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This article traces recent developments in European social theory and psychoanalysis on the theory of the human subject. Critically examining the recent psychoanalytic departures of Julia Kristeva and Jean Laplanche on the status of primary repression as a condition for the constitution of subjectivity, an analysis is presented of the state of the subject in its unconscious relational world. The article suggests ways in which the analyses set out by Kristeva and Laplanche can be further refined and developed, partly through (...) a reconsideration of the intertwining of unconscious representation and repression as developed in the writings of Cornelius Castoriadis, Thomas Ogden and others. For existing psychoanalytical accounts the article suggests we should substitute the concept of ‘rolling identification’, the psychical basis of the shift from self-referential representational activity to an elementary form of inter-subjectivity. Rolling identifications are defined as a representational flux that permits human subjects to create a relation to the self-as-object and pre-object relations. Such primal identification, the article suggests, operates through a ‘representational wrapping of self and others’. The article concludes with a consideration of the cultural significance of primary repression, and the politicization of identification. (shrink)

Review of East-West Literary Imagination: Cultural Exchange from Yeats to Morrison by Yoshinobu Hakutani.

Review of 'J.M. Coetzee and Ethics' edited by Anton Leist and Peter Singer.

Review of Joseph Heath's 'Filthy Lucre: Economics for Those Who Hate Capitalism'.

Review of 'The Life You Can Save: Acting Now to End World Poverty' by Peter Singer.

How should we treat the cosmogonies of the early ancient Greek philosophers? Much work has been done in showing how these cosmogonies differ from creation myths and how they relate to philosophical issues such as change, persistence through change and matter theory. Here, using Leucippus and Democritus as examples, Gregory tries to show that interesting light can be shed on these cosmogonies by looking at them in relation to perennial problems in cosmogony and perennial types of solutions to these problems. (...) Ancients and moderns have formulated both in different ways, but there are significant structural similarities. To understand ancient cosmogonies, we need to understand how these perennial problems were perceived, and what types of solutions were available. We then need to analyse how the basic ontological and aetiological principles of their systems lead them to choose certain types of solution over others. (shrink)

Aristotle is typically construed as a critic of atomism. He was indeed a critic of atomism of the extreme kind formulated by Democritus, according to which bulk matter is made of nothing other than unchangeable pieces of universal matter possessing shape and size and capable of motion in the void. However, there is a weaker kind of atomism involving the assumption that macroscopic substances have least parts which have properties sufficient to account for the properties of the bulk substances that (...) they are least parts of. Insofar as atomism has been vindicated by modern science, it is the weaker version of atomism that has proved to be profitable. The beginnings of the weaker version of atomism are to be found in Aristotle. Far from being an opponent of atomism, there is a sense in which Aristotle was one of its pioneers. (shrink)

Stuart-Fox's tightly organised book covers around 2000 years of relationships between China and the many kingdoms and countries of South-East Asia. He argues,as a good historian should, that the past will powerfully shape the future: ‘a new pattern of power relations is emerging, one that harks back in significant ways to earlier times.’.

Kevin Brophy shows us his skills as an entertainer in "Explorations in Creative Writing". He has read widely and has a diverse collection of tales to tell, from the mundane to the fantastic. The story, anecdote and fragment are all part of his performance. We shift between a reading of Kafka’s ‘Metamorphosis’, to the ‘agenda of the couch’ and even to writers’ accounts of visits to analysts. Like the best entertainers, Brophy knows how to tell a good story. His writing (...) has an admirable lightness of touch, alternately reflective and playful, and conveys a sense of the vitality of its subject matter. (shrink)

Horrigan’s book succeeds in its aims and deserves serious consideration. It is the publisher’s first in a planned series of titles on law in society. If the subsequent titles are of a similar standard, then there is no doubt that the series will make a valuable contribution to public understanding about law.

As part of his ongoing attempt to resurrect Anderson, Mark Weblin, the John Anderson Research Fellow, has collated, edited and provided a useful introduction to Anderson’s political writings. The volume, as a whole, raises two questions. Firstly, do Anderson’s political views remain of general interest? And secondly, what is the place or legacy of Anderson in contemporary Australian debate?

Review of A Country Too Far: Writings on Asylum Seekers edited by Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally.

Adelaide Festival of Ideas session, Bonython Hall, 2:30pm, Saturday 9 July, 2005. Chaired by Ian Henschke.

Adelaide Festival of Ideas session, Brookman Hall, 1:45pm, Sunday 10 July, 2005. Chaired by Peter Goldsworthy.

Adelaide Festival of Ideas session, Elder Hall, 8:00pm, Saturday 14 July, 2001. Chaired by Paul Davies.

Adelaide Festival of Ideas session, Elder Hall, 10:30am, Sunday 15 July, 2001. Chaired by Peter Goldsworthy.

Adelaide Festival of Ideas session, Basil Hetzel Lecture Room, 4:30pm, Friday 10th July, 2009. Chaired by Lynda Burns.

Christopher Falzon, a philosopher at the University of Newcastle, has written what seems to me, overall, an admirable introduction to philosophy. His selection of philosophical themes is balanced and judicious, and his presentation is unusually lucid and economical. His idea of using film as a resource to illustrate and explore philosophical ideas will appeal to most beginners, and probably assist with the marketing problem. Falzon’s book is not about the philosophy of film, although his discussion does shed light on the (...) philosophical content of some films. It is an invitation to philosophy that domesticates its subject by using film to illustrate, dramatise and, occasionally, propose philosophical themes. (shrink)

Love is a central preoccupation of art and literature, of popular culture and autobiography. This book is an attempt to understand its central themes, to discover why love is so important to most of us, why we seek it, and why we so frequently fail to hold on to it. John Armstrong is a philosopher whose primary interest is aesthetics. Accordingly, his meditations on love often proceed by way of reflection upon works of art and literature.

Aristotle argued that particular statements about the future were neither true nor false. Turner rejects this claim, arguing that implicit to such a theory is an untenable theory of time. Whilst developing a theory of time was not Aristotle’s intent, Turner believes his view does entail an ontology that is questionable at best. Once we have sorted out an acceptable theory of time, the only reasonable conclusions about all statements is that they are true or false. That we do not (...) know whether our statements about the future are true or false is an epistemological problem. This claim is aimed at those who wish to adopt Aristotle’s view today. (shrink)

Review of The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance by Drew Daniel.

Review of A Country Too Far: Writings on Asylum Seekers edited by Rosie Scott and Tom Keneally.

Review of Secular Mysteries: Stanley Cavell and English Romanticism by Edward T. Duffy.

Review of and then when the by Dan Disney.

Review of 'Meet the Philosophers of Ancient Greece' edited by Patricia F. O'Grady.

This paper argues for a coalition of ‘embattled adversaries’, namely philosophy and literature and it does that by referring to Derrida`s seminal work, Margins of Philosophy. To deepen our thesis about the alliance of philosophy and literature, we also allude to Indian philosophy and the great Indian philosophico-literary epic, the Mahabharata. Foundational Indian philosophic texts such as the Vedas and the Upanishads were articulated through poetic hymns which exude rich literary inflexions. This literary inscape of Indian philosophical texts testifies the (...) close kinship or non-duality of philosophy and literature. The Mahabharata is both philosophy as literature as well as philosophy and literature simultaneously. We would establish this claim by foregrounding the philosophical theme of cosmography or cosmological time/ deep time/kala or what we call thick time as enunciated in the Mahabharata.. Derrida used the term ‘tympanum’ to signify the divisive borderlines that constitutes epistemic and disciplinary boundaries. Derrida called for de-tympanising all margins that distances philosophy from its alienated Other such as literature. Such acts of de-tympanisation or deconstruction are the ways by which Derrida sought to bridge philosophy with its ‘suppressed outside’. In fact Mahabharata is a classic example of Derridean non-site that blurs the boundaries between literature and philosophy. (shrink)

The Chilean author Roberto Bolańo cultivated a contentious attitude to literature, believing that it conceals the fear and self-interest that coordinates its meaningfulness. For Bolańo, great writers should face the abyss of meaninglessness while standing tall, a directive which prohibits drawing conclusions that might ultimately be elevated to the level of fact. Instead, Bolańo commits to a category of truth that cannot be described by inscribing its contingent effects in his writing through what I will call his ‘antiliterature.’ Acknowledging this (...) inaccessible truth, Bolańo’s writing reveals an aversion to all-encompassing literary forms that can be seen in the same light as Jacques Lacan’s term ‘antiphilosophy,’ describing the French psychoanalyst’s position against philosophy. Just as Lacanian antiphilosophy continues to contribute to twenty-first-century philosophical critiques, Bolańo’s antiliterature renders possible novel literary trajectories. Bolańo’s 2009 novel 2666 exemplifies his antiliterary approach, subverting the literary genre of crime fiction by refusing to supply an object to fulfil the reader’s desire for closure and by universalising guilt. (shrink)

Was Plato the first philosophical dramatist to explore philosophical ideas through dramatic content, introducing dramatic structures currently in line with contemporary theatre? If Plato was an influential figure for philosophers as well as theatre-makers, it can arguably be said that he was a silent pioneer in creating the newly defined discipline of Performance Philosophy. There is an obvious polarity between performance and philosophy since both disciplines are on the quest of exploring and presenting what life is. At least this can (...) be said of ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Conceived as “biou techne” the art of living, Greek and Roman philosophers, especially the Epicureans, Stoics and Skeptics, saw philosophy as a way of conceiving what a good life is and pursuing its practical realization for the attainment of eudemonia. Plato was arguably the first significant philosopher to explore philosophical ideas through dramatic content, introducing dramatic structures currently in line with contemporary theatre views. As such, he can be seen as an influential figure for theatre makers as well as for philosophers. Plato’s artistic intention was to uncover the artist that lacked substance and support the knowledgeable creative philosophical mind that besides instant emotional pleasure has to contribute in social development. (shrink)

Essay on mysticism in poetry, the Australian bush, and a photo essay on the Coorong by Brian Medlin, with an introduction by his wife, Christine Vick.

Shirley Jackson’s 1962 We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Iain Banks’s 1984 The Wasp Factory and Sonya Hartnett’s 2009 Butterfly are novels separated not only by decades, but by distance being produced in the United States, Scotland and Australia respectively. Despite this, each of these texts depicts a young adult in a mimetically recognisable world struggling to reconcile their intuitive occultism with that world. The mediation of magic through assemblages of charged objects creates a philosophy of things – modelling (...) in intuitive and narrative terms the essence and nature of objects familiar from the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Walter Benjamin. As such, the supernaturalism of Iain Banks, Shirley Jackson and Sonya Hartnett’s narratives implicates their readers – breaking the boundaries of fiction to comment on the material world itself, not through analogy or metaphor but through direct modelling of the potential power and worth of things. (shrink)

In The Metaphysics Book Theta, Chapter four, Aristotle claims that to state that “some X is possible but X will never be” is a mistake. In effect, he collapses the possible into the actual. This view conflicts with the existence of dispositions which I argue exist, as they are indispensable to science. In Theta Chapter three, Aristotle sets out a test of possibility whereby we assume that some entity exists and then see if an impossibility ensues. I apply this test (...) to Aristotle’s theory and show that it entails the impossibility of dispositions. Given the clear existence of dispositions, Aristotle’s conflation of the possible with the actual fails his own test of possibility and must be wrong. (shrink)

Aristotle explains existence through postulating essences that are intrinsic and perception independent. I argue that his theory is more plausible than Hume’s and Russell’s theories of existence. Russell modifies Hume’s theory because he wants to allow for the existence of mathematical objects. However, Russell’s theory facilitates a problematic collapse of ontology into epistemology, which has become a feature of much analytic philosophy. This collapse obscures the nature of truth. Aristotle is to be praised for starting with a clear account of (...) ordinary objects rather than immediately reifying mathematical objects. He thus allows us to have a coherent account of existence and truth, and to easily resist collapsing ontology into epistemology. (shrink)

This paper critically assesses some recent attempts to develop and update the basic categories of Aristotle’s ontology, by Jonathan Lowe and Brian Ellis. It defends these attempts in face of criticisms by John Heil, while also addressing, and responding to, some possible weaknesses in Lowe and Ellis’s accounts. The paper defends Boyd’s idea of higher order kinds as homeostatic property clusters.

The subtraction argument for the existence of an empty world has been challenged in the case of where the world has an infinite number of objects. Drawing on the reconstruction of Philoponus’ traversal argument by George Couvalis. I argue that a subtraction argument based around time units can adequately deal with worlds that are inhabited by an infinite number of objects.

Ross, Hintikka, Waterlow and Makin have all suggested that there is something problematic about Aristotle’s treatment of possibility. I will canvas their concerns and propose that the problem is not so much with Aristotle as the fact that the notion of possibility is not a single simple concept. I will present eight different components of the notion of possibility and suggest that Aristotle may have been aware of all of them. I will conclude whilst his treatment can appear inconsistent, it (...) is instead, an attempt to give a complete description of a complex notion. (shrink)

Scholars have puzzled over the fact that Plato’s criticisms of poetry are themselves contained in mimetic works. This paper sheds light on that phenomenon by examining an analogous one. The Symposium contains one fable which is criticised by means of another which is thought to represent Plato’s own view. Diotima’s fable, however, is suspended within a larger narrative that invites us to examine and question it. The Symposium thus affords opportunity to observe Plato’s criticisms of a genre and the qualifications (...) that must be made regarding his own use of it. In particular, the Symposium emphasises that stories have no automatic claim to authority, whether they are told by a poet, or a priest or a philosopher. The upshot for Plato’s dialogues is that they remain always a starting point for philosophy: they are neither specimens of philosophical poetry nor philosophy per se. (shrink)

A 'platonic' dialogue in which Plato and Gorgias (and later Aristophanes) dispute about the nature of literature and the importance of disorder for a proper conception of life.