Sherah Bloor (Administrator) is an MA candidate at La Trobe University. Her thesis concerns meta-philosophy and the Analytic-Continental divide. At LaTrobe she's tutored first year philosophy and the provocatively titled 'Love, Desire and the Master-Slave dialectic'. She also assisted in teaching the MSCP Winter School 2009 marathon Kant course. She holds a BA (honours) in philosophy and social theory from the University of Melbourne (her honours thesis was on the distinction between phenomena and noumena in Kant and Nietzsche). She also completed A Levels in English Literature and Fine Arts. Her interests, at present, are centred on the nature of transcendental philosophy in all its incarnations, the philosophy of religion and hat collecting. She is also the Editorial Manager of Sophia (International Journal for Philosophy of Religion, Metaphysical Theology and Ethics). EMAIL

Bryan Cooke is a doctoral candidate in the School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Social Inquiry at the University of Melbourne. He is currently writing a thesis on truth, the subject, and what he calls the “conditions of political appearances” in the works of Jacques Rancière, Alain Badiou, Plato, Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss. Bryan has taught two full courses for the MSCP: “Dialectics of Enlightenment (On Adorno)" (2009) and “The Pleasures: Of Political Philosophy and Other Interruptions” (2008). His 2010 Summer course (on Plato and Xenophon) is called “The Problem of Socrates”. He has tutored at Newman College for some years and has lectured in political philosophy at Deakin University, Geelong. Apart from Plato, he is heavily influenced by Adorno, G.K. Chesterton, John Milbank, Slavoj Zizek, Kevin Hart, Hegel and St. Augustine. After years of indifference to metaphysics, he was recently awakened from his Kantian slumber by Jon Roffe’s 2009 course on ‘speculative realism’. EMAIL

Paul Daniels (Vice-Convenor) has studied philosophy at the University of Melbourne, UNSW and Monash University, and is an Honorary Fellow of the School of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. His most recent research focused on Nietzsche, Schopenhauer and The Birth of Tragedy, and investigated various complexities involved with the early Nietzsche's alleged 'discipleship' of Schopenhauer. His research interests include Kant's critical philosophy, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wittgenstein's early work. His current research compares Kant and Kierkegaard on faith, with particular attention to Fear and Trembling and the Kantian sublime. Paul is also an amateur composer in the classical style and enjoys playing no-limit Texas Hold'em. EMAIL

James Garrett (Treasurer and Publicity Officer) is a PhD candidate in the School of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. His thesis is on the early Heidegger's reading of Aristotle. He has an MA in critical theory (on Plato's reading of Heraclitus) from Monash. His areas of interest are in the history of philosophy, especially ancient Greek and German Philosophy. He co-tought the course ‘Plato and his Contemporaries’ at the 2008 Summer School. And ran a course on Heidegger's Being and Time at the 2009 Summer School. His email address refers to one of Schopenhauer’s dogs, Atma, meaning ‘Soul’ in Sanskrit. EMAIL

As well as a translator and sometime scrivener, Marc Hiatt is a student of theories with an emancipatory intent. He has studied in Melbourne, Berlin and Freiburg in Breisgau, taught at Monash and La Trobe universities and holds a Bachelor of Laws and a Bachelor of Arts, with honours in German and social theory, from the University of Melbourne. MSCP students have known him mainly as an interpreter of the traditions of dialectics, but Marc is also an inconstant amateur of the violin. EMAIL

After doing her undergrad studies in Colombia, Andrea Leon Montero did her MA and PhD studies at the New School for Social Research and also at Potsdam Universität. Her attention is focused on practical subjectivity, aka "the ethical subject". To that effect, the road has been complicated: Hegel, Habermas, Honneth and the classical Frankfurt School lead to psychoanalysis (Freud and Lacan) and in the last years, she has been working through the work of Emmanuel Lévinas. She has taught philosophy at Universidad de Antioquia, La Trobe and MSCP, all in late modern and contemporary philosophy. At the MSCP, she has taught two introductory courses on Lévinas and keeps mentioning a book on responsibility based on Weber, Jonas, Derrida and Lévinas.. EMAIL

Dr David Rathbone (B.Sc. M.Sc., M.A., Ph.D.) has run M.S.C.P. courses on Hegel, on Feuerbach, on the preSocratics and on Medieval Philosophy, and has also taught in courses in the Melbourne University School of Philosophy on Nietzsche, on Kant, on Heidegger, on Derrida, on Foucault, and even on Sartre. His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled The Imperative to See the Whole traced the vicissitudes of that imperative from Parmenides to Heidegger and back again. He has written or will soon be writing articles on the problem of misogyny in Nietzsche; on Derrida's readings of Hegel; on Blanchot's friendship with Camus; on Heidegger's silences; on the conception of Chinese Philosophy in the writings of Malebranche, Leibniz, Wolff and Voltaire; on Kant's doctrine of metaphysical illusion; and on some resonances between Parmenides and the Old English Riddles of the Exeter Book. EMAIL

Sean Ryan has lectured and tutored French and German philosophy at the University of Melbourne for the past 10 years. He holds an MA from the University of Melbourne, and is currently attempting to terminate an interminable PhD on the topic of Heidegger's Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsche. He has so far met with little success. EMAIL

Matthew Sharpe (Convenor) is a Lecturer in Philosophy and Psychoanalytic Studies at Deakin University, the author of Slavoj Zizek: A Little Piece of the Real, co-author of Understanding Psychoanalysis and the co-editor of Traversing the Fantasy: Critical Essays on Zizek. He has published numerous articles on Camus, Castoriadis, Baudrillard, Derrida, Zizek, Lacan, Marcuse, Kant and film theory, and his current research interests centre around Leo Strauss and the recent rise of neo-conservatist political doctrines. He completed his PhD at the University of Melbourne in social theory and philosophy in 2003, writing on Zizek's political and critical theory. Since that time, he has taught several courses at the MSCP, together with sessional appointments in the Philosophy departments of Auckland and Melbourne Universities. EMAIL

Cameron Shingleton completed an honours thesis in German on Nietzsche's reading of the Pre-Socratics in "Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks". He is the author of a PhD on Nietzsche's many and varied conceptions of philosophy, a collection of aphorisms, and translations from the German of Karl Kraus. As convenor of the MSCP from 2005 to 2007, he kick-started the MSCP's History of Philosophy series, as well as inventing and teaching MSCP's inaugural Evening School series, "Global Warming: Science, Politics, Ethics". An assortment of his writings is to be found at his blog, "The Great Stage". EMAIL

Dr Marion Tapper has lectured in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne for over two decades and formally joined the MSCP in 2004. Her interests include the history of philosophy, existentialism and phenomenology (in particular, Kant, Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre). As a senior lecturer in the School of Philosophy she supervised the postgraduate work of most present day MSCP members. She currently runs the Lives of the Philosophers public lectures and has co-organised MSCP events including the Sartre Colloquium in October of 2005, which included a performance of Huis Clos (held in conjunction with the Department of French, Italian and Spanish Studies and the Department of Philosophy). EMAIL

Mark Tomlinson is an MA candidate in the School of Philosophy at The University of Melbourne. He holds a BA (Hons.) in English and Philosophy from Melbourne, as well as a Diploma in Modern Languages (French). Aside from tutoring at the aforementioned institution, Mark is currently preparing papers on Nietzsche, the early German Romantics, and Walter Benjamin’s philosophy of history. EMAIL

Ashley Woodward received a B.A. (hons.) from LaTrobe University and a PhD in philosophy through the University of Queensland. His dissertation was a comparative and critical study of the concept of nihilism in the works of Lyotard, Baudrillard, and Vattimo, and he is broadly interested in the question of how to think the problem of existential meaning within the horizon of current theoretical approaches in the humanities. His other philosophical interests include Analytic philosophy, the social philosophy of science, technology, and information, post-Marxist social and political theory, and the aesthetics of modern art. He has taught philosophy at the University of Queensland, Deakin University, Monash University, and the University of Melbourne, and has published on Lyotard, Vattimo, and Deleuze. His website can be found here. EMAIL