2013 Simone Weil Lecture on Human Value

Between Love and Law: Paul and Philosophy

Jeffery Bloechl (Boston College)

Introduced by Jeff Hanson (ACU)

According to Paul, life in the spiritual community aspires to the virtues of faith, hope and love, of which love is the greatest. Love, be observes, allows members of the body of Christ to answer a call to transcend the law, though without cancelling it or destroying it. During the past few decades, various philosophers who have been interested in getting free of a modern preoccupation with law, have drawn on features of Pauline thinking in their attempts to develop new theories of community and subjectivity. What is generally not embraced, however, is any version of Paul’s Christian monotheism. This raises various questions. What is gained and what is lost when Paul is read in this light? What might be the relationship between certain Pauline conceptions--especially our relation to the law--and their correlates in the non-religious philosophies that are inspired by them? And what, finally, would it mean for us today to relate ourselves to the law without becoming subservient to it?

30 May; 6.00pm

ACU Melbourne Campus,

Mercy Lecture Theatre

115 Victoria Parade, Fitzroy VIC 3065

[The lecture will also be given at the Brisbane campus on 21 June at 6.00pm in Lecture Theatre IB.12.]

Jeffrey Bloechl is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Boston College. He is an internationally respected scholar of contemporary European philosophy of religion and psychoanalysis, with a particular interest in the work and legacy of Emmanuel Levinas. He has also translated major works by Jean-Louis Chretien and Roger Burggraeve, and is currently at work on a phenomenological anthropology of Christian life, a critical commentary on Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents, and various other projects.

Lecture is free and open to the public.

Registration is requested.

For all registration and inquiries, contact This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. .

After Smart Power: From Instrumentalism

to Legal Technique in Feminist Foreign Policy

Professor Karen Knop (University of Toronto) &

Professor Annelise Riles (Cornell University)

Professor Dianne Otto (Melbourne Law School) and Dr Jon Roffe (Faculty for Business and Economics) will co-chair this Symposium.

The Symposium is hosted by the Institute for International Law and the Humanities of the Melbourne Law School and the Department of Marketing and Management of the Faculty of Economics and Business.

Download flyer.

Registration link.

Professors Knop and Riles will engage critically with the implications for international law of the work of the feminist foreign policy establishment and considers what alternatives there might be for a gendered approach to diplomacy. The first part of the paper considers how feminist foreign policy has overcome the “culture problem” in gender debates by embracing and deploying the kind of pragmatic instrumentalism that so pervades the American legalism more generally. After sketching the limitations of this instrumentalism we propose a different kind of feminist diplomacy, one anchored not in legal tools but in legal technique. Our interest is the intellectual time-space of the “diplomatic incident” and we explore it through the conundrum of how to redress sexual slavery in the Asia-Pacific during World War II.

DATE: Thursday, 30 May 2013

TIME: 4.00 - 6.00PM (light refreshments from 3.45-4.00PM)

VENUE: Room 920, Level 9
Melbourne Law School (185 Pelham Street Carlton)

Registrations Essential: Please book here.

ENQUIRIES: Vesna Stefanovski This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

This event is initiated through COSM (Cluster for research on Organization, Society and Markets).

Karen Knop is a professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Toronto. As rapporteur for the International Law Association's Committee on Feminism and International Law, Professor Knop was responsible for the ILA's report on gender and nationality (2000). She became editor of the University of Toronto Law Journal in 2007. She writes on public and private international law, with a focus on issues of interpretation, identity and participation. Her book Diversity and Self-Determination in International Law (Cambridge University Press, 2002) was awarded a Certificate of Merit by the American Society of International Law in April 2003. She is the editor of Gender and Human Rights (Oxford University Press, 2004) and co-editor of Re-Thinking Federalism: Citizens, Markets and Governments in a Changing World (University of British Columbia Press, 1995), as well as the author of a number of journal articles and book chapters. Professor Knop recently edited a symposium issue of Law and Contemporary Problems on "Trandisciplinary Conflict of Laws" with Ralf Michaels (Duke) and Annelise Riles (Cornell).

Annelise Riles is the Jack G. Clarke Professor of Law in Far East Legal Studies and Professor of Anthropology at Cornell, and Director of the Clarke Program in East Asian Law and Culture. Her work focuses on the transnational dimensions of laws, markets and culture across the fields of comparative law, conflict of laws, the anthropology of law, public international law and international financial regulation.Professor Riles has published extensively, most recently, Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets (Chicago Press 2011) and From Multiculturalism to Technique: Feminism, Culture, and the Conflict of Laws Style (with Karen Knop & Ralf Michaels) (Stanford Law Review, Mar 2012). Her other publications include,The Network Inside Out, won the American Society of International Law's Certificate of Merit for 2000-2002, Rethinking the Masters of Comparative Law (Hart Publishing Limited, 2001), Documents: Artifacts of Modern Knowledge (University of Michigan Press, 2006). She also writes about financial markets regulation on her blog, http://blogs.cornell.edu/collateralknowledge/

Institute for International Law and the Humanities
Melbourne Law School
The University of Melbourne

Modern Soundscapes

Annual Conference of the Australasian Association of Literature held in conjunction with the Centre for Modernism Studies in Australia

University of New South Wales

July 10 -13, 2013

http://www.aal.asn.au/conference/2013/

Keynote Speakers

• Steven Connor (Cambridge)
• Garrett Stewart (Iowa)
• Laura Marcus (Oxford)

What is a modern soundscape?

This conference aims to address this question by drawing together researchers engaged with the history and theory of sound and noise from the fields of literature, film, and media studies, as well as architecture, music and the visual arts to consider the multiple soundscapes that have shaped and continue to shape the history of modernity. Jonathan Sterne contends that dating from around 1725 ‘sound itself’ becomes ‘an object and a domain of thought and practice, where it had previously been conceptualized in terms of particular idealized instances like voice or music’. This historical claim challenges the assumption that modern culture is essentially a visual culture, substituting the ear for the eye, and creating a space for a new sonic history of modernity to be written, theorized and contested.   Thinking through sound has long been a literary preoccupation. Reflecting on the potential of the “auditory imagination” T.S.Eliot wrote, it “is the feeling for syllable and rhythm, penetrating far below the conscious levels of thought and feeling, invigorating every word; sinking to the primitive and forgotten, returning to the origin and bringing something back, seeking the beginning and the end. It works through meanings, certainly, or not without meanings in the ordinary sense, and fuses the old and obliterated and the trite, the current, and the new and surprising, the most ancient and civilized mentality.”  Thinking through the resonant opening created by poetic form Eliot imagines potential creative fusions that cut across space, time, culture and forms. Taking inspiration from Eliot’s expansive vision, we invite papers that engage with sound as a catalyst for thought, critical and creative practice, and historical reconsiderations of modern soundscapes from the eighteenth century to the present.

UNSW, Morven Brown 310, 9.30am
July 25, 2013

Spinozan Genealogies of Political Community

An international workshop organised by:
the School of Humanities and Languages at the University of New South Wales

Supported by:

the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry at the University of Sydney

Spinoza’s idea that ‘the right of the individual is co-extensive with its determinate power’ has influenced important strains of contemporary political thought including Deleuze and Foucault, the Althusser School with Negri and Balibar, and socialist theology after Feuerbach. However, the assertion of equivalence between rights and powers confounds classic conceptions of sovereignty and political justice. How is the protection of fragile bodies able to be secured, if the right to persevere is linked with a power of endurance? If the indivisible power of a sovereign state is aligned with its right, then how are we to think about contested sovereignties in jurisdictions after empire? Participants in this workshop consider how Spinozist genealogies of political community may provide resources for new thinking about pluralism, the political economy of corporeal capacity, and transformative sociality.

• Professor Warren Montag (Occidental College, Los Angeles)
• Dr Martin Saar (University of Frankfurt)

With the participation of Professor Moira Gatens (University of Sydney),

• Dr Aurelia Armstrong (University of Queensland),
• Dr Knox Peden (University of Queensland),
• Dr Dimitris Vardoulakis (UWS),
• Professor Miguel Vatter (UNSW),
• Professor Paul Patton (UNSW) and
• Dr Simone Bignall (UNSW).

Admission is free, but booking is essential. To reserve a place, please RSVP to

This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. by July 15.

BOOK SYMPOSIUM: HERMAN PHILIPSE "GOD IN THE AGE OF SCIENCE"

WHERE: University of Sydney,
WHEN: Friday June 21, 10am-4pm
COST: $30 per person, includes morning and afternoon coffee - attendees to cater for their own lunch.

DETAILS:
As a prelude to the 2013 Australasian Philosophy of Religion Association
Conference 'Religion and Science, Theism and Atheism' APRA will be
hosting a Symposium with Professor Herman Philipse (University of
Utrecht, NL) focused on his recent book "God in the Age of Science: A
Critique of Religious Reason" Oxford University Press, 2012.

Philipse's book, aimed at a scholarly philosophical audience, offers one
of the most significant critiques of metaphysical theology to be
published in recent years and stands as a challenging criticism to some
of the most influential contemporary theistic philosophy (paying
particular attention to the work of Alvin Plantinga and Richard Swinburne).

Speakers:

• Herman Philipse (University of Utrecht)
• John Bishop (University of Auckland)
• Graham Oppy (Monash University)
• Philip Quadrio (University of NSW and APRA President)

The three major sections of Philipse's book will be addressed and
critically engaged by Bishop, Oppy and Quadrio with a response from
Professor Philipse to each presentation.

ABOUT HERMAN PHILIPSE:
Herman Philipse (D Phil (Leiden) 1983) took up a Distinguished
Professorship in philosophy at the University of Utrecht, The
Netherlands, in September 2003. He was previously Professor of
Philosophy at the University of Leiden (1985-2003), Assistant Professor
in Philosophy at that university (1978-85), and Research Assistant at
the Husserl Archives, University of Louvain, Belgium (1977-78). He has
been chairman (’decaan’) of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University
of Leiden several times.

For Details please view the ASCP annual conference page on this website:

http://ascp.org.au/ascp-conference

During the MSCP Winter School 2013 a free one-day workshop dedicated to the work of Heidegger will be presented on Sunday, the 23rd of June.

Keynotes:

• 'Heidegger on Human Understanding'
  Prof. Mark Wrathall (UC Riverside)
• 'The Twofold Character of Truth: Heidegger, Davidson, Tugendhat'
  Prof. Jeff Malpas (UTas)

Other Participants:

• Dr Sean Ryan (RMIT/MSCP)
• Dr Andrew Inkpin (UniMelb)
• Dr David Rathbone (MSCP)

When:
10.45am - 6.00pm
Sunday June 23, 2013

Where:
Room G08,
Law School on Pelham st.
University of Melbourne..

Further details as they become available will be posted on the MSCP website:
http://mscp.org.au/workshops

2013 New Zealand Philosophy Conference
(hitherto 'AAP NZ Division Conference')

8-12 December, The University of Auckland

This is an early notice that this year's New Zealand Philosophy Conference will be held at The University of Auckland (New Zealand) from the evening of Sunday 8th December to the afternoon of Thursday 12th December 2013.

Due to legal/structural changes of the AAP, a number of formal details of the conference are yet to be finalised (including its title). Details of the event will be posted on our departmental website in late July, once the 2013 AAP Conference hosted by The University of Queensland and Bond University has ended. We will also send a call for papers at that time.

In the meantime, if you would like further details on arrangements, please feel free to contact the organisers at the following addresses:

Denis Robinson: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Marco Grix: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Department of Philosophy
University of Auckland
Private Bag 92019
Auckland 1142
New Zealand

http://www.arts.auckland.ac.nz/uoa/philosophy

13 – 14 June 2013

Woolley Building,
Camperdown Campus,
University of Sydney

Conveners: Dr. Robbie Peters, Dr. Ryan Schram

Sponsored by: Department of Anthropology, School of Social and Political Sciences, and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences

Full Details and Registration: http://rethinkinganthropology.wordpress.com/

Anthropology has historically been based on an idea of the human as a ‘species-being’ defined by its unique capacity to order its own world. In this symposium, we ask how anthropology would change if we gave up this assumption. We take as a starting point Latour’s challenge to ‘open up the question of humanity’ by considering that ‘the non-human is not inhuman’ (1997: 15).

We ask that participants challenge the separation of nature and culture by considering a ‘post-human’ condition as it applies to their own research. How are our research agendas changed when we assume that human and non-human exist in relationship to one another as mediators rather than as ends and means, and with neither subordinate to the other? In recent years, anthropologists have explored the post-human condition through research on topics of surveillance, political ecology, cross-species relationships, disabilities, and virtual worlds, among others. This symposium invites everyone from across the field of anthropology to consider the implications for our discipline of a post-human world in which humans are part of nature and nature is part of the human. Our purpose is to debate the question of what is anthropology, both where it has come from and where it is going.

Some of the questions the sessions will address are:

• How to write an ethnography of animals?

• How to study human ecology in the anthropocene age?

• What theories of consciousness does anthropology need?

• What is agency?

• What tools do people use to acquire and transmit cultural patterns, practices and ideas?

Full Details and Registration: http://rethinkinganthropology.wordpress.com/

The Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy is proud to present the 2013 Winter School.  All courses are 10 hours in length, significant discounts apply for those enrolling in multiple courses.

When: June 17 - July 24, 2013

Where:  Law Building, Pelham St.
University of Melbourne

Full Details and Enrolment: http://mscp.org.au/courses/winter-school-2013

Day courses (Monday to Friday)

Evening Courses (6-8pm, over 5 weeks)

Daniel Brennan, 'Jan Patocka and Vaclav Havel in Ideology and Freedom'

Friday 24th May 3pm

Forgan Smith E302, St Lucia Campus, University of Queensland.

Deakin Philosophy Seminar Series

Autonomy, Authenticity, and the Self
Mark Wrathall (University of California, Riverside)

Tuesday, June 25 2013, 4:00pm - 5:30pm
School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Deakin University

C2.05
221 Burwood Highway
Burwood 3125

I'm interested in two ways that the self enters into accounts of human action.  According to what I'll call "the autonomy thesis," a bodily movement or change only counts as an action if it stands in the right kind of relationship to the self.  According to what I'll call "the authenticity thesis," it is an ideal of human existence to act in a way that is true to the self.  There are a variety of different ways to fill in the details of each account -- different ways, that is, to conceive of the "right" relationship of a bodily movement to the self, or of what it means to be "true" to the self.  In this paper, I explore the existential-phenomenological approach to autonomy, which departs in significant ways from more conventional analytic accounts of agency.  Understanding this model of autonomy is the basis for explaining Heidegger's account of authenticity as self-constancy, an ideal implicit in autonomy itself.

Mark A. Wrathall is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Riverside.  He is considered a leading interpreter of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger and is the author of Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, History (2010) and How to Read Heidegger (2005). He is also the editor or co-editor of numerous collections, including A Companion to Phenomenology and Existentialism (2006), A Companion to Heidegger (2005), and Religion after Metaphysics (2003).