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Dear members of the complex processes research group, The next meeting of the group on the theme of saving the environment from neoliberalism will feature:   SPEAKER: Cristina Neesham, Swinburne Business School TOPIC: Adam Smith and the Modern Business School   TIME: 12.30pm, Wednesday, 23rd May VENUE: AGSE301   Abstract: This presentation focuses on how business schools have adopted and applied the economic and moral-philosophical ideas of Adam Smith, and on the implications of these distortions for business education today. Using examples of genealogical studies (such as, the history of Marx’s concept of necessary class conflict as derived from Smith’s theory of social order), I critique the still dominant myth that neoliberalism (especially as reflected in the work of free-market theorists such as Friedrich von Hayek and Milton Friedman) is a natural ‘offspring’ of Smith’s economic thought. More specifically, I argue that, when similar assumptions about the ‘mechanics’ of the market are combined with profoundly different theories of social order, human nature, and the social meaning of value (as derived from economic activity), this results in profoundly different, and not similar, economic theories. Having mapped the trajectory of several Smithian ideas from his time to ours, I conclude that Smith’s work has more in common with Marx (especially in his early writings), with Sen (and his direction of development economics) and with social psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt than with von Hayek and Friedman. Based on this conclusion, I propose a manifesto for a new business education curriculum, aimed at deconstructing the narrow ideological co-optations operated by neoliberalist doctrines and at recovering the richness of Smith’s economic and moral-philosophical thought to support new, different understandings of socially responsible business activity.

Hi everyone, I've been accepted to teach a summer school course at the Melbourne School of Continental Philosophy (MSCP) beginning Monday 15 Jan. 2018 and going for two hours each Monday for five weeks. The course is called "Schelling and 'Philosophical Psychology'," and you can read the description here: https://mscp.org.au/courses/summer-school-2018#course1  

Sublation [Aufhebung], as I understand it, is Hegel's term for the process by which a state is "raised up," or cancelled out into a new, higher state of being.  So in Hegel's system, history unfolds as an optimistic, progressive movement toward the revelation of absolute spirit in the world.  It's a kind of optimism that been co-opted (knowingly or not) by all sorts of groups in contemporary culture - from those of us who think science is progressively discovering more and more about the world and will ultimately explain everything[1] to people who think that humanity is just getting better and that the world is generally improving (the "up and to the right" thinkers, as they say in economics).  In other words, history is a progression from state to (higher) state without looking back - "without remainder." But Hegel adds a wrinkle to Aufhebung which not everyone acknowledges.  In the Science of Logic Hegel is very clear about it however: The German “aufheben” (“to sublate” in English) has a twofold meaning in the language: it equally means “to keep,” “to ‘preserve’,” and “to cause to cease,” “to put an end to.” Even “to preserve” already includes a negative note, namely that something, in order to be retained, is removed from its immediacy and hence from an existence which is open to external influences. – That which is sublated is thus something at the same time preserved, something that has lost its immediacy but has not come to nothing for that. – These two definitions of “to sublate” can be cited as two dictionary meanings of the word. But it must strike one as remarkable that a language has come to use one and the same word for two opposite meanings. For speculative thought it is gratifying to find words that have in themselves a speculative meaning.[2] So sublation is a speculative term for Hegel, which means that it "disputes itself."  Thus, when something is sublated it is not annulled or cancelled out; it remains as an element in the new state, which means that there can never be a clean break between states.  Hegel may arbitrarily posit a linear progression from A to B to C etc., but this can never be guaranteed because of the very mechanism of sublation he uses.   Footnotes ^ I think this includes people who think we are free to pollute the planet as much as we want because, hey, by the time the Earth becomes uninhabitable we'll just build huge spaceships and go off to colonize other planets Battlestar-Galactica style! ^ G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. George di Giovanni (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2010), 81-82.