Next week and the week following the Deakin Philosophical Society will discuss The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka. On Wednesday, 26th of August we will discuss chapter 1; on Wednesday, 2nd September we will discuss chapters 2 and 3. Next week’s meeting will run from 5-6pm, the following meeting will run from 5-6:30pm.

A pdf copy of the entire text is available here.

If you wish to download and listen to a free mp3 audiobook version of the text, visit LibriVox.

Philosophy Cafe

Next Wednesday, 26th August, is also the evening of Philosophy Cafe, hence the shorter Society meeting. The details for Philosophy Cafe are:

Regards,

Dylan Nickelson.
President, Deakin Philosophical Society.

Join the Deakin Philosophical Society this Wednesday, 19th August from 5-6:30pm in ib3.307 to discuss a chapter from Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment.

This week we continue our engagement with the great texts of the West, but this time by looking at one of the most famous 20th century responses to Homer’s Odyssey.

The response is that of Adorno and Horkheimer from THE DIALECTIC OF ENLIGHTENMENT, a book these two Jewish intellectuals and (former-?)socialists wrote in exile, in the USA, in 1943.

The Dialectic of Enlightenment has been described as ‘the darkest book of all’ because of its central thesis, put squarely in our reading: that enlightenment reverts to myth, and myth (or at least epic) was already enlightenment. This means that the simpler claims of eighteenth and nineteenth century thinkers, and many people today, that modern scientific enlightenment wholly overcomes superstition in the clarity and distinctness of analytic science, are up for reconsideration, even philosophising.

What is the significance of the ODYSSEY, as against the THEOGONY and similar mythical texts? Is the wiliness of Odysseus, as he uses his nous to outwit the goddesses and chthonic monsters, the harbinger of modern ‘bourgeois’ strategic and instrumental reason? Does the enlightenment of the mind necessarily lead to the sacrifice of human sociability and bodily enjoyment, as much as it overcomes the older orbit of religious sacrifice? These are the questions this remarkable response to the ODYSSEY asks us to consider.

A copy of the text is available for download at JSTOR.

Regards,

Dylan Nickelson
President, Deakin Philosophical Society

Translated by Hugh G. Evelyn-White [1914]

(ll. 104-115) Hail, children of Zeus! Grant lovely song and celebrate the holy race of the deathless gods who are forever, those that were born of Earth and starry Heaven and gloomy Night and them that briny Sea did rear. Tell how at the first gods and earth came to be, and rivers, and the boundless sea with its raging swell, and the gleaming stars, and the wide heaven above, and the gods who were born of them, givers of good things, and how they divided their wealth, and how they shared their honours amongst them, and also how at the first they took many-folded Olympus. These things declare to me from the beginning, ye Muses who dwell in the house of Olympus, and tell me which of them first came to be.

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