2009 Readings

What is philosophy?

March 11^th

• A reading from Aristophane’s The Clouds

March 18^th

• The rough and steep ascent from opinion to knowledge: Plato’s cave allegory from book VII of Republic

March 25^th

• Knowing that you know nothing: A piece on Socrates’ irony in Pierre Hadot’s (2004) What is Ancient Philosophy?

What is knowledge?

April 1^st

• An excerpt from Richard J Berstein’s (1989) Beyond Objectivism and Relativism on the difference between objectivism, relativism and subjectivism

April 8^th

• Rationalism: A selection from Descartes’ Discourse on Method

April 29^th

• Empiricism: Hume’s abstract to A Treatise of Human Nature

A presentation by Dr Philip Quadrio

April 22^nd

• ‘Prussian monster? The nature of Kant’s Ethics’

Leadership, the citizen and the state

May 6^th

• An essay by Dietrich Bonhoeffer taken from Renate Wind’s Dietrich Bonhoeffer: A Spoke in the Wheel

May 13^th

Chapters 9, 14 and 18 from Machiavelli’s The Prince

May 20^th

• The first Act of Sophocles’ Antigone

What is Enlightenment?

May 27^th

• Immanuel Kant’s (1784) What is Enlightenment?

June 3^rd

• Hans-Georg Gadamer’s defence of prejudices: an excerpt from his (1989) Truth and Method, pp. 271-85

June 10^th

• Jürgen Habermas’s critique of Gadamer. Three excerpts: On the Logic of the Social Sciences (1988), pp. 271-85; ‘On Hermeneutics’ Claim to Universality’ (1970), in The Hermeneutics Reader, pp. 302-3 and pp. 313-14

Presentations

July 15^th

• Professor Michael Smith presents ‘Secular Vs. Religious Accounts of Values and Reasons’

July 22^th

• Dr Matthew Sharpe presents ‘Thoughts of an Antipodean in Hellas’

The Great Books

July 29^th

• Genesis

August 5^th

• ‘Problema 1: Is there a teleological suspension of the ethical?’ from Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling

August 12^th

• Excerpts from Theogony by Hesiod

August 19^th

• Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno’s analysis of The Odyssey, ‘Odysseus or Myth and Enlightenment’

August 26^th

• Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis

September 2^nd

• Act I of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot

September 9^th

• Chapter’s VII and VIII of Part I of Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground

The Gods of Stargate

September 16^th

• Kristian Schutz discusses the gods of Stargate

Philosophy and Theology

September 23^rd

• an article by Leo Strauss entitled ‘The Mutual Influence of Theology and Philosophy’

Philosophy and Literature

September 30^th

• Mitch Cunningham presents:
  • Stephen Muecke (2002), ‘The Fall: Fictocritical Writing’, Parrallax, vol. 8, no. 4, pp. 108-112
  • Russel Ford (2004), ‘Critiquing Desire: Philosophy, Writing and Terror’, Journal of Human Rights, Vol. 3, No. 1 (March), pp. 85-98

Post-religious Theology

October 7^th

• Greg Kasarik presents a paper entitled ‘Creation, the Universe and Why God Doesn’t Exist After All (Yet): In Search of a Post Religious Theology’