms of a new theory of the transcendental. These are all presented with multiple examples and with several key figures from the history of philosophy and its conditions, whose thought Badiou follows to the point of its impasse so as to continue in their direction.

Badiou’s 2009 Second Manifesto for Philosophy which supports the order Logics of Worlds traces out: Opinion, Appearance, Differentiation, Existence, Mutation, Incorporation, Subjectivation and Ideation. Badiou sums up the project in this way: ‘The task remains as in Being and Event, to think the possibility of real change but this time it extends to thinking the means by which change is brought to bear in a world. The central question of Being and Event in 1988 was that of the being of truths, thought in the concept of generic multiplicity, whereas in 2006, in Logics of Worlds, the question became that of truths' appearing, with this found in the concept of a body of truth or subjectivisable body.’

Logics of Worlds is a big book. The structure of it maps the vicissitudes of what needs to be thought and rethought regarding the laws of appearing and change and invokes a certain scholastic thematic, divided into books, sections, scholia and appendices and including at its end a selection of 66 statements, notes and digressions, as well as an iconography, dictionary and idiosyncratic index. As always, in this course, we will seek to read the whole thing, beginning to end. Accordingly, the course, a reading seminar: will work through the book in chronological order, following closely its unfolding structure, but necessarily the procedure will be truncated and, importantly, will emphasise the philosophical and thus conceptual import of what we encounter. This is not a mathematics course, even if we cannot avoid what is being (and not-being) written there.

This course presupposes no knowledge of Badiou per se, though some familiarity is always helpful. A reading of the (first) Manifesto for Philosophy which supports Being and Event (part 1) would be useful, as would Badiou’s recent Badiou By Badiou, which provides a simple summary overview of his oeuvre. The course will be both a wild ride across many seemingly disparate worlds: existential quantifiers to the battles of Alexander, La Nouvelle Heloise to the Chauvet Caves, the Commune to what it is to Live. And it will be a useful introduction to this work, Logics of Worlds, the Being and Event trilogy itself, and to the work of a thinker whose philosophy will have become, despite concerted contemporary reaction, truly transcendental.

Course Schedule

1. Intro to course and reading the Preface

2. Book I Formal Theory of the Subject (Meta-physics)

3. Book II – Forewords to Greater Logic, Introduction and Section 1 The Concept of Transcendental, (2 Hegel).

4. Book II Cont. Part 2 Sections 3 Algebra of the Transcendental, 4 Greater Logic and Ordinary Logic, 5 Classical Worlds

5. Book III Greater Logic, 2. The Object. Introduction, Section 1 For a New Thinking of the Object, 2 Kant, 3 Atomic Logic

6. Book III (part 2) Section 4 Existence and Death & A Scholium as Impressive as it is Subtle: The Transcendental Functor.

7. Book IV Greater Logic, 3. Relation Section 1 Worlds and Relations, 2 Leibniz & 3 Diagrams

8. Book V The Four Forms of Change: 1 Simple Becoming and True Change, 2 The Event According to Deleuze, 3 Formalizing the Upsurge?

9. Book VI Theory of Points: 1 The Point as Choice and as Place, 2 Kierkegaard, 3 Topological Structure of the Points of a World

10. Book VII What is a Body? : 1 Birth, Form and Destiny of Subjectivizable Bodies, 2 Lacan, 3 Formal Theory of the Body, Or, We Know Why a Body Exists, What It Can and Cannot Do, Scholium: A Political Variant of the Physics of the Subject-of-Truth.

11. Conclusion: What is it to Live

12. Notes, Commentaries Digressions & Questions, Remarks, what next – i.e. Riots, Happiness, Immanence of Truths.

Note that completion of this ‘order’ is subject to the vicissitudes of the seminar room.

Recommended Readings

• Logics of Worlds (Alain Badiou)
• Second Manifesto for Philosophy (Alain Badiou) – Second Manifesto is the accompanying, ‘explanatory and advocacy’ text to Logic of Worlds. A precise entrée into LW.
• Mathematics of the Transcendental (Alain Badiou): Introduction (Ling/Bartlett) – This text details Badiou’s journey through category theory as it becomes the onto-logic of being-there.
• Theoretical Writings (Alain Badiou): Section III – Early essays relevant to (and in parts included in) LW
• Briefing on Existence (Alain Badiou): Ch: 7, 8, 9, 10, 13 - (As above – transitional essays – being to being there)
• Badiou: Key Concepts (Bartlett & Clemens) – Wide range of introductory essays on Badiou’s conceptual armory.
• Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Peter Hallward) – first comprehensive introduction to Badiou – some early remarks on LW.
• ‘Had we but worlds enough and time, this absolute, philosopher . . .’, The Praxis of Alain Badiou (Justin Clemens) – excellent and seminal review of LW prior to its English translation. (Clemens has since modified and refined his position.)
• Alain Badiou: Live Theory (Oliver Feltham) – excellent critical overview of Badiou’s earlier work.

Perversion & Subversion in Psychoanalysis

Lecturer: Justin Clemens

Latent course description forthcoming.