GCAS College Dublin

Join a leading philosopher in artificial intelligence, Maxim Miroshnichenko, Ph.D. for an intro seminar in AI.

Introduction AI — GCAS College In current scholarship, Artificial Intelligence's profound complexities and innovations have begun to permeate the zeitgeist, becoming a central point of discourse in today’s rapidly evolving digital age. Rare is the occasion when the echoes of AI, its foundational principles, and its applicat...

https://gcascollege.ie/psychoanalysis-and-buddhism-1

Take this course on Buddhism and Psychoanalysis taught by Dr. Mario D'Amato (PhD at the University of Chicago).

Dates: Saturdays in November
Description: Buddhism began to be seriously studied in the West during the 19th century. While some thought that knowledge of Buddhism would most impact Western religion (e.g., Nietzsche’s reference to a possible “Euro-Buddhism” in On the Genealogy of Morality) or Western philosophy (e.g., Schopenhauer’s comparison of his own philosophy with “the Prajñā-pāramitā of the Buddhists” in The World as Will and Representation), the case can be made that Buddhism’s greatest impact in the West has been on forms of psychotherapy, including psychoanalysis. In this course we will study the engagement of psychoanalysis with Buddhism. We will especially attend to psychoanalytic works that address Buddhism, whether directly or indirectly. But we will also examine materials from Buddhist discourse, to arrive at our own interpretations of the psychoanalytic interpretations of Buddhism. In short, we will engage in the dialectic between psychoanalysis and Buddhism, in the hopes of pushing it further.

GCAS Weekly Update:

New Website Going Up in a Few Days Thanks to all who helped edit our new website this week. Sarah Sheedy has made the edits and we’ll be ready to launch in a few days. The benefits of our new website are many including much better optimization (i.e., we will be easier to find and access). GCAS invested in this necessary leap forwar...

Apply to GCAS' MA programme in theology: https://gcas.ie/ma-application

Join Todd McGowan for his revamped Hegel seminar. Limited seating available.

Hegel Seminar 2023 — GCAS College This seminar is a reading/discussion/lecture seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. It will focus on key concepts and themes found in the Phenomenology of Spirit as highlighted by professor McGowan.

Join us this weekend for a free conference in Prague.

Join Todd McGowan for his GCAS Hegel Seminar starting July 8th. McGowan will be expanding on his previous Hegel seminars. If you join us, you'll have access to all the previous seminar materials. Tuition reduction is available for those in need.

Hegel Seminar 2023 — GCAS College This seminar is a reading/discussion/lecture seminar on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. It will focus on key concepts and themes found in the Phenomenology of Spirit as highlighted by professor McGowan.

The Danger of Philosophy

In late December of 1981, French philosopher, Jacques Derrida visited Prague to lecture in the underground and illegal seminar directed by Ladislav Hejdánek (a co-writer of Charter 77). Derrida was being followed by the secret police but made it to the seminar late at night. The translator, Miloš Rejchrt was pushed to his limits trying to translate the difficult style of “deconstruction.” There were 10 students present all sitting on the floor of an apartment at the centre of the city. Derrida lectured on Descartes and his strategy was vastly different from Dutch theology or the British pragmatism about which the students were accustomed. Tomás Vlasák attended. He was a priest in the underground church and formulated a key question, ‘K čemu je ta filosofie?’ “What use is philosophy? What does such an intellectual, formal way of thinking have to offer to those who are living on the edge of existence, who are seeking a meaning to life in a totalitarian society?” (The Velvet Philosophers by Barbara Day, page 92). Derrida left the seminar and was intercepted by the police. A few days later on the 29th of December he went to the airport to fly back to Paris when at customs, he was arrested for transporting drugs. The drugs were planted in his luggage by the police. He was a victim of Operation Isolation “…devised to discredit Charter 77…. The aim of the action was to drive a wedge between Chapter signatories, and discredit them in the eyes of the public.” (page 94). Derrida was processed at the Ruzyne jail and put into prison pyjamas. Finally on December 30th Derrida was released under international pressure and returned to Paris, exhausted. Yet the question, K čemu je ta filosofie? remained indelibly etched on Derrida’s mind.

This question appears innocuous when pitched in a context of seeming freedom. However, if we have the courage to critically examine social structures, we can witness complex strategies and campaigns designed to silence critical thinking. It is not controversial to state plainly that the humanities have been attacked and neutralized from the core of the university. It is a fact that student debt has forced nearly all of us into economic difficulties to achieve an education. This is an economic strategy the outcome of which has turned the university into a job-training ground for corporations. The brain of society has been decapitated. The time and energy to critically evaluate our existence and seeming “freedoms” has evaporated before our eyes and over the past four decades. And a society without a brain is a zombie. And a zombie is wholly unable to challenge critical imbalances that overtime turn philosophy into the enemy of the ruling ideology.

Serious and sustained thinking and research requires time, freedom, and resources that have dried up leaving us in solidarity with those brave students learning philosophy inside a totalitarian regime. It is not the same, of course, the social and cultural matrix is vastly different. Nevertheless, the undermining of critical thinking through dangerous economic campaigns like student debt, the gutting of humanities departments and majors, the control of universities through briberies by the wealthy donors have all combined to turn society into the living dead controlled by a handful of people with the interests of the few dominating our actions.

This is why GCAS exists. We exist to create a space in which asking dangerous and serious questions is protected and supported. We don’t espouse a political or religious position in the vulgar sense of a “party” or “imperial apparatus”; we are mere thinkers and researchers. We support independent thinking whose telos is unknown and procedure is “useless” to a world obsessed with materialism and profits at the cost of destroying the earth and humanity in its wake. We are GCAS.

This Weekend @ GCAS
Sunday

12pm (New York Time) Fernanda Magallanes, PhD seminar, “On Writing the Sexual” will conclude.

You can take all our courses by becoming a GCAS Researcher or Subscriber. You can support critical thinking and independent writers, artists, and philosophers by becoming a researcher and subscriber.

Our next Ph.D. Researchers’ meet-up will be Sunday April 2nd at 2pm New York time.

Our Summer Institute will be held in Prague from June 10-23 with William Desmond, Nina Power, Rocky Gangle, Julie Reshe, Margaret Young, Sylva Fischerova, Helen Rollins, Alfie Bown, Adam Graves, Barry Taylor and dozens of GCAS researchers from all over the world.

Bruce Fink’s GCAS Seminar, “Desire and Its Configurations” will be in Paris (and online) May 18-19-20. We have two slots left so register today. You may take this course for ECTS credit.

Rocky Gangle’s GCAS course on Nietzsche will be in the Alps (May 27-June 4) and we still have three more slots remaining. You can also take this course online. You may take this course for ECTS credit.

Courses for this summer will be posted in May and next academic calendar year (2023-2024) will be posted in July.

The world always needs people who think against the grain. Without critical thinkers like Albert Einstein, Alan Turing, Katherine Johnson, James Baldwin, and Martin Luther King, Jr. our existence would be anaemic and colorless. There are too many powerful people and campaigns who have a vested interest in undermining real thinking in society. The powerful corrupt banks and corporations who rob and steal from us don't want change. But it's not enough to just think, one must have the courage to enact thought in actions that lift up the human spirit and make our lives better, together.

GCAS college offers one of the best programs for activating real thinking and change. Our EU accredited MA program in philosophy is one of the best programs in which world-leading professors work with our students to produce scholarship and research that could never be imagined in the universities and colleges today that depend on putting their students into massive debt. It's as if developing innovative thinking at the university today forces students into financial debt. It's part of a system that punishes smart people from making change happen.

Consider studying with GCAS or encouraging your children or friends to join our degree programs because change cannot happen alone, the forces are too great for that. Change can only happen when taken up together collectively.

GCAS is the world's first, debt-free, co-owned college offering accredited degrees to give you and thinking a chance to make change real. We offer some scholarships to everyone who is accepted.

The deadline for applying to our MA program in philosophy is 1 April 2023. Learn more: https://gcas.ie/ma-application

GCAS is the alternative because we offer accredited degrees that are debt free and we are co-owned by faculty and graduates. We even have our own token, which can be earned by helping with operations and used to pay tuition thus equalizing the global regional economic disparities. https://gcas.ie

Join us for a public meeting in which GCAS Researchers present their early findings.

GCAS MA Researcher Present Preliminary Findings Ewa Lewandowska's current research interests include consciousness, technology, capitalism, love, ontology and the Real. In her work, Ewa is on the lookout f...

Take a course on Woody Allen by a leading film critic and theorist, Mary Wild.

Woody Allen Seminar — GCAS College Woody Allen is a prolific filmmaker; his style ranges from slapstick to dramatic art cinema with dark philosophical undertones, often combining tragic and comic elements. He frequently stars in his films, typically in the anxious, insecure intellectual persona he developed for stand-up in the 1960s....

Become a GCAS Researcher for $20/20€ per month and take all our live and some archived seminars. https://gcascollege.ie/gcas-subscriber. This is a special offer.

Take a course on cancel culture and comedy by Dr. Alfie Bown. Financial assistance is available. Saturdays and Sundays starting December 3rd.

Comedy — GCAS College For the father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, laughter was a mechanism of relief – something that could allow society to unite momentarily in a burst of joy that broke through oppressive social codes. For the Russian Marxist Mikhail Bakhtin, laughter was a democratic unity that brought down king...

Julie Reshe's GCAS course starts next weekend, Dec 3rd. Financial assistance is available. Sign-up here:

Negative Society: Love in Times of Despair — GCAS College Can we build a world where people will no longer hurt each other? No. Can we fail better in trying not to hurt each other? Yes.

Welcome to the world's most advanced college, Jamie Davies.

Jamie Davies — GCAS College I am interested in the construction, and cultivation, of subjectivity and how technics, truth, and our wider habitus influences, informs, and orientates this specific construction. I also research how politics, ethics, and their offshoot, nationalism, coalesce to form competing systems which each re...

Congratulations to Lars Kessler (Berlin, Germany) for successfully defending his BA thesis. Prof. Dr. Barry Taylor and I evaluated the work. Now Lars moves into our MA programme in philosophy to join a brilliant cohort. Whoa!

Take a GCAS seminar with a Pulitzer Prize winning author (Chris Hedges) and a community education activist (Boris Franklin). Enrol today:

Voice Seminar — GCAS College Description: This seminar, which will include the book Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison by Chris Hedges and the play Caged written by The New Jersey Prison Theater Cooperative, will examine the transformative power of education and creative self-expression in prison. It wil...

Take a course from a leading philosopher of law, Laurent de Sutter. There's limited space and financial aid.

Postcritical Thinking — GCAS College Reading: Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, transl. Michael A. Greco and Daniel W. Smith, Univ of Minnesota Press, 1997

Take a course from the Pulitzer prize writer, Chris Hedges and Boris Franklin. Enrol now for a 50% discount until September 7.

Voice Seminar — GCAS College Description: This seminar, which will include the book Our Class: Trauma and Transformation in an American Prison by Chris Hedges and the play Caged written by The New Jersey Prison Theater Cooperative, will examine the transformative power of education and creative self-expression in prison. It wil...

Take a course with one of Latin America's leading artists and philosophers, Francisco "Pancho" González Castro. His seminar, "The Category of Art as a Capitalist Product" starts this Sunday, September 4th.

The Category of Art — GCAS College In this seminar we will review the relationship between the art system and capitalism. To do so, we will examine how contemporary art is articulated as a system and how it is differentiated from artistic practices. Then we will see certain ways in which Art relates to capitalism and how aesthetics a...

Take a GCAS seminar with a leading philosopher, John D. Caputo:

Caputo Seminar — GCAS College Description: In a scene from Ghost Dance (1982) in which Derrida played himself, an actress asks Derrida whether he believes in ghosts. His “appearance” in this film is turning him into a ghost, he replies, an apparition in which, long after he is dead, we will be able to “see” and “hear.....

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