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Sherah Bloor (Administration) is a doctoral candidate at La Trobe University, where her thesis is on transcendental questions and the Analytic-Continetal divide.

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 in 2009, 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’.

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.

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.

As well as a translator and sometime scrivener, Marc Hiatt (Convenor) 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.

Andrea Leon Montero has taught philosophy and worked as a translator for a number of years. She taught a course on Levinas at the 2008 summer school.

Alex Murray is a lecturer in twentieth-century literature at the University of Exeter. He is the author of Giorgio Agamben (Routledge, 2010) and Recalling London (Continuum, 2007). With Justin Clemens and Nick Heron he edited The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life (Edinburgh 2008) and with Philip Tew The Modernism Handbook (Continuum, 2009). He is currently editing The Agamben Dictionary with Jessica Whyte and writing a book on city spaces.

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.

Jon Roffe is a founding member and the original convenor of the MSCP, and a founding editor of Parrhesia: A Journal of Critical Philosophy. He is the editor of Understanding Derrida (Continuum Press) with Jack Reynolds, and Deleuze's Philosophical Lineage (Edinburgh University Press) with Graham Jones, and his other publications concern Deleuze, Derrida, Spinoza, Merleau-Ponty and the philosophy of the city. He is currently completing a book on Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze; his other current research interests include Jean-Francois Lyotard's reading of psychoanalysis and the philosophy of mathematics.

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 Heideggers Auseinandersetzung mit Nietzsche. He has so far met with little success.

Matthew Sharpe 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.

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". His PhD thesis was on Nietzsche's many and varied conceptions of philosophy. He is also the author of a collection of aphorisms, and of translations from the German of Karl Kraus. He was the convenor of the MSCP from 2005 to 2006, kick-started the MSCP's History of Philosophy series and is in the process of putting together a new Environmental Philosophy program.

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.

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).

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.