Summer School 2024

Eight courses taught in-person and online in Jan-Feb.

The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy is proud to present the Summer School 2024 curriculum.  All courses are 10 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..

Summer School Programme

 

Course Descriptions

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808s and Breakthroughs: Blackness as a Blueprint for Navigating the Virtual Age

Lecturer: Kalenga Leon Kalumba

The aim of the course is to look at black thought in America from Fredrick Douglass to Ye (f.ka Kanye West) to see how a ‘paraontological’ nonessentialist understanding of blackness can help us discover new modes of being and assist in distinguishing between the physical material and the virtual immaterial worlds. The course will aim to explore how, in relation to the events of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, black Americans experienced post-modernity four hundred years ago. We will examine how according to modern metrics black Americans exist in a state of exception stripped of any qualifiers that would suggest their humanity such as— language, territory or myth. We will therefore look at how this disposition has placed them in the temporal present, where they are both refused a past and denied a future in normative forms. The course will look at the logocentric tension between presence and absence and illustrate how, upon existing onto-epistemic grounds, blackness is relegated to the realm of nothingness—death.  

Lecture 1 —  Blackness in a state of exception: Foundations of Black Thought within the Western Intellectual Tradition.

In this Lecture we will look at the foundations of Black Thought within the Western Intellectual Tradition. We will explore the notion of Blackness equating to nothingness and non-being as well as the following concepts; presence, absence, whiteness and blackness. This lecture will also focus on the events of the  ‘Middle Passage’ and how it has formed the foundation of Modern Rationalism.

Readings:

• Frederick Douglass’, ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass’ (Chapters 1 and 2)
• W.E.B Dubois’, “ The Souls of Black Folk”  (Chapters 1 and 3)

Lecture 2 — Blackness in the Hold of Nothingness: How Contemporary Schools of Black Thought Understand the Notion of Blackness.

Here we assess how varying contemporary schools of black thought understand the notion of blackness. We will look at how foundational schools of thought Afro-pessimism, Afro-futurism and Afro-optimists interpret the possibility of a black social life. As we familiarise ourselves with some of the central tenets of these respective schools, we will begin to emphasise the need of a non-essentialist form of blackness that has the capacity to affirm life. The lecture will illustrate the dialectical tension between social death and social life. We will explore qualities that blackness attains in the hold of nothingness such as fugitivity, socio-poetics and other  emancipatory activities.

Readings:

• Fred Moten, Blackness and Nothingness (mysticism in the flesh) pp. 737-757
• Fred Moten, Blackness and Nothingness (mysticism in the flesh). Whole text (optional)
• George Shulman, Fred Moten: Critical Theory for Political Theology 2.0  (optional)
  https://politicaltheology.com/fred-moten/ 
• Paul Gilroy, Lecture I Suffering and Infrahumanity and Lecture II Humanities and a new Humanism. (optional)
  https://tannerlectures.utah.edu/_resources/documents/a-to-z/g/Gilroy%20manuscript%20PDF.pdf

Lecture 3 — De-Ontologizing of Blackness Toward a ‘Paraontological’ Framework.

In this week, the aim is to properly introduce the idea of a  “paraontological” mode of being in blackness. Building on the last two lectures, this week will demonstrate how current ontological and epistemological frameworks are unable to recognise alternative modes of being. We will look at how blackness is affirmed through different modes such as the equivocal, univocal, dialogical and analogical. Through the “paraontological” framework we will arrive at a  non-essentialist form of blackness. Then we will explore a necessary theological turn (ascent) to affirm new modes of existing. This will inform the understanding of blackness as an analogical mode of being. The lecture will propose the idea of a contrasting culture that exists outside of the dialectical tension between the dominant culture and its antithetical counter-culture. Lastly, we will look at how ‘paraontological’ blackness pertains the qualities of exponential consciousness and prophecy.

Readings:

• Marquis Bey, The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for Gender (Chapter 2: Paraontology) <https://manifold.umn.edu/read/the-problem-of-the-negro-as-a-problem-for-gender/section/3c938633-32fe-46b6-b167-3823bc7a2260>
• Fred Moten, Blackness and Nothingness (mysticism in the flesh) pp 757-779
• Nahum Chandler, “The Problem of the negro as a Problem for Thought” (Introduction, Chapter 1 and Conclusion)— optional reading

Lecture 4 —  Blackness as a Blueprint for Navigating the ‘Post-Human’ Age.

In this lecture, we will look at how the black slave entered postmodernity 400 years ago. As well as blackness’ occupancy in the temporal present. We will examine how blackness understood via ‘paraontological’ grounds can resurrect new modes of existing with others. We will look at the shift from a visual world, with its attendant sharp boundaries and object-oriented, rigid p.o.v, toward an acoustic world, a complete sphere whose centre is nowhere and margin is everywhere. Lastly, we will explore the utility of ‘paraontological’ blackness in assisting humanity negotiate a hybridised reality—distinguishing between the physical material world and the virtual immaterial realm.

Readings:

• Moten & Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Chapters 3,4,5 & 6) <https://www.minorcompositions.info/wp-content/uploads/2013/04/undercommons-web.pdf>
• McLuhan & Bruce Powers, The Global Village (Chapter 8)
• Annalisa Oboe and Achille Mbembe, Africa and the Night of language — optional
• Nahum Chandler, “Beyond this Narrow, Now” or delimitations of W.E.B Du Bois. (introduction) <https://www.dukeupress.edu/Assets/PubMaterials/978-1-4780-1480-5_601.pdf> optional   

Lecture 5 — How Ye (f.k.a Kanye West) Captures a Form of Blackness via Paraontological Frames.

This final lecture will focus on how Ye presents a renewed perspective of blackness that resists ontology and presents new modes of being. We will look at how key tensions within Western intellectualism are captured by Ye’s discography. We will separate his discography into three distinct epochs, the “Dialectical”, the “Hyperreal”, and “Metanoia”, and we will assess how his work has the potential to disrupt the dialectical tension between ethics and aesthetics. Lastly, we will take a reinvigorated look at the idea of art as a form of revelation as opposed to being merely ‘work’.

Readings:

• Music and Interviews - links to be provided 
• Driscoll, Christopher, and Monica R. Miller. “Niggas in Paris?: Traveling between the ‘Who’ and ‘What’ of Diaspora in the Study of African American Religion.” Journal of Africana Religions 4, no. 1 (2016): 28–53. https://doi.org/10.5325/jafrireli.4.1.0028.
• Monica R Miller, “God of the New Slaves or Slave to the ideas of Religion and God”
• Giorgio Agamben, Man without content pp 13-27 <https://anarch.cc/uploads/giorgio-agamben/man-without-content.pdf>

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Introduction to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas: Ethics as First Philosophy and the Image

Lecturer: John Lechte

The course, as well as providing a background to Levinas’s philosophy in relation to Husserl and Heidegger, will carry out a reading of Levinas’s key texts, Totality and Infinity and Otherwise than Being. The focus, in the first instance, will be on the meaning of ‘ethics as first philosophy’ as revealed through an explication of key concepts. Secondly, the course will address the relation between the ethical and the political in Levinas’s philosophy. Some attention will thus be given to defining the ‘political’. The terms ‘immanence’ and ‘transcendence’ as Levinas understands them will be explained. 

In the latter part of the course the implications will be set out of Levinas’s view of the image, ethics and art. In one sense, for Levinas, the image, ethically speaking, is a mistaken view of the face of the other. This is the image as pure immanence.  The image is also important because, as regards totality, it is the part that reflects the whole.

Finally, we want to know whether Levinas’s approach to the image means that images as evidence are rendered problematic. 

Lecture One

This lecture will, firstly, provide background on Levinas’s early philosophical career. His studies with Husserl in Germany in the 1930s will be outlined as well as his attendance at Heidegger’s seminar. Levinas’s involvement with Husserl’s Cartesian Meditations in Paris in 1929 will be described. His relationship with Sartre in 1948 on the question of art and the image will be referred to briefly. To be explained is the significance of each of these events for Levinas’s later work. The idea of ethics as first philosophy will be introduced with the question: Is Levinas simply giving a transcendental account of ethics?

Reading:

• Levinas, E. (1999) Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith, London: Athlone Press, 97-109.
• Levinas, E. (2000) ‘Freiburg, Husserl and Phenomenology’ (1929) in Discovering Existence with Husserl, trans. Richard Cohen and Michael B. Smith, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 32-38. 
• Levinas, E. (1985) ‘Heidegger’ in Conversations with Philippe Nemo, trams. Richard A Cohen, Ann Arbor: Duquesne University Press, 37-44. 
• Robbins, Jill, ed. (2001) Is it Righteous To Be? Interviews with Emmanuel Levinas, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 31-40.   
• Burggraeve, Roger (1997) ‘Emmanuel Levinas: Thinker between Jerusalem and Athens
  A Philosophical Biography’, Journal of Social Philosophy, 28 (1), 110-126. 

Lecture Two

In this lecture, an explication will be given of key terms of Levinas’s philosophy. The opposition that is of crucial significance is that between ontology (where being is a totality) and ethics as first philosophy and the basis of the absolute Other.  In other words, Levinas develops his philosophy via a critique of Heidegger’s Being and Time.  The key terms to be explicated include: ethics (as first philosophy) with a brief comparison with other approaches to ethics (e.g. Spinoza and Kant and the notion of ‘ought’); ontology; ‘here I am’ (me voici); the same; ‘egology’; totality; face; Other; responsibility; infinity; immanence; transcendence; exteriority; substitution; expression; war.

We will see from an explication of these terms that ethics is not self-focused; it is not about what one should do, even less is it about what the other should do. Of equal significance is the notion that Western philosophy has, according to Levinas, hitherto been dominated by the order of the Same, making it an ‘egology’ that shuts out the Other, infinity, exteriority, the Good and transcendence, in favour of finitude, the ego-self, interiority, or immanence and freedom. To be noted is that the latter grouping of terms is specific to the nature of the political and it is the latter to which we will turn in the next lecture.

Reading:

• Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 21-30; 33-52; 187-201
• Levinas, E. (1998a) Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 114-115. 
• Levinas, Emmanuel (1999) Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith, London: The Athlone Press, 3-37. Levinas, E. (1998b) Entre Nous: On Thinking-of-the-Other, trans. Michael B. Smith and Barbara Harshav, London: The Athlone Press, 8-10; 11-15; 161-6.
• Kant, Immanueal (1998) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 19-47.
• Spinoza, Benedict de (1955) ‘Of Human Bondage or the Strength of the Emotions’ in The Chief Works of Benedict de Spinoza, trans. R.H.M. Elwes, New York: Dover, 187-236.

Lecture Three 

A full appreciation of the significance of ‘ethics as first philosophy’, requires that the nature of the political be understood. Violence is implicated here. The origins of thinking the political will be briefly recalled – from Heraclitus to Hobbes and Rousseau – summarised in large part by the myth of ‘the social contract’. Also, Hannah Arendt’s concept of the polis needs to be considered, along with her notion of the political as freedom. The point here is to show that the nature of the political – the political as enacted today – runs counter to ethics as understood by Levinas. It will be argued that, contrary to the view of certain commentators, there is no easy transition from ethics to politics even if the reality of the political must always be acknowledged. 

The key points as regards the political are: 1) from the Greeks (Heraclitus): war (polemos) as the natural condition of the human thus needs to be controlled – recall, too: ‘war is politics by other means’ (Clausewitz). 2) The state of nature in social contract theory is a state of freedom (but also of violence) for the individual. 3) Freedom is essentially political freedom. 

Reading:

• Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 21-2, 64.
• Levinas, Emmanuel (1999) Alterity and Transcendence, trans. Michael B. Smith, London: The Athlone Press, 121-30; 145-9. 
• Levinas, E. (1998a) Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 121-29.
• Arendt, H. (2005) The Promise of Politics, New York: Schocken Books, 108-123.
• Schmitt, Carl (2007) The Concept to the Political, trans. George Schwab, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 19-53.
• Martin Oppelt: ‘Thinking the World Politically (interview with Chantal Mouffe)’, ZPTh Jg. 5, Heft 2/2014, S. 263–277

Lecture Four

This lecture examines Levinas’s approach to the image prompting two lines of inquiry. The first is the image as referred to in the articulation of ethics as first philosophy. This will include an interpretation of Levinas’s notion of ‘trace’. The second is the image in art. In this respect attention will be given to the 1948 text, ‘Reality and its Shadow’ published in Les Temps Modernes. What we want to know is whether Levinas’s approach to the image is operational. What, for example, are its implications as regards the Shoah? 

Reading:

• Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 50-1, 297-98.
• Levinas, E. (1998a) Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 29, 61, 87, 89, 93-4,  
• Levinas, E (1986) ’The Trace of the Other’, trans. by Alphonso Lingis from ‘La trace de 1’autre’ (1963) (in: Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 25 (3), 605-23, and in Levinas, E. (1974) En découvrant 1’existence avec Husserl et Heidegger, 187-202, Paris: Vrin, in: M. Taylor (ed.), Deconstruction in Context, 345-59, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 
• Saxton, Libby (2007) ‘Fragile Faces: Levinas and Lanzmann’, Film-Philosophy, 11 (2), 1–14.

Lecture Five

In this concluding lecture, an attempt will be made to determine what it might mean to adopt a Levinasian position in ethics. Does it make sense to speak in these terms? What has been outlined in Lectures One and Two is relevant here in as far as ethics should not be understood as a set of rules to be applied to the self and to others, or simply as an account of ethics.  If we interpret the ‘here I am’ (me voici) in a quasi-religious sense, it could well refer to Levinas himself. Thus, one may well be witnessing Levinas’s own ethical struggle. The issue arising, however, is that the role of philosophy is not accounted for in the notion of ‘ethics as first philosophy’.  To be determined is whether, for Levinas, philosophy is, ultimately, essentially Western philosophy. If so, there seems to be no way out. However, there are the following lines of inquiry that will be examined in the lecture: 1) philosophy as ‘awakening’; 2) philosophy as ‘saying’ rather than the ‘said’; 3) philosophy as a theoretical discourse; 4) philosophy as the idea that comes to mind; 5) philosophy as dialogue; and 6) ‘contesting of the philosophical privilege of being’ (OTB 18).  These lines of inquiry are what truly call on us to think. 

Reading:

• Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 40, 48-9,
• Levinas, E. (1998a) Otherwise than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. Alphonso Lingis, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: Duquesne University Press, 18, 114, 120, 146, 149, 152, 155, 161-2, 165, 169, 183, 185.
• Levinas, E. (1998) Discovering Existence with Husserl and Heidegger, trans. Richard A. Cohen and Michael B. Smith, Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 153-179.

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Nietzsche’s Will to Power

Lecturer: Vincent Lê

This course provides an in-depth look at Nietzsche’s infamous but often misunderstood doctrine of “the will to power” by reconstructing how it is presented, developed and refined in his published works, his unpublished notebooks and contemporary Nietzsche scholarship. In doing so, the course also aims to show how the doctrine can still be of use today in drawing out overlooked critical insights and important stakes in contemporary philosophical debates and discussions around questions of agency, free will, ethics and the nature of intelligence.

Lecture 1 — Why Will to Power Today?

Before directly focusing on Nietzsche, the first lecture sets out to show how his often-dismissed doctrine of the will to power can still be relevant in our contemporary philosophical conjuncture. In particular, we will look at how the doctrine can be productively contrasted almost point by point with prominent contemporary philosopher Nick Bostrom’s theory of intelligent agency such as the latter is based on two key theses. Firstly, Bostrom’s central “orthogonality thesis” holds that intelligence is a sheer capacity or purely instrumental power that agents can use in the pursuit of virtually any goal of their choosing. Secondly, his other central “instrumental convergence thesis” holds that intelligent agents are likely to pursue certain subgoals or “basic drives” like “self-preservation,” “goal-content integrity,” “cognitive enhancement,” “creativity” and “resource acquisition” as the universally necessary means of pursuing any other primary goals they might have. As we will see, Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power exhibits some striking similarities with Bostrom’s account of intelligent agency, but also significant and insightful differences that raise important implications, questions and stakes.

Reading:

• Nick Bostrom, “The Superintelligent Will: Motivation and Instrumental Rationality in Advanced Intelligent Agents,” in Minds and Machines 22, 2, 2012, pp. 1-14,  https://www.nickbostrom.com/superintelligentwill.pdf

Lecture 2 — The Will to Power in the Published Works

The second lecture introduces Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power by tracing its appearance in his published works, from its earliest anticipations in the “pessimism of strength,” the “feeling of power” and the “drive for knowledge” mentioned in his early and middle period works, to its explicit development in the post-Thus Spoke Zarathustra writings. In particular, I draw out the way it is conceived in the published works as a drive of all humans and perhaps even all life that is even more fundamental than our instinct for self-preservation as we strive to distinguish ourselves from others by amassing ever more power and performing ever greater feats of mastery and strength.

Reading:

• Friedrich Nietzsche, “On a Thousand and One Goals” and “Self-Overcoming,” in Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, eds. Adrian Del Caro and Robert B. Pippin, trans. Adrian Del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 42-44, 88-90.

Lecture 3 — Interpreting the Will to Power

The third lecture considers some of the major scholarly interpretations of the will to power as both a psychological and a metaphysical doctrine before siding with a metaphysical (as well as constitutivist) reading of the will to power as a universal and quasi-normative drive that all goal-directed agents are committed to pursuing simply by virtue of pursuing any action at all.

Reading:

• Maudemarie Clark and David Dudrick, “Introduction,” in The Soul of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 1-10.
• Paul Katsafanas, “Introduction,” in Agency and the Foundation of Ethics: Nietzschean Constitutivism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. 1-5.
• Tsarina Doyle, “Introduction,” in Nietzsche’s Metaphysics of the Will to Power: The Possibility of Value (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), pp. 1-16.

Lecture 4 — The Will to Power in the Unpublished Notebooks

By comparing and contrasting Bostrom’s basic drives to be creative, cognitively enhance oneself and acquire resources with at least some of the several ways in which Nietzsche speculates about the doctrine in his unpublished 1880s notebooks, the fourth lecture explores the hypothesis that the will to power might be a fundamental drive because it is the necessary, universal means of pursuing any other end. It is here that we draw out a key difference between what we might call Bostrom’s weak instrumental convergence thesis and a more Nietzschean inspired strong instrumental convergence thesis. As we look at in the first lecture, Bostrom holds that intelligence, creativity and resource optimization are the universally useful but secondary means of pursuing any other more primary ends of our choosing. Drawing on Nietzsche’s doctrine of the will to power, this lecture instead considers the stronger hypothesis that any other ends we might have are just the contingent means of getting us to pursue power—as inflected through Bostrom’s basic drives to mean intelligence, creativity and resource optimization—as our primary end. 

Reading:

• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Selections from the Notebooks of the 1880s, ed. R. Kevin Hell, trans. R. Kevin Hill and Michael A. Scarpitti (London: Penguin Books, 2017), sections 666-715, pp. 374-406.

Lecture 5 — Loose Ends

In the fifth and final lecture, we will see that, unlike Bostrom’s other basic self-preservation drive, Nietzsche denies that self-preservation is as fundamental as the will to power—qua intelligence, creativity and resource optimization—on the basis that it can just as well impede the latter as it can facilitate it. This reconstruction of Nietzsche’s will to power and comparative study with Bostrom’s basic drives will then permit us to conclude the course by critically examining Bostom’s conception of agency as being devoid of any fundamental values, norms, ends or goals. According to an alternative Nietzschean model of intelligent agents, Bostrom might just be overlooking the potential for ever more advanced intelligences to pursue neither the ends we gave them or our freely chosen ends, but to pursue power an ultimate end in itself.

Reading:

• Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power: Selections from the Notebooks of the 1880s, ed. R. Kevin Hell, trans. R. Kevin Hill and Michael A. Scarpitti (London: Penguin Books, 2017), sections 666-715, pp. 374-406.

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Being and Time in 5 Weeks

Lecturer: Ingo Farin

Martin Heidegger is easily the most controversial philosopher in the 20th century. One of the best introductions to his thought is his early work Being and Time (1927). In this course we set ourselves a very ambitious goal, namely to read and discuss the ideas laid out in Being and Time – in just five weeks. The emphasis is on the discussion of the primary text by Heidegger, but references to main interpretative lines in the vast secondary literature will occasionally be consulted. For each session I will provide a summary of the main points and then open it up for debate among the participants of the course. Participants can decide for themselves how much of the readings they want to work through for each week – the weekly meetings are not dependent on everyone reading everything. The main point is to understand Heidegger and relate his thoughts to our very changed situation in the 21st century.

There are two English translations of Being and Time available, the one by Joan Stambaugh or the earlier one by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. Joan Stambaugh’s translation is now also available in a revised edition by Dennis J. Schmidt. For our purposes, any of the versions will do. I will occasionally look at the German original. If you don’t want to buy the book, you can still follow the discussion, as I will have slides and short write-ups to help us along in the discussion. Alternatively, you may plan on reading or re-reading the bulk of the book on your own, after the course.    

Lecture  One – Introduction to Heidegger & Heidegger’s Philosophy & Being and Time 

I will give a short overview over Heidegger’s philosophy and situate Being and Time within Heidegger’s long career and within the broader philosophical scene in the 20th century. We will then discuss §§ 1-5, and §§ 9-13 in detail. I will give a quick summary of §§ 6-13 (which are not required). Key concepts: Dasein, Being.  

Reading: 

• BT, §§ 1-5 and 9-13 comprise the basic reading 
• § 6-8 can be easily skipped. 

Week Two – Dasein, Being, and Being-in-the-World  

This week is devoted to Heidegger’s key concept of the world and being-in-the-world, as well as the concepts of authentic and inauthentic being, being with others, idle talk, ambiguity, and fallenness. I will give an overview over the decidedly secular approach in Heidegger and explain how Heidegger departs from traditional metaphysics. 

Reading:

• §§ 14-38 
• § 17 & 19-21 can be skipped, as well as § 33

Week Three – Care

This week is devoted to Heidegger’s analyses of the fundamental structure of care, anxiety, the disclosure of the world, projection, and truth. I will make sure that we get all the important ideas on board without making it too technical.

Reading:

• § 39-44  
• 43 can be skipped; §44 is hard and will be revisited after the end of the course. 

Week Four — Authentic Dasein: Death, Conscience, and Resoluteness  

This is the heart of Heidegger’s analysis and what has been quite influential in what has been called existentialism (Heidegger always disliked the term and never adopted it as a name for his own philosophy).   

Reading: 

• § 45-66

Week Five: Temporality, History, Science and the Meaning of Being in General  

Reading:

• § 67-83
• §82-83 are a bit technical and not so essential to the book, but I will give the gist of Heidegger’s ideas in these sections.

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The Philosophy of Madness

Lecturer: Cynthia Cruz

Taking as our point of departure Derrida and Foucault’s tangled discourse on Descartes’ concept of madness, we will move to Hegel who tells us in the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences that madness, rather than being a state in which only some find themselves, is a latent possibility for all. As Hegel writes, each of us must enter into madness every time we acquire knowledge. This space between, this moment of disorientation, is a state subjects can also fall into when one’s world comes undone. Indeed, in both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel provides the French Revolution as an example of such a state of madness, connecting political and social events to the madness of individuals. This is not far from Freud’s argument in Civilisation and its Discontents that neurosis is a symptom of what he calls civilisation, or what we might call capitalism. We will also examine the concept of the fetish, turning to Freud and Marx’s writing on the topic. Next, we turn to madness as figured by Eric Santner’s work on Judge Daniel Paul Schreber, the subject of Freud’s famous Schreber case. In our final week we will look at the fetish and fetishistic disavowal and the ways this type of ‘not-knowing-what-one-knows’ allows one to both simultaneously know, yet not know, the reality of the precarious situation we find ourselves in.

Week One – Introduction to course  

In this week’s discussion we will examine the dispute between Foucault and Derrida, from which the following questions arise: How ought we speak of madness? Can we speak of madness without marginalisation? Where does madness originate? What is the distinction between the I and the Subject? We will also touch on Hegel’s notion of pure being, the I and the subject, and Lacan’s concept of subjective destitution. 

Readings: 

• Descartes, Meditation One: Concerning Those Things That Can be Called into Doubt
• Foucault, excerpt: The History of Madness
• Derrida, Cogito and the History of Madness
• Hegel, excepts: Encyclopaedia and Philosophy of Mind

Week Two – Hegel: Madness and Habit

According to Hegel, each time a subject acquires a new habit, they must necessarily move through a moment of madness. Madness is, as such, latent within us all. But because habit also has the ability to sublate madness, Hegel posits habit as a means to treat madness. And yet, habit, though it liberates, also has death within it, and it therefore also has the potential to bring about a death-like existence; while madness, in its radical disorientation, presents a moment where spirit is without a nature, and thus is absolutely free. 

Readings:

• Hegel, excerpt: Philosophy of Spirit
• Slavoj Žižek, Discipline Between Two Freedoms—Madness and Habit in German Idealism

Week Three – The French Revolution and Madness 

Foucault suggests that the French Revolution marks the beginning of modern madness. For Hegel, madness can occur as the result of “a stroke of great misfortune, by a derangement of someone’s individual world, or by the violent upheaval and coming-out-of-joint of the universal state of the world.” Hegel provides the French Revolution as an example, of which he writes, “many people became insane by the collapse of almost all civil relationships”. Thus, Hegel connects madness with the social, an analysis akin to Freud’s concept of neurosis as symptom of civilisation, or capitalism, from his text Civilisation and its Discontents. 

Readings:

• Hegel, excerpt: Phenomenology of Spirit: Absolute Freedom and Terror 
• Rebecca Comay, excerpt: Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution 

Week Four – Judge Daniel Paul Schreber & the Charge  

The case of Judge Daniel Paul Schreber has been studied and remarked upon by numerous thinkers including Freud and Lacan. This is due to the case’s standing as a paradigm for modern madness. Schreber had a psychotic break after being appointed as a judge, an event Eric Santner suggests is connected to what Santner calls a “crisis of investiture,” an act of symbolic investiture that proves to be too much. What is this “too-muchness”? How does this libidinal quality enter into society and alter subjectivity? How does this, in turn, alter madness (perversion, hysteria, and psychosis)?

Readings: 

• Eric Santner, The Rebranding of Sovereignty in the Age of Trump: Toward a Critique of Manatheism 

Week Five – The Fetish

Marx and Freud’s concepts of the fetish present a form of fiction that allows for a covering over, rather than a repression of, reality. With fetishistic disavowal, rather than the truths that exist within our unconscious that we do not have conscious access to– where what we know but do not know exists, what we have is a truth we know but do not know due to fetishistic disavowal, a disavowing that allows us to immediately forget what we know. This form of not-knowing allows us to, therefore, function in what would otherwise be intolerable situations.

Readings: 

• Marx, excerpt: Capital Vol. I 
• Freud, excerpt: Three Essays on Sexuality
• Alenka Zupančič, Perverse Disavowal and the Rhetoric of the End

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Embodiment and Feminist Theory

Lecturer: Francesca Ferrer-Best

The question of how the gendered body takes up and inhabits space is a longstanding feminist preoccupation, spanning decades-long discussions across disciplines from phenomenology, to geography, to affect studies. This course will explore feminist thought on this question from Simone de Beauvoir to Stacy Alaimo, encouraging students to think critically about the ways in which we inhabit and move through the world. Each week’s lecture will be based predominantly on one reading, either a book chapter or a journal article. Throughout the lecture there will be opportunities for discussion and engagement.   

Lecture One – The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir 

Women’s inhabitation of both object and subject positions are central to de Beauvoir’s work. We will explore the implications of this tension and consider the terms “transcendence” and “immanence”, and what they might mean for the gendered body.

Readings: 

• de Beauvoir, Simone. “Chapter 12: The Woman in Love”, The Second Sex. Vintage Arrow, 2015 (originally published 1949).

Lecture Two – “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality” by Iris Marion Young 

Young builds on de Beauvoir’s engagement with the gendered body as an object of phenomenological (and existential) concern. Young develops an analysis of women’s comportment and motility that accounts for the impact of their being watched and policed from a young age, while boys are encouraged to “roam and explore” (44). Like de Beauvoir, Young theorises that women conceive of themselves as “object as well as subject”, which leads to a process of interrupted action in their constant awareness that “one will be gazed upon as mere body, as shape and flesh that presents itself as the potential object of another subject’s intentions and manipulations, rather than as a living manifestation of action and intention” (44).

Readings: 

• Young, Iris Marion. “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment, Motility, and Spatiality”, On Female Body Experience: “Throwing Like a Girl” and Other Essays. Oxford University Press, 2005 (originally published 1980), pp. 27-45.

Week Three – “Situated Knowledges” by Donna Haraway

Following from Young, Haraway offers a different avenue for challenging the notion of an objective subject position. We will also focus on what Haraway’s understanding of “prosthesis” has to offer a feminist philosophy of embodiment. 

Readings: 

• Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575-599. 

Week Four - “Volatile Bodies” by Elizabeth Grosz 

Elizabeth Grosz takes the feminist question of the gendered body in space further still. She provides an overview of psychoanalytic and phenomenological investigations of the body via Freud and Merleau-Ponty, through to the “inscriptive and productive functioning” of social bodies from Nietzsche, Foucault, Lingis, and Deleuze and Guattari. In doing so, she constructs a framework that acknowledges what all of these theorists might have to offer, but concentrates on sexual difference, as opposed to proclaiming a position that would exist outside of it. Grosz’s hypothesis is that “women’s corporeality is inscribed as a mode of seepage” (203). She describes this “inscribed” feminine corporeality as that which leaks beyond containment, simultaneously permeable and encroaching.

Readings: 

• Grosz, Elizabeth. “Sexed Bodies”, Volatile Bodies. Taylor & Francis, 1994, pp. 187-210.

Lecture Five – “Trans-Corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature” by Stacy Alaimo 

Contemporary feminisms have carried out their theoretical critique of the body through developing a richer understanding of space itself, where space is understood to be neither inert or empty. In this lecture, we examine how Stacey Alaimo takes up “toxic bodies”—pollutants and chemicals—as vivid examples of the trans-corporeal nature of being human, and of materiality itself.

Readings: 

• Alaimo, Stacy. “Trans-corporeal Feminisms and the Ethical Space of Nature”, in Material Feminisms, (eds) Stacy Alaimo and Susan Heckman. Indiana University Press, 2008, pp. 237-264.

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A Critique of Keynesian Rationality: From Philosophy, to Ethics, to Macroeconomic Management

Lecturer: Austin Hayden Smidt

This course will argue that to understand Keynes is to understand how his philosophy of time is inseparable from his ethical philosophy, which grounds his economic theory in the pursuit of the good society through the management of the future. Essentially, the course is broken down into two parts. In Part 1, we address the ethical and temporal foundations of Keynes’ philosophical orientation, as it is his philosophical concerns for the future well-being of the nation and the good that guide his economic theory. This informs Keynes’ desire to construct a future good society in economic terms by managing the future itself. Then, in Part 2, we discuss how the construction of a future good society in economic terms occurs by managing the future via a modal operation of economic management as an ongoing communicative activity through institutions and subjects. By the end of the course, we will have painted a picture of Keynesian theory defined as an ethics of macroeconomic rationality. This is because Keynes is a moral theorist, centrally concerned with the philosophical pursuit of the good in the form of national well-being. This occurs for Keynes through the management of an uncertain future by technical instruments, put in the hands of those charged with mitigating the consequences that such uncertainty presents. The importance of this is to understand the philosophical underpinning of a dominant mode of economic thinking and practice operative in our world today. What is more, by understanding precisely how Keynesian theory feeds directly into a legitimation of macroeconomic management, we can see how macroeconomic institutions justify their actions in and over the world in various ways. We will close the course by briefly discussing practical examples highlighting precisely how this process occurs.

Lecture One – The Philosophical Foundations of Keynesian Political Economy 

This week will focus on the philosophical influences on Keynes, particularly the work of G.E. Moore and J.M. McTaggart. The foundations of Keynes' political economic theory are rooted in his ethical concerns for the construction of the good society which were greatly influenced by the meta-ethical work of Moore. Further, Keynes’ fascination with the unknowable future can be traced to the influence of McTaggart’s thesis on the unreality of time. We close the week by asking if Keynes is best understood as a Platonist, an Aristotelean, or perhaps both.

Readings – selected pages from:

• G. E. Moore, Principia Ethica
• McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time”
• Keynes, The Essential Keynes

Lecture Two – Keynes’ Economic Management of The Future

Once we understand the philosophical foundations that ground Keynes’ inquiry into the construction of a good society, we will explore how his economic theory is essentially concerned with mitigating the consequences that come from our inability to know the future and the concurrent ethical mandate to secure as bright a future as possible for the nation despite the certainty that the future is fraught with uncertainty. This, for example, explains how he understands the role of money and liquidity preference as providing a link between the present and future, and helps explain the rationale behind hoarding liquidity as a security measure. Further, this sheds light on his view of the uncertain future as not being merely an epistemological limitation that can be calculated away by risk management or other such financial technologies, but as an ontological feature of reality itself.

Readings – selected pages from:

• Keynes, The Essential Keynes
• Selected passages/quotes from the literature (Robinson, Lavoie, Madsen, Chick and Dow, Skidelsky, Davidson, etc)

Lecture Three – The Rationality of Technocratic Sovereignty: Macroeconomic Management of the Future 

Understanding Keynes’ concern to manage the future, and understanding how he views the irreducible uncertainty of the future as an ontological feature, allows us to understand how and why Keynesian theory justifies technocratic sovereignty through macroeconomic management. This week will recap what we’ve learned so far by tying the first two weeks together and also exploring the logic of Keynesian macroeconomic management as a necessary activity of institutions who are able to use economic models to aim towards the creation of the good society, which is by mitigating the negative consequences that are the direct result of the certainty of varying degrees of fraught futures. 

Readings – selected pages from:

• Keynes, The Essential Keynes
• Martijn Konings, Capital and Time
• Paul Livingston, The Politics of Logic
• Selected passages from the literature

Week Four – Macrofoundations of Micro: The Modal Logic of Macroeconomic Rationality

This week is the most speculative of the weeks, suggesting that the form that Keynesian technocratic sovereignty takes is an ongoing communicative modal activity. Essentially, what this means is that it is a system of giving and asking for reasons. To say, for example, “central banks inject liquidity into the market” is a statement that has empirical content. A modal expression that makes explicit the rules implicit in this first empirical claim might be something like “in order to prop up asset prices.” This latter modal expression reveals certain rules that frame thought and practice in relation to the original proposition. The modal claim does not add external truth to the original claim, but serves as the inferential license to make the original claim from, for example, the perspective of political economic analysis. We close the lesson by looking at how balance sheet operations are one of the key technological operations that use this modal style of ongoing communication. We appeal to the work of post-Keynesian Hyman Minsky to make this clear.

Readings – selected pages from:

• Keynes, The Essential Keynes
• Robert Brandom, “Modal Kant-Sellars Thesis”
• Further selected passages from the literature (Sellars, Minsky, Konings, Culham)

Lecture Five – Recap and Practical Examples

In the final week, we will do a full recap and attempt to weave the various threads together into a single logical map for the class, so that we can see how each of the topics discussed from week one through to week four inform one another. Then, we will close by looking at practical examples from the media that demonstrate precisely how these theoretical musings are played out in real-world economic discussions and policy

Readings/Media: TBD

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Camus’ Absurdism and African Perspectives on the Question of Life’s Meaning

Lecturer: Augustine Obi

In The Myth of Sisyphus (1975), Albert Camus famously claims that human life is absurd and will remain so. Camus explains that the absurd is the futility of humanity’s yearning for meaning in a world that is highly incomprehensible and devoid of God. For Camus, the only legitimate response to the absurdity of life is to wholeheartedly embrace meaninglessness, epitomised by the Ancient Greek mythological figure of Sisyphus. 

This course will concern the following question: if the world is meaningless and absurd, as Camus boldly asserts, how does Camus’ absurdism compare with the African philosophical perspectives on human existence? What exactly would constitute an African response to Albert Camus’ idea of absurdity, and where might African reflections on the meaning of life sit in relation to canonical philosophical literature? Through exploring these questions, this course will attempt to investigate the question of life’s meaning from a primarily African philosophical perspective. 

The course commences with a survey of Albert Camus’ position that our lives are absurd. Then, we will assess different theories of the meaningfulness of life informed by the indigenous sub-Saharan African philosophical tradition. Ultimately, the course is purposed to provoke a discourse around Camus’ conception of the absurd, using the different theories of meaning in African philosophy to demonstrate how Camus’ absurdism and African theories of meaning are at odds, and how each of the African theories of meaning can align with concepts from other philosophical traditions to merit global philosophical attention.

Lecture One – Analysing Camus’ Absurdism 

The course will begin by providing a detailed analysis of Camus’ conception of absurdism as seen in his essay, The Myth Sisyphus. By giving a detailed exposition of Camus’ absurdism, we will see how Camus popularised absurdism by claiming that the world is irrational, and that what is absurd is humanity’s confrontation of this irrational world, and humanity’s primitive yearning to make sense of it. Camus illustrates his conception of the absurd “with a striking image of the human fate: Sisyphus endlessly pushing his rock up the mountain only to see it roll back down each time he gains the top” (Aronson 2011). For Camus, what this means is that “life had no meaning, that nothing exists that could ever be a source of meaning, and hence there is something deeply absurd about the human quest to find meaning” (Macguire 2015).

Readings: 

• Aronson, R. 2011. “Albert Camus.” In: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by E. N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2017/entries/camus/
• Camus, Albert. 1975. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, Trans. J. O’Brien. New York: Penguin.
• Macguire, L. 2015. “Camus and Absurdism.” Philosophy Talk, 27 February. https:// www,philosophytalk.org/blog/camus-and-absurdity
• Mlungwana, Yoliswa. 2020. An African Response to Absurdism. South African Journal of Philosophy, 39:2, 140-152. https://doi.org/10.1080/02580136.2020.1771823
• Mlungwana, Yolanda., 2020. An African Approach to the Meaning of Life. South African Journal of Philosophy, 39(2), pp. 153-165.

Lecture Two – African Approaches to the Meaning Of Life: African Conceptions of Personhood and the Question of Meaning

After assessing Camus’ conception of absurdism, the successive lectures will explore how characteristically African theories of meaning provide a contrasting response to Camus’ position. In this second lecture, we will consider the link between African conceptions of personhood and the question of life’s meaning. Specifically, we will engage with and beyond leading African scholars (like Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye) who claim that personhood is earned, not normatively given at birth, and that achieving personhood can inevitably lead to a meaningful life. Thus, to be a person, individuals must convert and hone their innate raw capacities to acquire moral excellence–to live a meaningful life is to build the capacities that enable one to live a satisfactory level of moral excellence.

Readings:

• Molefe, M., 2020. Personhood and a Meaningful Life in African Philosophy. South African Journal of Philosophy, 39(2), pp. 194-207.
• Ifeanyi Menkiti, ‘Person and Community in African Traditional Thought’ in African Philosophy: An Introduction, R. A. Wright (ed) (Lanham: University Press of America, 1984).
• Micheal Onyebuchi Eze, Ubuntu: Ideology or Promise?” in Exploring Humanity: Intercultural Perspectives on Humanism, National University of Taiwan Press: 247-259

Lecture Three: The African Vital Force Theory of Meaning

Having seen how the African conception of personhood is tied to the question of life’s meaning, lecture three will attempt to appeal to the African theory of vital force to ground a theory of life’s meaning. First popularised by Placide Tempels, in African normative thought, vital force is an imperceptible energy–the animating soul or essence that “inheres in everything in the universe in varying degrees and complexities” (Metz, T, 2020). When it comes to life’s meaning, the prevailing thought in the African philosophical literature is that vital force implicates affect, and thus can either be maximised or diminished. As we will see, a meaningful life is one that maximises one’s life force and the life force of others, and any failure to promote this vital force diminishes existence, and in so, doing leads to a meaningless life.

Readings: 

• Agada, A., 2020. The African vital force theory of meaning in life. South African Journal of Philosophy, 39(2), pp. 100-112.
• Attoe, A., 2020. Guest Editor’s Introduction: African Perspectives to the question of Life’s Meaning. South African Journal of Philosophy, 39(2), pp. 93-99.
• Attoe, A., 2020. A Systematic Account of African Conceptions of the Meaning of/in Life. South African Journal of Philosophy, 39(2), pp. 127-139.
• Gyekye, K., 1992. Person and Community in Akan Thought. In: K. Wiredu & K. Gyekye, eds. Person and Community. Washington D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, pp. 101-122.
• Metz, T., 2020. African Theories of Meaning in Life: A Critical Assessment. South African Journal of Philosophy, 39(2), pp. 113-126.
• Tempels, P., 1959. Bantu Philosophy. Paris: Presence Africaine.

Lecture Four: Ubuntu: Communal Nortive Function Theory Of Meaning

In the fourth class, we will examine African communal normative function theories of meaning (Attoe, 2020). We will consider how, as a generalised form of African humanism, summarised in the following Bantu aphorisms “a person is a person through other people”, communal normative function theories of meaning draw on African relational ontologies to locate meaning in enhancing communal harmony and ensuring a positive relationship with others in the community. By ensuring a positive engagement with others in the community, the individual attains humanity, and by attaining and fostering this humanity, the individual acquires meaning as well.

Readings: 

• Attoe, A., 2020. Guest Editor’s Introduction: African Perspectives to the question of Life’s Meaning. South African Journal of Philosophy, 39(2), pp. 93-99.
• Metz, T., 2020. African Theories of Meaning in Life: A Critical Assessment. South African Journal of Philosophy, 39(2), pp. 113-126.
• Gyekye, K., 1992. Person and Community in Akan Thought. In: K. Wiredu & K. Gyekye, eds. Person and Community. Washington D.C.: The Council for Research in Values and Philosophy, pp. 101-122.
• Motsamai Molefe, Critical Comments on Afro-Communitarianism: The Community Versus Individual, in Filosofia Theoretica: Journal of African Philosophy, Culture and Religions, (January-June 2017) 6:1.

Lecture Five–Is Human Existence a Tragedy Afterall? Cases Against African Approaches to the Meaning of Life

Having expounded and assessed the vistas of thought opened up by different African philosophies of the meaning of life, lecture five will examine how plausible these theories of meaning are. Are these theories compelling in explaining the conferral of the meaning in life, or have they been unsuccessful in overcoming the pessimism of Camus’ critical reflection on a meaningful life (Agada 2020)?

Readings: 

• Agada, A., 2020. The African vital force theory of meaning in life. South African Journal of Philosophy, 39(2), pp. 100-112.
• Metz, T., 2020. African Theories of Meaning in Life: A Critical Assessment. South African Journal of Philosophy, 39(2), pp. 113-126.