Evening School Sem1 2025

Three 12-week courses running March to June

The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy is proud to present the Evening School Sem1 2025 curriculum.  All courses are 24 hours in length.  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..

Semester 1 Program

 

Course Descriptions

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Outline of a Heterodox Philosophy of Economics

Lecturer: Jon Roffe

The aim of this course will be to elaborate a philosophy of economics that breaks with both the commitments of a range of economic positions – classical, neo-classical and a number of so-called ‘heterodox’ positions – and the philosophical commitments that they share.

Each part of the course is organised around a critical identification of one of the paralogisms that underlies mainstream economic thought: the paralogism of the totalisation of value, paralogism of exchangism, the paralogism of the real economy, and the paralogism of the free market.

This course will proceed against the background of a series of texts that address the elements of its construction. In particular, we will draw from works in philosophy (Kant, Nietzsche, Bergson, Deleuze, Derrida, Stiegler), anthropology (Mauss, Lévi-Strauss, Sahlins, Clastres) and psychoanalysis. This textual network will orient and motivate our consideration of texts from within the history of economics, from Smith to Marx and contemporary theories of money.

Part 1: Introduction. Against the totalisation of value.
Weeks 1 - 3

The first three lectures will be devoted to establishing the definition of key terms, and in particular value and price. Aside from providing a foundational split in the thought of economic activity, this distinction also grounds the distribution of temporal registers – the present and past for value, the future for price.

1.1 Introduction. Key terms, dominant paralogisms, central elements

1.2 Defining value

1.3 Defining price

Part 2. Memory and debt.
Weeks 4 - 6 

The second part of the course will focus on establishing the essential connection between debt and memory, and to introduce the historical dimension into the analysis.

2.1 The topological hypothesis of two memories

2.2 The status of exchange in pre-State society

2.3 Social memory

Part 3: Money. Against the hypothesis of ‘money as veil’
Weeks 7 - 9

The third part of the course will be focused around the concept of money and the historical reality of the State, and in particular how the two intersect. These analyses will allow us to link together in adequate terms two central categories of the course: money and memory.

3.3 The pre-history of money

3.4 Taxation and the State

3.5 Money and memory

Part 4. Capitalism. Against the hypothesis of the free market.
Weeks 10 - 12

The final part of this course will lead us to the contemporary conjunction. Of central importance will be the erosion of State law and its various consequences for memory, money and social organisation. The course will conclude with a recapitulation of the elements of this heterodox philosophy of economics.

4.1 The capitalist market and its states.

4.2 Money in capitalism.

4.3 The bank. Conclusion: recapitulation of the elements

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The Philosophy of Corruption and the Corruption of Philosophy

Lecturer: Jon Rubin

‘He’s been corrupted by a book or by Prodicus or some windbag or other.’
Aristophanes, Fragment 490 cited in Conversations of Socrates.

Week 1. Plato             Apology – the corruption of youth

Week 2. Plato             The Republic – the corruption of the state form

Week 3. Plato             The Sophist – the corruption of the philosopher

Week 4. Aristotle       On Generation and Corruption – On generation and corruption 1

Week 5. Averroes       The Incoherence of the Incoherence – On generation and corruption 2

Week 6. Augustine     Confessions – The Fall as the corruption of man

Week 7. Machiavelli Discourses – what to do if the Best are just the corrupt rich?

Week 8. Mandeville   Fable of the Bees (1714) – what if corruption wasn’t so bad?

Week 9. Schelling     The State and the corruption of the world

Week 10. Wollstonecraft                   Vindication of the Rights of Women – patriarchy & corruption 1

Week 11. Firestone    The Dialectic of Sex – patriarchy & corruption 2

Week 12. Sortition, Machiavellian and Platonic democracy: anti-corruption in theory & practice (can the aleatic replace the eternal?)

What is corruption? No doubt this is a current and urgent question, but it is not a new one. It is also inherently double: something can both be corrupt and be corrupting; it is unclear whether something can be one, without the other. It may also feel like a problem (as did the movement of the planets) that has escaped, or left behind, philosophy. Isn’t corruption, we might wonder, just an economic, legal, administrative, problem? Unlike the movement of the planets, the mundanity of corruption does not put it past or below philosophy. Arguably, without corruption, there is no European philosophy, at least, not one that we would recognise as such. The death of Socrates on the charges of corrupting the youth (and impiety, but nobody cares about that) shaped European political philosophy (Arendt) but also made the problem of Socrates, the problem of corruption: what is it, what to do about it?

Corruption is one of those multi-valent philosophical concepts that is not content to remain in one domain. Plato and Aristotle begin the demonstration of this claim. Of the two charges brought against Socrates, it is corrupting the youth that has remained fascinating. But corruption isn’t just a problem of-and-for the young. It is also the primary problem of political statecraft. The analysis of the three forms of the state, their inevitable corruption, their conversion into a new form, and the repetition of this very cycle, from which only the philosopher-kings can break, constitutes the climax of the Republic. Finally, there is the figure of the Sophist, who is not merely a corrupt philosopher, but, as The Eleatic Stranger shows, the one who corrupts the distinction between Socrates and the sophist, or sophistry and philosophy itself (or so Deleuze claims, in Difference and Repetition). In Plato, then, the problem of corruption already spans the domains of pedagogy, politics, and philosophy. In Aristotle, we have those same problems again, with the addition of a recognition of corruption as a problem in natural philosophy and the philosophy of nature. Augustine provides us with corruption’s explicitly theological positioning. After the Fall, man (indeed, all of nature) is corrupt; all virtues are now glittering vices and only grace is salvific. 

Machiavelli and Mandeville make a glorious pairing. Whilst Machiavelli is often thought to be quintessentially modern (the pragmatism! the cynicism!) in his concern with corruption and the necessity of virtue to combat it, he is strikingly traditional. Rather, it is Mandeville who must take that dubious plaudit of ‘modern’. Before Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand, it was Mandeville’s ‘Fable of the Bees’ that attempted to de-moralise corruption. What if, Mandeville asks: private vices had public benefits? Does that mean that corruption is good, now? Of course, this stark private/public divide (at the heart of all liberalism) is vigorously contested by feminist thinkers (and we could even suggest that the very public/private distinction is corrupting of certain emancipatory political projects). Before we turn to feminism’s interventions in this problem, we will have a look at Schelling’s final flowering of naturphilosophie and its thinking of the problem of corruption. With the final two thinkers, Wollstonecraft and Firestone, we have feminism’s reworking of, and novel contribution to, the problem: patriarchy as both inherently corrupt and therefore corrupting.

The final week addresses Machiavelli from a different standpoint. If, for Aristotle and Plato, one response to the problem of corruption was the positing of something incorruptible because eternal (or rather, eternal and therefore incorruptible), McCormick’s reading of Machiavelli proposes a turn to the aleatoric (aleatory: a dice throw, the element of chance) as a solution to the practical problems of political corruption. If nothing is predictable or permanent, then can anything then be corrupted? Perhaps surprisingly, we will have to return to Plato, but the Plato of the Laws, not the Republic and another Stranger, this time from Athens, to end this investigation into the uses of sortition as a strategy of counter-corruption.

absolutely unnecessary readings:

As Plato was (probably not) the first to point out: modern technology is corrupting the youth of today. The written word enfeebles and corrupts the memory, so I cannot consistently recommend any reading. As a general rule, my courses neither require, nor need, you to have read any of these texts, this one is no different.

If, however, you wish to embrace your corruption, then I’d have a look at these:

1. Plato Apology – the corruption of youth

• Bartlett, Adam John. 2011. Badiou and Plato: An Education by Truths. Edinburgh: Edinburgh university press.
• Bartlett, Adam John, and Justin Clemens. 2017. What Is Education? Edinburgh: University Press.
• Plato. 2010. The Last Days of Socrates: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo. Translated by Christopher Rowe. London: Penguin.

2. Plato The Republic – the corruption of the state form

• Bloom, Allan. 2016. ‘Interpretative Essay’. In Republic of Plato, by Plato. New York: Basic Books.
• Ladikos, A. 2002. ‘The Ancient Concept of Corruption : A Platonic Interpretation’. Acta Criminologica : African Journal of Criminology & Victimology 15 (2): 141–46. https://doi.org/10.10520/EJC28718.
• Plato. 2016. Republic of Plato. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York: Basic Books.

3. Plato The Sophist – the corruption of the philosopher

• Cassin, Barbara. 2019. Jacques the Sophist: Lacan, Logos, and Psychoanalysis. Translated by Michael Syrotinski. First edition. New York: Fordham University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823285778.
• Deleuze, Gilles. 1994. ‘Chapter One: Difference in Itself’. In Difference and Repetition, translated by Paul Patton. London: Athlone Press.
• Rowe, Christopher. 2015. Plato: Theaetetus and Sophist. Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139047036.

4. Aristotle On Generation and Corruption – On generation and corruption 1

• Aristotle. 1984. ‘On Generation and Corruption’. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by Jonathan Barnes, translated by H. H. Joachim, The Revised Oxford Translation. One Volume Digital Edition. Princeton, N.J: Princeton University Press.
• Haas, Frans A. J. de, and Jaap Mansfeld, eds. 2004. Aristotle On Generation and Corruption, Book 1: Symposium Aristotelicum. Oxford ; New York: Clarendon.
• Irma Kupreeva. 2005. ‘Aristotle on Growth: A Study of the Argument of On Generation and Corruption I 5’. Apeiron 38 (3): 103–60. https://doi.org/10.1515/APEIRON.2005.38.3.103.

5. Averroes The Incoherence of the Incoherence – On generation and corruption 2

• Averroes. 2016. Averroes’ Tahafut al-Tahafut: (The Incoherence of the Incoherence): Volumes I and II. Edited by Simon van den Bergh. London: Gibb Memorial Trust.
• Butterworth, Charles E. 1992. ‘The Political Teaching of Averroes’. Arabic Sciences and Philosophy 2 (2): 187–202. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0957423900001636.
• Moad, Edward. 2023. Coherence of the Incoherence: Between Al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd on Nature and the Cosmos. Gorgias Press. https://doi.org/10.31826/9781463244989.

6. Augustine Confessions – The Fall as the corruption of man

• Augustine. 1998. Confessions. Edited and translated by Henry Chadwick. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Augustine, Saint. 1897. The City of God. Translated by Marcus. Dods. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark.
• Hoffmann, Tobias. 2022. ‘Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Duns Scotus on the First Cause of Moral Evil’. Quaestio 22 (January):407–31. https://doi.org/10.1484/J.QUAESTIO.5.133419.
• Wetzel, James. 2012. ‘Augustine on the Origin of Evil: Myth and Metaphysics’. In Augustine’s City of God: A Critical Guide, edited by James Wetzel, 167–85. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9781139014144.010.

7. Machiavelli Discourses – what to do if the Best are just the corrupt rich?

• Machiavelli, Niccolò. 1975. The Discourses of Niccolò Machiavelli. A new ed. with introduction and Appendices by Cecil H. Clough.[First published 1950]. Vol. 1. Routledge Library Editions. London: Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315002606.
• Maher, Amanda. 2020. ‘The Power of “Wealth, Nobility and Men:” Inequality and Corruption in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories’. European Journal of Political Theory 19 (4): 512–31. https://doi.org/10.1177/1474885117730673.
• McCormick, John P. 2011. Machiavellian Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• Ritner, Scott. 2011. ‘The Concept of Corruption in Machiavelli’s Political Thought’. SSRN Electronic Journal. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1808959.
• Sparling, Robert. 2017. ‘The Concept of Corruption in J.G.A. Pocock’s The Machiavellian Moment’. History of European Ideas 43 (2): 156–70. https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2016.1198074.

8. Mandeville Fable of the Bees (1714) – what if corruption wasn’t so bad?

• Allen, Danielle. 2010. ‘3 : Burning The Fable of the Bees: The Incendiary Authority of Nature’. In The Moral Authority of Nature, edited by Lorraine Daston and Fernando Vidal, 74–99. University of Chicago Press. https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226136820-005.
• Balsemão Pires, Edmundo. 2015. ‘Mandeville and the Eighteenth-Century Discussions About Luxury’. In Bernard de Mandeville’s Tropology of Paradoxes: Morals, Politics, Economics, and Therapy, edited by Edmundo Balsemão Pires and Joaquim Braga, 25–47. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19381-6_3.
• Bernard Mandeville. 1989. The Fable of the Bees. Edited by Phillip Harth. Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics.
• Guion, Béatrice. 2015. ‘The Fable of the Bees: Proles Sine Matre?’ In Bernard de Mandeville’s Tropology of Paradoxes: Morals, Politics, Economics, and Therapy, edited by Edmundo Balsemão Pires and Joaquim Braga, 91–104. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19381-6_7.

9. Schelling The State and the corruption of the world

• Habermas, Jürgen. 2004. ‘Dialectical Idealism in Transition to Materialism: Schelling’s Idea of a Contraction of God and Its Consequences for the Philosophy of History’. In The New Schelling, edited by Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman. London: Continuum. https://doi.org/10.5040/9781472547675.
• Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von, C. (1978) 2001. System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). Virginia: The Universi1y Press Of Virginia.

10. Wollstonecraft Vindication of the Rights of Women – patriarchy & corruption 1

• Howard, Carol. 2004. ‘Wollstonecraft’s Thoughts on Slavery and Corruption’. The Eighteenth Century 45 (1): 61–86.
• Sapiro, Virginia. 1992. A Vindication of Political Virtue: The Political Theory of Mary Wollstonecraft. University of Chicago Press.
• ———. 1997. ‘A Woman’s Struggle for a Language of Enlightenment and Virtue: Mary Wollstonecraft and Enlightenment “Feminism”’. In Perspectives on Feminist Political Thought in European History. Routledge.
• Wollstonecraft, Mary. 1970. A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. Edited by Sylvana Tomaselli. Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

11. Firestone The Dialectic of Sex – patriarchy & corruption 2

• Firestone, Shulamith. 1971. The Dialectic of Sex : The Case for Feminist Revolution. Bantam rev. ed. New York ; London: Bantam Books.
• Merck, M., and S. Sandford, eds. 2010. Further Adventures of the Dialectic of Sex: Critical Essays on Shulamith Firestone. New York, UNITED STATES: Palgrave Macmillan. http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/monash/detail.action?docID=652558.

12. Sortition, Machiavellian & Platonic democracy: anti corruption in theory & practice (can the aleatic replace the eternal?)

• McCormick, John P. 2011. Machiavellian Democracy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
• McGlew, James. 2018. ‘Equality and Sortition in Plato’s Laws’. In Thinking the Greeks, 159–69. Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315616711-12/equality-sortition-plato-laws-james-mcglew.
• Plato. 2005. The Laws. 2 edition. London: Penguin.

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The Future in the Making: From Byung-Chul Han, Mark Fisher and Bifo to Deepfakes, SpaceX and Beyond

Lecturer: Vincent Lê

“We are in need of a great debate about the future!”

– Adam Driver, Megalopolis

Questioning a prevailing contemporary view in philosophy and particularly art that “the future has been cancelled,” this course explores what a renewed philosophy of the future might look like through several case studies of techno-cultural artifacts. By considering cutting-edge developments in social media, virtual reality, deepfakes, robotics, space travel, AI, algorithmic governance and more, as well as their cultural and philosophical ramifications, this course offers a little glimpse of the future in the making, as oftentimes monstrous as it is sublime.

Weeks 1-3. Has the Future Really Been Cancelled?

Before looking forward to the future, the course begins by examining the popular claim—made by Byung-Chul Han, Franco “Bifo” Berardi, Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds among others—which holds that the days of the future are numbered, soon to leave nothing in its wake but a monotonous and immobile present without novelty or surprise.

Suggested readings:

•   Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society, trans. Erik Butler (Standford: Stanford University Press, 2015), pp. 1-34.
•   Franco “Bifo” Berardi, “Futurism and the Reversal of the Future,” https://www.generation-online.org/p/fp_bifo8.htm.
•   Mark Fisher, “‘The Slow Cancellation of the Future,’” in Ghosts of My Life: Writings on Depression, Hauntology and Lost Futures (Winchester: Zero Books, 2014), pp. 2-29.

Suggested songs:

•   Arctic Monkeys, “I Bet You Look Good on the Dance Floor”
•   Goldie, “Terminator”
•   Olivia Rodrigo, “déjà vu”
•   Drake, “Marvin’s Room”
•   Burial, “Pre Dawn”

Weeks 4-5. Simulation Hypotheses

As Han, Bifo, Fisher and Reynolds all identify the internet as one of the leading culprits for why the once heart-racing pulse of the future has become so faint, weeks four to seven will both critically investigate this claim and perform emergency CPR on the future by exploring the current state of cyberspace. Our fourth and fifth weeks will trace a select history of thought experiments claiming we live in a simulation, from Plato’s allegory of the cave to Bostrom’s simulation hypothesis, and particularly Kant’s discovery of the phenomena/noumena distinction as the difference between the way things appear to us and the way they are independently of ourselves. We will explore how recent developments on the internet and social media—along with virtual reality, synthetic drugs, biotechnology and artificial intelligence—turn Kant’s transcendental deduction that we are living in a simulation into a technical proof through the experimental production of alien conditions of life.

Suggested readings:

•   Byung-Chul Han, “Infocracy,” in Infocracy: Digitization and the Crisis of Democracy, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022), eBook.
•   Tom Wheeler, “Connections Have Consequences,” in From Gutenberg to Google: The History of Our Future (Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2019), pp. 11-24.
•   Tom Wheeler, “The History We are Making,” in From Gutenberg to Google, pp. 181-219.

Weeks 6-7. The Deepfakes to Come

The sixth and seventh weeks consider deepfakes, artificial neural nets generating realistic audiovisual simulations of public figures, and their success in passing Turing’s imitation game by deceiving us into believing they are human. Deepfakes are exemplary of a more general technological trend—encompassing social media, sex robots and the blockchain—which see our gadgets and tools only pretending to satisfy our desires so as to lure us into pursuing their own ulterior motives.

Suggested readings:

• Byung-Chul Han, “The Crisis of Representation,” in In the Swarm: Digital Prospects, trans. Erik Butler (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017), pp. 63-65.
• Alan Turing, “Computing Machinery and Intelligence,” in The Essential Turing: Seminal Writings in Computer, Logic, Philosophy, Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Life: Plus the Secrets of Enigma, ed. B. Jack Copeland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 433-463.
• Samantha Cole, “We Are Truly Fucked: Everyone is Making AI-Generated Fake Porn Now,” Vice, January 25, 2018, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/bjye8a/reddit-fake-porn-app-daisy-ridley.
• Jon Christian, “Experts Fear Face Swapping Tech Could Start an International Showdown,” The Outline, February 1, 2018, https://theoutline.com/post/3179/deepfake-videos-are-freaking-experts-out?zd=1&zi=t5kayssn.

Suggested film:

• Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014)

Weeks 8 - 9. The Dionysus Space Program

Bifo has argued that the future is not only a question of exploring the unknown through time, but also across space. This is why space colonization is so often associated with the future: “As long as spatial colonization was underway, as long as the external machine headed toward new territories, a future was conceivable, because the future is not only a dimension of time, but also of space.” In trying to trace such a future, in the eighth and ninth weeks we turn to critically examining the prevailing Hegelian conception of technics as both extensions of man and tools for our self-assertion by hitching a ride with ever more autonomous robots capable of venturing beyond the bounds of our possible experience in uninhabitable disaster zones, battlefields and particularly the cold and hostile void of outer space. In place of the Apollo space program’s archetype of manned spaceflight that defined 20^th century space exploration, we shall see that advances in unmanned spaceflight and privatized space companies like Elon Musk’s SpaceX amount to a Dionysus space program capable of accelerating well beyond the earth’s center of gravity.

Suggested readings:

•   Byung-Chul Han, “Heidegger’s Hand,” in Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022), pp. 70-72.
•   Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy, “Introduction: A False Dichotomy,” in Robots in Space: Technology, Evolution and Interplanetary Travel (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2008), pp. xi-xviii.
•   Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy, “The Human/Robot Debate,” in Robots in Space, pp. 1-31.

Suggested film:

• Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity (2013)

Week 10. Patient AlphaGo Zero

This week looks at how the AI company DeepMind’s Go-playing computer programs were able to defeat the world’s greatest human champions through unprecedented strategies which subvert our dogmatic beliefs that our knowledge exhausts the upper bounds of cunning, imagination and conquest. As we shall see, DeepMind are well on their way to disillusioning our delusions of grandeur in other domains through their AIs’ automation of scientific discovery and superhuman success at war games.

Suggested readings:

•   Byung-Chul Han, “Artificial Intelligence,” in Non-things: Upheaval in the Lifeworld, trans. Daniel Steuer (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2022), pp. 40-44.
•   DeepMind, “Mastering the Game of Go Without Human Knowledge,” in Nature 550, 2017, pp. 354-359.

Suggested film:

• AlphaGo (2017): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y

Weeks 11-12. Seasteading, or How to Escape the Island of Reason

The last two weeks set off from Kant’s metaphor of the island of reason and the noumenal seas to show that, in a time of ecological catastrophe and rising sea levels, we are left with no choice but to abandon the island of reason and journey across the sea. In particular, we must consider the necessity of building ocean cities or “seasteads” that could very well provide the technological means for critiquing all existing forms of governance, as well as the ideas, beliefs and values that reinforce them, by experimenting with new conditions of life on the anarchic open seas.

Suggested readings:

•   Patri Friedman, “Dynamic Geography: A Blueprint for Efficient Government,” Patri Friedman, 2002, https://patrifriedman.com/old_writing/dynamic_geography.html.
•   Patri Friedman and Brad Taylor, “Seasteading: Competitive Governments on the Ocean,” in Kyklos 65, 2, 2015, pp. 218-235.