Philosophy Research Seminars 2008
Each fortnight, the School of Philosophy holds a regular research seminar that unites the national ACU philosophical community via videoconference.
The seminar is an opportunity for post-graduate students, staff and invited guests to present their research, and to receive support and feedback through shared discussion and debate.
The seminar dates for 2008 are below.
Seminars are held every second Monday, from 1.00-3.00pm. All seminars are held over ACU's video conference system and so, can be joined in your city of preference where ACU has a campus (Brisbane, North Sydney, Strathfield (Sydney), Canberra, Ballarat and Melbourne). Simply go to the ACU campus most convenient for you and go to the video conference facility there (the ACU website has maps for each campus that are helpful in finding your bearings). You should be able to join the seminar from that site.
Speakers and topics will be announced closer to each seminar.
For further information, please contact Mr. John Quilter by email: J.Quilter@mary.acu.edu.au
Seminars for 2008
3rd March
Assoc. Prof. John Ozolins, ACU National Melbourne (St Patrick's).
"Creativity, Education and the Subversion of the State"
Abstract
Creativity is seen as valuable and rightly so, but the difficulty is that in recent times it has come to be defined narrowly as practically synonymous with what is economically valuable. While government initiative to encourage creativity within educational systems is welcomed, the view that creativity will result if sufficient resources are allocated needs to be treated with caution. One aim of education is the development of human beings in all their capacities and talents, and this is creativity in its most fundamental sense. Applied more generally, this provides the background for a more general analysis of the concept of creativity. Since creativity involves not only what is innovative and new but also valuable, it is by no means clear how increased efforts to foster creativity will bring it about. The received view is that the logic of discovery and the logic of justification are not the same from which it can be concluded that there is no correlation between the resources allocated to a search for innovation and novelty and the outcomes of such a search.
In this paper we provide an analysis of the concept of creativity and show that just because something is innovative and novel does not mean that it will be valuable as this is something to be determined within the context of field of activity in which what is creative is produced. This is in contrast to the rhetoric of governments, where what is valuable inevitably means what is of economic value. Concentration on economic value as a measure of whether something is creative is corrupting of the norms and standards applied by a discipline to determine whether something is creative. A narrow concentration on what is of economic value is the result of a lopsided understanding of what is good for human beings and that this is to the detriment of other more reflective forms of creativity which seek to locate the human good more broadly. Insofar as this runs against what is seen as valuable by the State, an education which encourages the development of all the capacities of human beings will be subversive, as will be resisting the intrusion of economic values into the assessment of creativity or deciding what projects or problems to pursue.
31st March
Dr Martin McAvoy, ACU National, University of Sydney & Notre Dame University, Sydney.
"The Apology of Socrates, the Professor of Ignorance"
Dr. McAvoy lectures at ACU National, the University of Sydney and Notre Dame University (Sydney, Australia). The philosophy of Socrates is his specialty and he has interests in Kierkegaard and Moral Philosophy.
7th April
Prof Haim Maranz, Ben Gurion University, Israel.
"Multiculturalism"
Educated in Melbourne and Oxford, Dr. Maranz is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Ben Gurion University in Israel. He has edited books on philosophy of education, and political philosophy and is a regular contributor both to learned philosophical journals and in fora for a wider educated audience.
14th April
Dr Jim Franklin, Mathematics, UNSW.
"Social Justice: Utopian Fantasy or Foundation of Prosperity"
Dr. Franklin is the author of several books including "Corrupting the Youth- A history of Philosophy in Australia", "The Science of Conjecture- Evidence and Probability before Pascal" and "Life to the Full- Rights and Social Justice in Australia". He has contributed to numerous learned journals on philosophy of mathematics and science and on ethical matters, to periodicals with a more general readership and has been interviewed on the Philosopher's Zone on Radio National.
28th April
Seminar CANCELLED
19th May
Professor Tony Coady, University of Melbourne, CAPPE.
"Playing God”
Tony Coady is one of Australia's best-known philosophers. He has an outstanding international reputation for his writings on epistemology and on political violence and political ethics. His book Testimony: a Philosophical Study (OUP, 1992) has been particularly influential and more recently he published Morality and Political Violence (CUP, 2008) In 1990 he founded and became director of the Centre for Philosophy and Public Issues at the University of Melbourne, the first centre in Australia to be concerned with broad issues of philosophy and public affairs. CPPI later became absorbed into CAPPE where Coady was Deputy-Director for its first four years. In 2005, he gave the Uehiro Lectures on Practical Ethics at the University of Oxford and they will be published in 2008 by Oxford University Press under the title, Messy Morality: the Challenge of Politics.
16th June
Professor Tony Kelly, ACU National
"Communicating Natural Law in the Global Context"
Tony Kelly, a priest of the Redemptorist Order and formerly professor of Theology at Australian Catholic University. Before his position at ACU, for many years involved in Yarra Theological Union in Melbourne. President of YTU for ten years. Formerly President of Australian Catholic Theological Association. Past Chair of the Forum of Australian Catholic Institutes of Theology. Tony was Head of Sub-Faculty of Philosophy and Theology at the Australian Catholic University from 1999 - 2004. In February 2004, Tony Kelly was appointed by His Holiness Pope John Paul II to the International Theological Commission. The author of over a dozen books of theology and numerous articles in learned journals, recent works include Behold the Cross. Theological Meditations for Lent and Easter, Melbourne: Harper Collins, 1997; Liguori, Mo., :Liguori Press, 1998, The Bread of Life: Nurturing a Eucharistic Imagination (Melbourne: Harper Collins; Liguori, MO: Liguori Press), 2001, and Eschatology and Hope, Orbis Books, 2006.23rd June
Prof John Haldane, Philosophy and Centre for Ethics, Policy and Public Affairs, University of St Andrew’s.
“Recognising Humanity”
As well at St Andrews, Professor Haldane has taught at universities across the U.K. and in the U.S., including the Thomistic Institute at the University of Notre Dame in 1994, 1996, 1999 and the University of St Thomas in 2003. His Atheism and Theism, co-authored with J. J. C. Smart (Blackwell, 1996), was listed by Blackwell in its "Tomorrow's Classics" list. His Intelligent Person's Guide to Religion was published by Duckworth in 2003, and Faithful Reason: Essays Catholic and Philosophical by Routledge in 2004. He has published articles on a wide variety of topics, including aesthetics, art, philosophy of education, ethics, the history of philosophy, the philosophy of mind, political and social philosophy, and theology.
30th June
Dr Julia Annas
"The Unity of the Virtues"
Julia Annas (Ph.D., Harvard), is Regents Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona, and before that was at St. Hugh's College, Oxford. She specializes in almost every facet of ancient Greek philosophy, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and psychology. Her current research interests are in Platonic ethics. She is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the founder and former editor of the annual journal, Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy.Her books include Platonic Ethics, Old and New (Cornell, 1999), Sextus Empiricus: Outlines of Scepticism (Cambridge, 1994), a translation with Jonathan Barnes, The Morality of Happiness (Oxford, 1993) and Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind (California, 1992).
14th July
Dr Martin McAvoy, ACU National.
"Self-Deception: A Practical Guide"
4th August
Pat Kavanagh, ACU National.
“Participation in Aquinas”
11th August
Jordan Taylor, ACU National.
“Imagination”
25th August- CANCELLED
Joseph Quilter, ACU National.
“Confronting Language … Swearing by the Word”
15th September
Dr. Richard Colledge, St Paul's Theological College, Banyo and ACU National.
"On Ex(s)istere: Revisiting the "to Be"–"to Exist" Debate"
This paper looks to revive and advance dialogue surrounding John Nijenhuis’ case against ‘existence language’ as a rendering of Aquinas’ esse. Nijenhuis presented both a semantic/grammatical case for abandoning this practice as well as a more systematic argument based on his reading of Thomist metaphysics. On one hand, I affirm the important distinction between being and existence and lend qualified support to his interpretation of the quantitiative/qualitative correlation between esse and essentia in Aquinas’ texts. On the other hand, I take issue with Nijenhuis’ relegation of exist(ence) to a second-rate ontological principle, and to this end undertake a brief historical and etymological survey, noting its emergence in Greek thought (u9pa/rxein, u3parcij), its translation into medieval Latin (ex(s)istere, ex(s)istentia) and thus something of the pedigree of this terminology in modern usage. I conclude with some brief remarks on the task of exegeting Aquinas vis-à-vis the revivification of contemporary metaphysical ontology in general.
Richard is Academic Dean at St Paul’s Theological College (soon to be incorporated into Australian Catholic University, McAuley campus, Brisbane) and co-ordinator of Philosophical studies for the Brisbane College of Theology. A ‘native’ of Brisbane, Richard completed a B.A. at the University of Queensland in 1987, before pursuing postgraduate studies in education and counselling psychology and working extensively in secondary school education in Queensland and the UK. He went on to complete an M.Th through the Brisbane College of Theology (1997), a Licentiate (M.A.) in Philosophy at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium (2000), and a PhD through the University of Queensland (2006). His current research interests are in the areas of metaphysical ontology, in dialogue with the western tradition; contemporary Continental philosophy, focusing on phenomenology (esp. Heidegger); key themes and points in the history of western philosophy (esp. involving Aristotle, Aquinas and Scotus, Kant and Kierkegaard); hermeneutics and post-structuralism; philosophy of religion; and philosophy of depth psychology (esp. Freud, Rank, Becker).
13th October
Prof Warren Reich, Georgetown University.
"Retrieving the Consolation Tradition for the Ethics of Today"
Professor Reich is the Distinguished Research Professor of Religion and Ethics and Professor Emeritus of Bioethics in the Theology Department of Georgetown University and Director, Project for the History of Care. Professor Reich was a founding member of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics and was the creator of the award-winning Encyclopedia of Bioethics between 1971 and 1978 and a fully revised five-volume edition between 1990 and 1995. Professor Reich's recent work has been focussed on the History of Care project, a topic on which he has published extensively.
27th October
Dr. John Lamont, Catholic Institute of Sydney
“Contemporary Analytic Molinism and Molina’s Molinism”
