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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

CURRENT MSCP NEWS AND EVENTS

 

MSCP WINTER SCHOOL 2009
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The MSCP Winter School is currently underway. Please feel free to enrol in person at the beginning of each course. Could all participants note that it is important to arrive on time to avoid being locked out of the building, thank you. The Winter School shall run from June 29 until July 17 at the Academic Centre, Newman College, University of Melbourne Parkville Campus.

 

Week 1
June 29 - July 3		 11am - 1pm: Meaning and Metaphor in Nietzsche and Wittgenstein (Paul Daniels)
2pm - 4pm: Deleuze's Difference and Repetition (Jon Roffe)
Week 2
July 6 - July 10		 11am - 1pm: Kant's Critical Philosophy 1 (Paul Daniels, Marc Hiatt and Philip Quadrio)
2pm - 4pm: Marx and Marxism (Andy Blunden)
Week 3
July 13 - July 17		 11am - 1pm: Kant's Critical Philosophy 2 (Paul Daniels, Marc Hiatt and Philip Quadrio)
2pm - 4pm: Recent Continental Rationalism (Jon Roffe)

FULL COURSE DETAILS

Further information about the school can be found here.

 

ENROLMENT

Enrolment form available here.

Online Enrolment form available here.

 

 

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MSCP AUTUMN AND SPRING WORKSHOPS 2009
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The MSCP is pleased to announce two new regular free events to the MSCP calendar, the Autumn and Spring workshops.  The inaugural Autumn workshop on Friday, 8th of May, was a forum regarding the importance, legitimation and relevance of philosophy today.  Details of the Spring Workshop will be available soon.

 

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MSCP EVENING SCHOOL 2008-9 - Global Warming: Ethics, Science, Politics
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The final course in the MSCP's Evening School program Global Warming: Ethics, Science, Politics, 'Global Warming: Science and Politics in Troubled Times', has now concluded. Thankyou to all participants.


Global Warming: Science and Politics in Troubled Times


Lecturer: Dr Cameron Shingleton (MSCP)
Venue: Trades Hall, Carlton
Times: Mondays, 6.30 - 8.30, March 16 - June 1 (12 weeks)
Prices: $140 (student/unwaged), $180 (waged)

Few people would dispute that the issue of climate change raises serious questions for political life, in Australia and the world 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 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?

 

Further information about this Evening School course can be found here.


 

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MSCP SUMMER SCHOOL 2009
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The MSCP Summer School 2009 has now concluded. Thank you to all participants.

 

Week 1
January 26 - 30		 11am - 1pm: Foucault and Hadot: Philosophy as a Way of Life (Ashley Woodward)
2pm - 4pm: History of Philosophy IV: Medieval Philosophy, Part 2 (Late Medieval Era) (Ian Weeks)
Week 2
February 2 - 6		 11am - 1pm: Environmental Political Theory from Spinoza to Negri (Kate Noble)
2pm - 4pm: History of Philosophy V: Rationalism (Jon Roffe)
Monday and Wednesday, 6 - 8.30pm: Global Warming: Politics and Science in Troubled Times (Cameron Shingleton)
Week 3
February 9 - 13 		11am - 1pm: Deleuze's Logic of Sense: A Critical Introduction (James Williams)
2pm - 4pm: Heidegger's Being and Time (James Garrett)
Monday and Wednesday, 6 - 8.30pm: Global Warming: Politics and Science in Troubled Times (Cameron Shingleton)

Week 4
February 16 - 20

11am - 1pm: On Slavoj Zizek's Political Theory, or: Would You Like A Politics With That? (Matthew Sharpe)
2pm - 4pm: Dialectics of Enlightenment (Bryan Cooke)


Further information about the school, including full venue details, can be found here.

 

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MSCP EVENING SCHOOL 2008-9 - Global Warming: Ethics, Science, Politics
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Semester 1 2008:
Images of Nature: A Philosophical Introduction to an Environmental Ethics (Lecturer: Dr Cameron Shingleton)
Global Warming: The Science and its Implications (Lecturer: Phillip Sutton)

Semester 2 2008:
Global Warming: An Economic Perspective (Lecturer: Dr Jim Crosthwaite)

Semester 1 2009
Global Warming: Science and Politics in Troubled Times (Lecturer: Dr Cameron Shingleton)

Further details about the Evening School can be found here.

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LIBIDINAL PHILOSOPHY RESEARCH DAY
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A special event hosted by The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy.

In France in the nineteen-sixties and -seventies there appeared a number of fascinating confluences of philosophy and psychoanalysis, including the works of Jean-François Lyotard, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and Jacques Lacan, amongst others. Such works often showed a marked influence from Friedrich Nietzsche and his French interpreters such as Georges Bataille and Pierre Klossowski, who emphasized the role of the body and affect in his thought. What marks out these works as distinctive is the way desire, understood through Freud and Nietzsche as a force which challenges the supposed self-possession and transparency of reason, motivates a reconsideration of what philosophy is, and how it should be pursued. These reconsiderations are played out in a rich variety of philosophical explorations, of topics including the arts and art criticism, politics, linguistics, semiotics, the body, and economics, as well as of philosophical thinking itself and of the production of philosophical texts. In recent times, while the works of many of these thinkers still garner much attention, the specifically libidinal themes they develop are often overlooked or ignored, and stand in danger of being forgotten. This special event seeks to refocus attention on the role of the libido, desire, and affect in the works of these thinkers, with the larger aim of illuminating the relation of desire to philosophy itself, and of questioning what a “libidinal philosophy” – one which takes the implications of the nature of desire for philosophy seriously – can do.

Participants:
Professor James Williams (University of Dundee)
Justin Clemens (University of Melbourne)
Graham Jones
Jon Roffe (MSCP; University of Tasmania; La Trobe University)
Ashley Woodward (MSCP)

9am - 5pm
Friday, February 6, 2009
The Gryphon Gallery, 1888 Building
The University of Melbourne
Parkville Campus

A full program will be circulated closer to the day.

This is a FREE event, and all are welcome. Some refreshments will be provided.

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OTHER NEWS AND EVENTS

Heidegger's Parmenides
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Helios Stalingrad is a translation of Heidegger's Parmenides from German into French.

The translation is presented as a large format artist's book (elephant folio) based on Deleuze and Guttari's principle of Cartography.

Helios Stalingrad will be on view from Monday, 11 August 2008 at the Rowden-White Library, 2nd Floor, Student Union Building, Melbourne University, Carlton.

Information: Francis and Leonie Osowski
(03) 9376 1296
22 Lambeth St, Kensington 3031, Victoria

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Parrhesia - A Journal of Critical Philosophy

Parrhesia - A Journal of Critical Philosophy is an open access journal published online at www.parrhesiajournal.org, dedicated to providing a venue for contemporary thought as it unfolds.

Issue Four has just been published, including pieces by Alexander García Düttmann, Christian Kerslake, Michael Marder, Alison Ross, an interview with Samuel Weber, and a number of reviews.
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