2008 Readings

Plato

5^th March

• Discussion of the Apology of Socrates

12^th March

• An encounter with the drunken Alcibiades – an excerpt from Plato’s Symposium

19^th March

• Plato’s Rival Lovers or “Lovers,” and the philosopher’s art.

Mores

2^nd April

• Using a newspaper article as our basis for discussion: ‘A philosophical discussion of mores surrounding university study, vocation and love.’

The Individual and Society

9^th April

• Film Night, screening Into the Wild.

16^th April

• Following on from the topics discussed at the film night we’ll be looking at Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience.

23^rd April

• The Second Part of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s (1754) Discourse on the Origin and the Foundations of Inequality Among Men.

7^th May

• Simone Weil’s The Need for Roots entitled ‘The Needs of the Soul’.

The Tyranny of Happiness

14^th May

• New Yorker article entitled Pursuing Happiness: two authors explore the fragility of contentment, downloadable from the New Yorker website
• Washington Post article entitled The Happy Heretic: Martin Seligman thinks psychologists should help people be happy. Who could possibly have a problem with that?

Langauge and Philosophy

30^th July

• George Orwell (1940) New Words.

University students: are we lovers anymore?

6^th August

• a brief excerpt from Allan Bloom’s (1987) The Closing of the American Mind.

Why Culture Wars Now? The New Right in Australia

13^th August

• chapter five from Geoff Boucher & Matthew Sharpe’s The Times Will Suit Them: Postmodern Conservatism in Australia, Allen & Unwin.

Free Speech and Truthfulness: Michel Foucault on parrhesia

20^th August

• The Meaning and Evolution of the Word Parrhesia.

The education of creativity and character

3^rd September

• two excerpts from Martin Buber’s Between Man & Man.

10^th September

• Martin Buber on philosophical anthropology: ‘What is Man?’

Climate change

17^th September

• Frank Furedi on scepticism in the climate change era: an article from Spiked entitled Demonology.

Public and Private

8^th October

• Section 26 and 27 of chapter 5 in Arendt’s The Human Condition

15^th October

• The Metropolis and Mental Life by Georg Simmel

Batman and Philosophy

22^nd October

• Two excerpts from Batman and Philosophy: the Dark Knight of the Soul