The Antipodean Philosopher, Volume 1: Public Lectures on Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand 9780739127339, 9780739167939, 1251391451, 0739127330

Table of contents :
Cover......Page 1
Title Page......Page 4
Copyright Page......Page 5
Table of Contents......Page 6
Preface......Page 8
Chapter 1: Metaphysics in Australasia......Page 12
Chapter 2: Science, Morality, and the Death of God......Page 22
Chapter 3: Philistines, Barbarians, and the Death of Intellect......Page 36
Chapter 4: Philosophy in Melbourne......Page 50
Chapter 5: Missing the Point Many Times Over?: Australian Philosophical Atheism......Page 64
Chapter 6: Philosophy in Sydney......Page 72
Chapter 7: Australian Women Philosophers......Page 78
Chapter 8: In the Name of the Father: Understanding Monotheism and Fundamentalism......Page 92
Chapter 9: The Nature of Love......Page 100
Chapter 10: Free Will and the Sciences of the Mind......Page 110
Chapter 11: Feminist Philosophy in Australasia......Page 120
Chapter 12: Philosophy and Its Masters: The Transformations of Philosophy in Queensland......Page 136
Chapter 13: Philosophy in South Australia......Page 150
Chapter 14: Is Religion to Be Respected or Only Tolerated?......Page 156
Chapter 15: Continental Philosophy in Australia......Page 170
Chapter 16: Getting the Wrong Anderson?: A Short and Opinionated History of New Zealand Philosophy......Page 180
Chapter 17: Nature in the Active Voice......Page 208
Chapter 18: Why Asian Philosophy?......Page 222
Chapter 19: Logic in Australasia......Page 234
Chapter 20: The Analytic/Continental Divide: A Contretemps?......Page 250
Chapter 21: Philosopher Deans and Philosopher Kings: The Contribution of Philosophers to Senior Management in Australian Universities......Page 266
Chapter 22: Becoming Slow: Philosophy, Reading, and the Essay......Page 276
Bibliography......Page 290
Index......Page 310
About the Contributors......Page 320

Citation preview

The Antipodean Philosopher

The Antipodean Philosopher Volume 1: Public Lectures on Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand Edited by Graham Oppy and N. N. Trakakis Associate Editors Lynda Burns, Steve Gardner, and Fiona Leigh

LEXINGTON BOOKS A division of ROWMAN & LITTLEFIELD PUBLISHERS, INC. Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

Published by Lexington Books A division of Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.lexingtonbooks.com Estover Road, Plymouth PL6 7PY, United Kingdom Copyright © 2011 by Lexington Books All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data The Antipodean philosopher / edited by Graham Oppy . . . [et al.]. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7391-2733-9 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-7391-6793-9 (electronic) 1. Philosophy, Australian. 2. Philosophy, New Zealand. I. Oppy, Graham Robert. B5701.A58 2011 199'.94—dc22 2010048622 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Printed in the United States of America

Contents

Preface

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1 Metaphysics in Australasia John Bigelow 2 Science, Morality, and the Death of God Raymond D. Bradley 3 Philistines, Barbarians, and the Death of Intellect Andrew Brennan 4 Philosophy in Melbourne C. A. J. (Tony) Coady 5 Missing the Point Many Times Over?: Australian Philosophical Atheism Peter Forrest 6 Philosophy in Sydney James Franklin 7 Australian Women Philosophers Karen Green 8 In the Name of the Father: Understanding Monotheism and Fundamentalism Russell Grigg and Matthew Sharpe 9 The Nature of Love Jeanette Kennett 10 Free Will and the Sciences of the Mind Neil Levy

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1 11 25 39

53 61 67

81 89 99

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11 Feminist Philosophy in Australasia Catriona Mackenzie 12 Philosophy and Its Masters: The Transformations of Philosophy in Queensland Gary Malinas 13 Philosophy in South Australia Chris Mortensen 14 Is Religion to Be Respected or Only Tolerated? Robert Nola 15 Continental Philosophy in Australia Paul Patton 16 Getting the Wrong Anderson?: A Short and Opinionated History of New Zealand Philosophy Charles R. Pigden 17 Nature in the Active Voice Val Plumwood 18 Why Asian Philosophy? Graham Priest 19 Logic in Australasia Greg Restall 20 The Analytic/Continental Divide: A Contretemps? Jack Reynolds 21 Philosopher Deans and Philosopher Kings: The Contribution of Philosophers to Senior Management in Australian Universities Paul Thom 22 Becoming Slow: Philosophy, Reading, and the Essay Michelle Boulous Walker

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125 139 145 159

169 197 211 223 239

255 265

Bibliography

279

Index

299

About the Contributors

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Preface

For many years, the homepage of the Australasian Association of Philosophy (www.aap.org.au) carried the following words from Cambridge philosopher Hugh Mellor: It’s just as well for the rest of the world that philosophy is not an Olympic sport. In the last few decades, Australasia has produced more good philosophers per square head than almost anywhere else. There is no better place for philosophers to go who wish to raise their game.

We think that the attitude that Mellor here displays would be surprising to all but academic philosophers, Australian or otherwise. Moreover, we think that, even if people generally came to accept that what Mellor says is so, they would still suppose that philosophers in Australia have nothing to say to anyone beyond the academy. In Australia—and not only in Australia—it is common to suppose that academic philosophy is an arcane pursuit that has no interest or significance for anyone else. We think that anyone who thinks this, and who reads the lectures in this volume, will have reason to engage in revision of opinion. These lectures were all presented to general public audiences, and they all generated significant amounts of interested and intelligent discussion. When academic philosophers speak plainly about things that matter to them, what they say sometimes has much wider resonance than common opinion might suppose. The lectures that are collected together in this volume were arranged under the auspices of a larger project on the history of philosophy in Australia and New Zealand. This larger project was funded by a large grant from the Australian Research Council (ARC, DP0663930), and by smaller grants from the Myer Foundation and the William Angliss Charitable Trust. The lectures were presented at writers’ festivals and other similar events in Australia and New Zealand, in the period from 2006 through 2009, including: the Melbourne Writers Festival (2006–2009), the Monash Arts Festival (2007), the Brisbane Writers Festival (2007), the Auckland Writers Festival vii

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(2008), the Sydney Writers Festival (2009), and the Adelaide Festival of Ideas (2009). Almost all of the lectures from the series were recorded by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, and excerpts from many of these recordings have been broadcast on Radio National, on Alan Saunders’s program ‘The Philosopher’s Zone’ (www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone). Some lectures that were presented at these events have not made it into the finished volume, though there was no case in which this was because of considerations of quality: some lectures were excluded by considerations of copyright, some for reasons of personal misadventure, some because the deadline for publication proved too hard to meet, and so on. We are grateful to all of the philosophers in Australia and New Zealand who have participated in this adventure, including those who continue to do so. After the very first set of public lectures—in Melbourne, in 2006—the Festival organiser, Rosemary Cameron, wrote to us to say that philosophy had been ‘the surprise hit of the Festival.’ As it happened, all four of the philosophy talks attracted sell-out crowds of around 200 people each. Philosophy will be on again at the Melbourne Writers Festival in 2010—having been there every year since 2006—and it is a reasonable supposition that a tradition has now been established. We have ordered the lectures alphabetically by the surnames of the lecturers. There are other systems of arrangement that we might have adopted. If one is looking to group the lectures, then it is plausible to see them as dividing into five overarching themes. Five of the lectures—those by Coady, Franklin, Malinas, Mortensen, and Pigden—are about local histories of philosophy: philosophy in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, and New Zealand, respectively. Five of the lectures—those by Bigelow, Green, McKenzie, Patton, and Restall—are about histories of local discussions of topics in philosophy: metaphysics, women in philosophy, feminist philosophy, Continental philosophy, and logic, respectively. Four of the lectures— those by Bradley, Forrest, Grigg and Sharpe, and Nola—are about philosophy of religion. Six of the lectures—those by Boulous Walker, Kennett, Levy, Plumwood, Priest, and Reynolds—are about other philosophical topics: reading, love, free will, eco-philosophy, Asian philosophy, and the ‘analytic’/‘continental’ divide, respectively. The final two lectures—those by Brennan and Thom—are about universities, university administration, and the intellectual state of universities at the beginning of the twenty-first century. It is important for us to note that the lecturers chose their own topics (though we did initially encourage lectures on aspects of the history of philosophy in Australia and New Zealand). Since we are both philosophers of religion—a rare breed in philosophy departments in Australia and New Zealand—it is of interest to us that four of the lectures turned out to be on philosophy of religion. Finally, a note on the spelling conventions we have adopted. In order to reflect the Australasian character of the book, and given that a large portion of our readership is expected to be in, or from, Australasia, we have chosen to use Australian (or British-Australian) spelling conventions, as opposed to

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the spelling conventions which are outlined in The Chicago Manual of Style and which are more typical of American publications. There are many people who have supported and assisted the production of this volume, and who are appropriately acknowledged here. First, we are grateful for the efforts of our associate editors—Lynda Burns, Steve Gardner, and Fiona Leigh—who were all employed on our project from the funds provided by the ARC. Lynda, Steve, and Fiona all acted as hosts for some of the lectures, and assisted in arranging travel, accommodation, and so forth for the lecturers. We note, in particular, that Steve played a leading role in the administration of the larger project during the second year (2007), when Nick Trakakis took up a twelve-month postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. Second, of course, we are indebted to all of the philosophers who agreed to give the public lectures that form the basis of this book. Among the lectures that were presented, but that did not make it into the book, we feel that we must mention the lecture given by Barry Taylor on David Lewis’s role in philosophy in Australia and New Zealand. Barry’s untimely death in early 2010 robbed Australian philosophy of one of its favourite larrikin sons; he is very much missed. Third, we wish to acknowledge the support that we have received from our colleagues at Monash University, within and beyond the Department of Philosophy. In 2010, the department became part of the larger School of Philosophical, Historical and International Studies in the Faculty of Arts; we have always felt supported by our department, school, and faculty, and by the wider university. In particular, we are grateful to: Dirk Baltzly, Linda Barclay, John Bigelow, Jacqui Broad, Sam Butchart, Monima Chadha, Karen Green, Toby Handfield, Jakob Hohwy, Lloyd Humberstone, Mark Manolopoulos, Justin Oakley, Rob Sparrow, and Aubrey Townsend. Fourth, we thank the team of people at Lexington Books who were involved in the production of this work, including Jana Wilson and Gwen Kirby. We are also indebted to Karen Gillen who, as always, has done a superb job indexing the final work. Last, but by no means least, we express our enormous debts to friends and family who have supported us through what has turned out to be a rather long and arduous undertaking. From Graham: to Camille, Gilbert, Calvin, and Alfie, with love. From Nick: to my parents, brother John, and partner Lydia, with gratitude and affection. Parts of Tony Coady’s chapter are drawn from his contribution to Graham Oppy and N. N. Trakakis (eds.), A Companion to Philosophy in Australia and New Zealand (Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2010). We are grateful to the publishers for permission to reuse this material. An earlier version of James Franklin’s chapter appeared in the October 2009 issue of Quadrant (vol. 53, issue 10, pp. 76–79), under the title of ‘The Lure of Philosophy in Sydney.’ We are grateful to Professor Franklin for permission to republish the paper. Portions of Jeanette Kennett’s chapter are drawn from her article, ‘True and Proper Selves: Velleman on Love,’ Ethics, vol. 118, January 2008, pp.

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213–27. We are grateful to the University of Chicago Press for permission to reuse this material. An extended version of Robert Nola’s chapter has been accepted for publication in the Croatian Journal of Philosophy. We are grateful to the journal’s editors for allowing the shorter version to be included in the current volume. The paper by Val Plumwood, who sadly passed away in February 2008, has been slightly revised since it was originally submitted to us, but only for stylistic purposes and not in content. A similar version of this chapter was published in the Australian Humanities Review, vol. 46, May 2009, pp. 113–29, and we are grateful to Professor Deborah Rose from the Australian Humanities Review editorial board for granting permission to publish a version of this paper here.

Chapter One

Metaphysics in Australasia John Bigelow

I was born in Canada, but went to secondary school and then studied for my first university degree in New Zealand. After postgraduate studies in Canada and England I took up my first academic position in New Zealand. Hence, when I speak of metaphysics in Australasia, by ‘Australasia’ I mean ‘New Zealand and also Australia.’ Metaphysics in Australasia began long before Europeans and then Asians, Africans, Americans, and others arrived in Australasia. Metaphysics is inextricably woven into myths, religions, arts and crafts, and everyday life all over the world. When you learn your native language, part of what you are learning is metaphysics. Judaism, Islam, and Christianity embrace a belief that the material world was created by an intelligent designer, God, and this is metaphysics. It is then assumed that if you hold this metaphysical belief it will deeply affect the way you feel about the world and the way you live your life. In ancient Greece, in Plato’s dialogues, we not only find metaphysics, we also find the thesis that in order to achieve the best forms of government we must found our social order on a correct understanding of the fundamental nature of the world we live in, and of the place of human beings within that world. If a system of government is founded on a mistaken conception of human nature, it will fail. Applying this to modern times, one might suggest for instance that twentieth-century communism failed because it was founded on a failure to recognise the deeply ingrained selfishness of human beings. We are now governed by another extreme, an uncompassionate, ‘user-pays’ system that is grounded in a different but (perhaps) equally mistaken conception of human nature, and of nature, and of the place of human beings in the natural world. To take another example, from the standpoint of an atheistic metaphysics, theocracies that are dominated by a single monotheistic orthodoxy are based on a mistaken metaphysics—and this is a bad thing. Conversely too, however, from the standpoint of some monotheistic orthodoxies, all secular, liberal governments are not based on a correct metaphysics—and this is a bad thing. 1

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Consider another example. Hinduism includes the doctrine of reincarnation, and this is metaphysics. Long ago within this tradition, a heretical school arose, the Buddhists, who argued that all six of the orthodox Hindu schools rested on a mistaken assumption about the continuing identity of the self through the passage of time. The Buddhists held a ‘no-self’ doctrine, a doctrine of ‘momentariness,’ and this is metaphysics. It was also thought that an improved understanding of this matter in metaphysics could change the way you feel about the world and the way you live your life. Very roughly, if you stop believing in the self you will stop being selfish, and the world will then be a better place. In more recent times in Europe, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant said that the fundamental questions of metaphysics are God, freedom, and immortality. Kant’s list embodies a degree of Eurocentricity, but nevertheless his list does also touch on concerns that resonate very widely throughout human history. People have a recurring propensity to ask why there is a world at all, and why there is a world like this one, rather than some other world very different from this one. Some people settle upon definite answers, and this influences the way they feel and the way they live their lives. Some people do not settle on any definite answers, and so find themselves lost and undecided, and this too influences the way they feel about the world and the way they live their lives. Metaphysics in Australasia is like metaphysics everywhere: it pervades life in many ways. In this chapter, however, I will narrow the focus to the role of metaphysics among academic, professional philosophers in Australasia. To set the context, I will first speak briefly about academic philosophy in Europe and America. As I have been suggesting, metaphysics is ubiquitous and important in all cultures. In the twentieth century, however, metaphysics came under sustained attack from professional philosophers. The attack was mounted under several banners, including ‘pragmatism,’ ‘positivism,’ and ‘postmodernism.’ Instead of helping us to try to find answers to our metaphysical questions, twentieth-century philosophers systematically set out to persuade themselves, and their students, that the whole enterprise of metaphysics is entirely wrong-headed. We should stop asking these questions, and we should stop trying to answer them. Instead of asking about Reality, we should content ourselves with articulating the textures of our own texts, and exploring the patterns we weave with words, and our social networks of political power. We should publish books with titles like The Social Construction of Reality. We should recognise, with the French philosopher Derrida, that ‘there is nothing outside the text.’ At the end of the twentieth century, however, some professional philosophers have come to believe that there are signs of a possible rebirth of metaphysics, even within those very parts of the academy where formerly were heard the longest and loudest sermons preaching the death of metaphysics. In this process of rebirth, Australian philosophers are perceived, by some, to be playing a surprisingly prominent role. I will give three examples. In my narrative I will highlight some philosophers and completely ignore many others. I will focus on a handful of Australian philosophers who are

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perceived, by some philosophers overseas, as forming a distinctive family that can be grouped under some such heading as ‘Australian Realists.’ Not all philosophers, of course, are working on metaphysics, and of those working on metaphysics only some fall into the loose family that might travel under some such name as ‘Australian Realism.’ My narrative will be partial and partisan. Any attempt I might make to come up with something impartial and comprehensive would only succeed in producing something boring, of the sort that we have to produce all the time for our paymasters in Canberra. A few years ago there was a conference on Australian philosophy held in France. Fares were paid for many Australians, who came and gathered in Grenoble. Some papers by French speakers were delivered in French; papers by Australians were delivered in English, but simultaneous translation was available through headphones. The papers in English were translated into French and published by one of the leading academic publishing houses in Paris. The title of this book is, in translation: The Structure of the World: Objects, Properties, and States of Affairs, The Rebirth of Metaphysics in the Australian School of Philosophy (Monnoyer 2004). The title of this book pays special homage to the work of Professor David Armstrong, of Sydney University. Here in Australia it does not feel at all as though there is any such thing as ‘the Australian school of philosophy.’ Nevertheless, it is interesting to note that, from the distant vantage point of France, certain broad similarities among several prominent Australian philosophers are more visible than the detailed disagreements that loom so large for those philosophers themselves, in their own local dealings with each other here in Australia. Consider a second example. A few years ago there was a very lively conference in Manchester, and from it came a book published by the prestigious academic publishing house, the Clarendon Press of Oxford University: Truthmakers: The Contemporary Debate (Beebee and Dodd, 2005). In this book, young professional philosophers debated about a proposed new way of approaching metaphysics. In this book there are pervasive references to Australian philosophers, especially David Armstrong, but also several others, including for instance John Fox at La Trobe University. There are frequent citations of a metaphysical thesis I proposed in 1988: truth supervenes on being (Bigelow 1988). Don’t worry what it means. Just notice: doesn’t it sound metaphysical? (Incidentally, I proposed this thesis in a book that began with the statement, ‘Under the shadow of logical positivism, it has been difficult to speak of metaphysics openly . . .’ [Bigelow 1988: 1]). In this chapter, I harken back to the same idea, that we should return to metaphysics and shake off the inhibitions instilled by a century of pragmatism, positivism, and postmodernism.) Consider a third example. Under the shadow of logical positivism, one of the metaphysical topics that lay furthest beyond the pale was a doctrine known as essentialism. This is a theory tracing back to Aristotle, according to which things have what might be called ‘essential natures.’ These ‘natures’ include properties that determine what a thing is. Once these properties have determined what is there, other so-called ‘accidental’ properties determine how that thing happens to be at a given time. The accidental properties may change, but the essential properties remain the same.

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Essentialism became extremely unfashionable in professional philosophical circles in the twentieth century. In recent years, however, there have been several international conferences in Britain at which young professional philosophers have been debating essentialism with gusto. Repeated reference to several Australian philosophers has permeated these debates, especially to Brian Ellis, formerly of La Trobe University, but also to some younger Australian philosophers, and some young philosophers overseas who are drawing on the work of Ellis and others in Australia. How did it come about that Australian philosophers should be playing so salient a part in this attempted rebirth of metaphysics, after a century of sustained attack from pragmatism, positivism, and postmodernism? Is it due to our climate? Or our lack of old buildings? Maybe in London or Paris it is possible to think that ‘there is nothing outside the text.’ Yet on the beach at Bondi, or in the baking sun back of Burke, maybe it is more obvious that the world has a structure that is not of our making. Maybe it is more obvious in Australia that truths need truthmakers, these truthmakers being things in the world that exist independently of our theories about them. Maybe in Australia it is more obvious that things have their own essential natures, which may be radically different from the ways we conceive them to be in our thoughts and in our texts. Yet I am not going to advance a climatic theory of the history of ideas. I will trace just a few sample trajectories that have contributed to some of the recent developments among professional philosophers in Australia. I will begin with a philosopher called Samuel Alexander. He was born in Sydney and studied in Melbourne, and then went to Oxford and then to Manchester. At Monash University, the Alexander Theatre is named after him. Samuel Alexander wrote a large book of metaphysics called Space, Time, and Deity (1920). This book contains one of the best chapter titles I have met: ‘Time Is the Mind of Space.’ I don’t really know what it means, but whatever it means, it is clearly metaphysics. I will gesture towards a glimmer of understanding shortly. Alexander defended a metaphysics according to which everything there is exists in space and time. There is no supernatural world outside space and time. There is, for instance, no transcendent God or angels, at least if they are supposed to exist outside space and time. There is no Platonic realm of timeless, abstract objects, of the sort that Platonists allege to be studied in pure mathematics. There are only the things that exist, either earlier or later than us, at some particular location in this same world that we live in. Yet Alexander was not a crass ‘reductionist,’ like the ancient Greeks who said that all that exist are ‘atoms and the void.’ Alexander was what is called an emergence theorist. He held that when atoms of hydrogen and oxygen come together in the right way, something new emerges that did not exist before, with properties that are very different from the properties of the ingredients from which it was made: namely, water. Likewise, when matter comes together in the right way, life emerges. When living things develop in the right ways, mind emerges. And when and if the whole universe attains the right kinds of harmonies, then what emerges is a new property of the world as a whole: the property of divinity. This is a form of pantheism. The world

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of space is God’s body, and in this body a property of divinity can emerge in the same way that consciousness emerges from the chemicals in the human brain. With this broadly pantheistic conception in mind, it might be possible to tease out some of the meaning in Alexander’s statement that ‘Time Is the Mind of Space.’ Under ancient conceptions, the mind or soul was thought of as the source of motion, and more generally, of change. When a mop sits in the corner, it does not move unless something pushes it. When you see a mouse, however, and you see it moving without anything pushing it, it is clear that there is within it some source of movement. What makes motion possible is, of course, the passage of time. Space, then, is a body, and Time is what makes it possible for there to be motions of smaller bodies within the all-encompassing body of Space itself. This, then, is one respect in which Space is like an all-encompassing counterpart of our body, and Time is like an all-pervading counterpart of our minds. For Alexander, although there is no transcendent God, it is possible to wonder whether the world itself is worthy of worship. Or at least, parts of it might be, for instance, at least some of the wildernesses that have not yet been despoiled by human mistakes. And some human domains might be, too, some gardens, some chapels, some poems, and so on. This is metaphysics. In Britain, one of the young philosophers who was deeply impressed by Alexander’s metaphysics was a young man called John Anderson, who went on to become professor of philosophy at Sydney University. Anderson brought with him to the job a passionate love of metaphysics—and a belief that everything that exists is in space and time, and that there is no supernatural world beyond space and time. Anderson had an enormous impact on intellectual life in Sydney. Andersonians were rumoured to be believers in free love, for instance. And among the Andersonians was David Armstrong, who became professor of philosophy at Sydney University after Anderson. Armstrong, like Anderson and Alexander before him, loved metaphysics and believed that everything that there is exists in space and time. Armstrong calls this doctrine Naturalism. The image of Australian philosophy overseas, among those professional philosophers for whom Australian philosophy has a high profile, is closely tied to a this-worldly metaphysics of this kind, a metaphysics which descends from Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity. There is another trajectory that I will describe, which helped to bring Australian philosophy to its current perceived role in an alleged rebirth of metaphysics. In Britain, a young philosopher called J. J. C. Smart, Jack Smart, came to occupy a chair in Adelaide, and brought with him a doctrine called Scientific Realism. This was a metaphysics that harmonised well with Armstrong’s naturalist metaphysics in Sydney, and Brian Ellis and others who knew Jack Smart in Adelaide brought this doctrine to Melbourne University’s newly created department of the History and Philosophy of Science, to La Trobe University, and other places. In addition, Jack Smart was a friend of the leading American philosopher of the time, W. V. Quine at Harvard. At Harvard, Quine met a young philosopher called David Lewis, who went on to be a professor at Princeton and to become the leading systematic metaphysician of his generation. Very early in

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Lewis’s career, Smart organised for Lewis to give a prestigious series of Gavin David Young lectures in Adelaide. Following this visit to Australia, Lewis travelled around Australia for the entire Princeton summer, and he continued to do so nearly every year throughout his career. The pervasive presence of Lewis in Australia had an enormous impact on metaphysics in Australia. Lewis, like Smart, was a dedicated defender of Scientific Realism. He not only talked metaphysics to Australian philosophers, he also talked about Australian philosophers in America and Europe. Scientific Realism, like Naturalism, looms large in the image that many professional philosophers overseas have formed of ‘the Australian school of philosophy.’ This trajectory, stemming from Smart and Lewis, leads to a beehive of current work in this vein. A prominent example is furnished by Frank Jackson at the Australian National University, whose John Locke Lectures at Oxford some years ago became the influential book From Metaphysics to Ethics (1998). Notice the way the title privileges metaphysics. It echoes the title of a book by the philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992). And, despite government policies, work of this kind still continues to thrive among a handful of younger philosophers in Australia. Here is one more trajectory leading to the present state of the art in Australasian metaphysics. The great twentieth-century philosopher Karl Popper worked in New Zealand early in his career before he went to London. One of his best students was Alan Musgrave, who became professor of philosophy at the University of Otago in Dunedin. Musgrave, like Smart, Lewis, and Armstrong, was a staunch defender of something that could be called Scientific Realism. These several trajectories have all contributed to the prominent role Australasian philosophy is currently perceived, by some, to be playing in a rebirth of metaphysics after the Dark Ages of twentieth-century pragmatism, positivism, and postmodernism. The metaphysics that is being reborn is, very broadly speaking, something akin to the metaphysics of Samuel Alexander’s Space, Time, and Deity. I have only given the sketchiest outline of the ‘this-worldly’ metaphysics that has evolved from early metaphysics, like that of Samuel Alexander, into the theories expounded by more recent Australasian philosophers like Smart and Armstrong (as well as Lewis). What is impressive about all this metaphysics is the depth of argumentation and complexity of interconnections among different aspects of the theory, and it is hard to summarise these briefly. The devil is in the details, and we will have no time for details here. Philosophers in this family differ passionately among themselves over many of those details, and, of course, they frequently differ in many of these details from the distinctive quasi-pantheism of the much earlier metaphysics of Samuel Alexander. I will just give one short example. Smart, Lewis, Armstrong, and others have defended a materialist theory of the mind, a theory that breaks down the traditional dichotomy between the mind and the body. They have also defended a theory that breaks down the traditional dichotomy between Time and Space. The thought comes to mind: perhaps this is because ‘time is the mind of space’? They have broken down both Alexander’s dichotomy between mind and body, and his dichotomy between Time and Space. Australian Realists characteristically defend the

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thesis that time is a fourth dimension that is much more like spatial dimensions than common sense would have us believe. When people we love are distant from us in space, it is consoling to know that although they are far from us, and we are far from them, at least we both exist. They do not exist here, that is, at our spatial location; nevertheless, it is true, and it is true here, that they exist at their own spatial location. According to the four-dimensionalist, temporal relations are just like spatial relations in this respect. Imagine that some people you love are distant from us in time, rather than space. Imagine that someone does not exist now, but existed long ago. Then, according to the four-dimensionalist, you can take consolation in the fact that although these people are distant from us, and we are distant from them, at least we both exist. These people do not exist now, that is, at our temporal location; nevertheless, it is true, and it is true now, that they exist at their own temporal location. For absolutely everything that ever did, does, or will exist, it is true now that these things exist. They are spatiotemporally related to us, and we to them. There is no difference between time and space in this respect. If this were right, it might be thought that this four-dimensionalist metaphysics could, and should, affect some the ways we think and feel about the world. One New Zealand philosopher who resisted four-dimensionalism ironically had the name Arthur Prior. He was a presentist. He thought that nothing exists except what is present. Prior said nothing prior exists. Prior wrote an article with the title, ‘Thank Goodness That’s Over’ (1959). We seem to find it consoling, sometimes, to think that certain examples of suffering lie mercifully in the past. And it would seem as though this consolation may not rest on an entirely selfish desire that the suffering be distant from us. One can feel compassion for the sufferers, and take comfort in the thought that their suffering now lies mercifully in the past. Yet surely this way of thinking should be irrational, if it were still true (as the fourdimensionalist says) that the suffering exists. It should not be consoling to think the suffering is east rather than west of us. Why should it be consoling to think the suffering lies in one direction rather than the opposite direction along one of the other dimensions of the four-dimensional spacetime manifold? The four-dimensionalist metaphysics seems to stand at odds with our ordinary ways of thinking and feeling about things. Likewise, consider the fact that we do not think it a tragedy that there might be no life in spatially distant parts of the universe. Yet compare space with time. It does seem to matter to us, much more, if we imagine that there might be no life in temporally distant parts of the universe, especially if those temporally distant parts lie in the future. Yet if time were just a fourth dimension, metaphysically on a par with the other three dimensions in the spacetime manifold, then it is hard to see how it could be rational to feel differently about a lack of life in the future, from the way we feel about a lack of life in spatially remote regions. Again, it would seem that the four-dimensionalist metaphysics seems to stand at odds with our ordinary ways of thinking and feeling about things. This could cut two ways. You might use this as a reason for rejecting the metaphysics. Or conversely, you might use this as a reason for changing your life. The Buddhists, for instance, argue that if we cast away our common

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sense and adopt the metaphysics of ‘momentariness,’ this will help us to achieve inner tranquillity. The ancient Greek school of Epicurean philosophy used arguments, very like those I have sketched from four-dimensionalism, to support the conclusion that if we can find a correct metaphysics, it may help us to achieve release from anxiety and a state of lasting tranquillity. Australian metaphysicians characteristically make much more modest claims for their metaphysics: nevertheless, I submit that their metaphysics, just like the metaphysics of the past, is not wholly disconnected from the ways we think and feel about the world. The general drift of Australian Realism runs roughly like this. Australian Realists are addressing the very same questions that lie behind many of the great religions of the world, and it is disingenuous to pretend that there is no potential for friction between academic philosophy and religious belief. Academic philosophers address the same questions, and often come up with different answers. Furthermore, the methods used by academic philosophers are often different from those used by followers of religious faiths. Australian Realists tend to assume that we should all be genuinely curious about the world we live in. We should be concerned to find out, for instance, why sugar dissolves in water. What causes rainbows? Why are rock formations often found in horizontal layers, but sometimes these layers seem to be ‘buckled’? Why are there marsupials (and no monkeys) in Australia and in some of the islands to the north of Australia—but only up to the ‘Wallace line,’ where there is a sudden change to monkeys and other Asian animals? Why do the planets seem to move in the ways they do, through the constellations of the zodiac? Why is the sky black at night? And so on. Australian Realists assume that if you are genuinely curious about these things, you will be impressed by the answers that science has developed. Any rational person’s metaphysics at any given point in history should include, as a very large chunk, both common sense and the contemporary sciences. Anything else in the metaphysics should fit in, consistently, with common sense and the sciences. As a result of this approach, many Australian metaphysicians arrive at a metaphysics that lies perilously close to the ‘reductionism’ of the ancient Greek philosophers who said that nothing exists except ‘atoms and the void.’ Insofar as this metaphysics draws back from this extreme, it does so in something like the spirit of Samuel Alexander’s doctrine—that somehow mind and divinity ‘emerge’ out of patterns of atoms in the void. The method used in this kind of current Australian Realist metaphysics is, roughly, something that might be called ‘inference to the best explanation.’ Philosophers like Smart and Armstrong characteristically argue that a naturalist metaphysics, Scientific Realism, furnishes us with a good explanation of many of the things we hunger to explain in this world of ours. They argue that this is an economical explanation, a simpler explanation than those offered in many of the rival metaphysics that draw wide adherence around the globe, the doctrine of reincarnation for instance. Because their explanation is arguably simpler than rival ones, they argue that it is reasonable to believe that it is likely to be closer to the truth. This does not establish certainty, but it does make a case for reasonable probability, and probability is the guide of life.

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This metaphysics, if you believe it, will have an influence on the ways that you feel about the world, the ways that you live your life, and the ways you think it best to govern a nation. Australian academic philosophers, however, have chosen to keep a low profile in the wider community, and not to engage in open debate with religions that cling to alternative metaphysical beliefs. It is easier to follow the argument wherever it leads, when no one outside your own small ‘community of enquiry’ is watching you, and no one in the world at large, apart from a few academics, cares what conclusions you reach. Australian academic philosophers have, on the whole, been talking only to academic philosophers in Australia and overseas. They have not, on the whole, set themselves up as government advisors. They could not otherwise have made the kinds of progress that they have made in their discipline. Yet this leaves us with a big question: but is it true? And if it were, would it do? Many twentieth-century philosophers were hostile to metaphysics—and, one may well suspect, not entirely without reason. Metaphysics has been pursued for centuries, and philosophers have never come to any consensus on the answers to the questions they ask. The same old debates go on and on, and show no signs of reaching any resolution. Surely, one might wonder, it is pigheaded to keep on debating the same old issues in the same old fruitless ways, without any prospect of reaching settled answers to any of the questions you are asking. Why should we pay any attention to Australian throwbacks, who replay old metaphysical debates like broken long-playing records from the early days of vinyl discs? Is it not possible that Australian philosophers have just failed to understand the devastating critiques of twentiethcentury critics like Heidegger in Germany and Wittgenstein in England? No, the new Australian metaphysics neither ignores nor misunderstands the critiques that have been mounted against metaphysics. In particular, Australian metaphysicians are under no illusion that they will be able to furnish proofs that will compel rational agreement and lead to universal consensus. It is fairly obvious that belief in a transcendent God, in reincarnation or the immortality of the soul, in the doctrine of momentariness, and many other metaphysical doctrines will continue to attract believers all over the globe. Live and let live, I say. The metaphysical theories of professional philosophers are never going to command universal agreement even among professional philosophers in the academies, let alone in the wider world outside the academies. Yet why should that prompt either modern despair or postmodern ‘playfulness’? Recognition that no one can prove (finally and absolutely) that we are wrong should not lead to the complacent conclusion that we could not be wrong—or that there is no longer any need to keep striving after ‘truth’ as a regulative ideal. In George Eliot’s great novel Middlemarch, there is a young man called Ladislaw who is in Rome, studying the paintings, and trying to paint original works of his own. His beloved, Dorothea, has been impressed by the number of paintings that are already to be found in Rome. She has also been impressed by some of the poverty that was to be found in Rome at that time. She thinks that the last thing the world needs is yet another picture. What are we to say to that?

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The reason for studying metaphysical systems of the past is the same as the reason for studying the paintings in Rome, or for performing Bach’s Mass in B Minor yet again. The reason for continuing in the attempt to find our own answers to metaphysical questions is like the reason for painting yet another picture, or composing new music, even though you know that what you create is unlikely to be ‘the last word,’ or even to be any better than many of the creations that have come before. It is a worthy thing to do, and I think we should say ‘Good on you’ to Australian professional philosophers for continuing to do it. Australian Realists embrace an attitude known as ‘fallibilism.’ Notice that the idea that ‘you might be wrong’ is inconsistent with the postmodern thesis that there is no such thing as ‘right’ and ‘wrong.’ The postmodern thesis stops people from arrogantly saying that they, and they alone, are ‘right’; but it also stops anyone from humbly admitting that they might have been ‘wrong.’ The Australian Realist hopes that a broadly naturalist metaphysics is roughly right, but is mindful of the possibility that it could be wrong. To be an Australian Realist, you need to be satisfied with the suspicion that you are probably getting closer to the truth, even though you know it is also possible that you are continually moving ever farther away. It is better to travel hopefully than to arrive. When Alexander of Macedon reached India, it is said he fell to his knees and wept because there were no more lands to conquer. Few of us should be so lucky.

Chapter Two

Science, Morality, and the Death of God Raymond D. Bradley

In 1922 the American essayist H. L. Mencken wrote a little essay titled, ‘Memorial Service.’ Here is how it began: Where is the grave-yard of dead gods? What lingering mourner waters their mounds? There was a day when Jupiter was the king of the gods, and any man who doubted his puissance was ipso facto a barbarian and an ignoramus. But where in all the world is there a man who worships Jupiter to-day? And what of Huitzilopochtli? In one year—and it is no more than five hundred years ago—fifty thousand youths and maidens were slain in sacrifice to him. (Mencken 2002: 293)

Mencken went on to name a total of 189 pagan gods. 1 He told how millions worshipped these gods; how people laboured for generations to build them vast temples; how priests, evangelists, bishops, and archbishops served them; how to doubt them was to die, usually at the stake; how armies took to the fields to defend them against infidels; and how villages were burned, women and children slaughtered, and cattle driven off. All these, he pointed out in conclusion, ‘were gods of the highest standing and dignity—gods of civilized peoples—worshiped and believed in by millions. All were theoretically omnipotent, omniscient and immortal. And all are dead’ (Mencken 2002: 296–97). THE DEATH OF THE GODS What does Mencken mean by the ‘death’ of these gods? Not that they once existed in reality and now do not. Rather, that a god dies when no one believes in him, her, or it; dies when that god disappears from the pantheon 11

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of the corresponding religion or when the religion itself disappears; dies when that god is recognised as existing only in fable, not in fact. All these pagan gods were once thought of as supernatural agents, akin in their attributes to us, beings whose actions were posited as direct causes of natural phenomena: earthquakes, tsunamis, lightning, thunder, floods, famines, diseases, eclipses, and the like. Yet today, as Mencken claimed, all are dead. They have lost whatever epistemic credentials, whatever evidential base and explanatory power, they were once thought to have. The same holds for their moral credentials. We now view the demands these gods imposed on their followers with repugnance. Human sacrifice, temple prostitution, and slavery, for example. So, too, the barbarities their followers inflicted on the devotees of rival gods: indiscriminate slaughter, torture, and persecution. THE GODS OF MONOTHEISM But how about the revealed gods of monotheism? The God of Judaism? The God of Christianity? And the God of Islam? Currently over half the world’s population believes wholeheartedly in one or other of these gods. And how about the God of Deism, the vaguely conceived ‘Supreme Intelligence’ that so many non-churchgoers believe in? Are their claims to credibility any better than those of their pagan rivals? Atheists, of whom I am one, think not. Indeed I shall argue that the epistemic credentials of these gods are no better than those of the pagan gods and that the moral credentials of the theistic gods are worse by far. THE CONCEPT OF GOD First, I want to clear up a confusion about the term ‘God.’ Pick up any newspaper, journal, or book of theology, philosophy of religion, or comparative religion, and you’ll find the term ‘God’ used as a proper name as if there is one and only one object that it designates. But that is clearly wrong. If someone tells you that he or she believes in God, it makes perfect sense to ask, ‘Which god?’ Is it the Hebraic god ‘Yahweh’ as revealed in the Tanakh (roughly, the Old Testament)? Is it God the father, God incarnate in Jesus, as revealed in the New Testament? Is it Allah as revealed in the Quran? Or is it a deist god? Each believer will use the noun ‘God’ as a proper name for his or her own object of worship and is likely to insist that their object of worship is different from that referred to by followers of other religions, denominations, or sects. And they would be right to do so. Each god differs from all the others in the properties he or she is supposed to possess. Hence they cannot be identical. The fact is that the upper-case term ‘God’ functions like the proper name ‘Mary’ insofar as it admits many different persons as bearers of the name.

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Another point that many people forget: just because ‘God’ functions as a proper name it doesn’t follow that there really is an entity of which it is the name. ‘Santa’ is a proper name. But it doesn’t follow that Santa exists. So how am I going to use the term ‘God’ when, as an atheist, I say that I don’t believe God exists? I propose to use it as a sort of variable proper name for whichever object people think exists when they use the term. 2 One caveat, though. I am going to take it, as most philosophers and theologians do, that when people talk about God they are talking about, or taking themselves to be talking about, some sort of supernatural entity or spiritual being. THE CONCEPT OF ATHEISM Second, the term ‘atheist.’ As commonly used, it applies to anyone who does not believe in the existence of God—any god. People sometimes say that atheism cannot be proved. They trot out the old claim, ‘You can’t prove a negative,’ as if to prove the point. But this is fatuous. ‘No negatives can be proved’ is itself a negative! And it’s false. Some negatives are easy to prove. The statement, ‘There is no greatest prime number,’ is one of them. It can be proved, as Euclid showed, by means of a reductio ad absurdum. When the concept of something—a certain sort of prime number, for instance, or the concept of a morally perfect God torturing nonbelievers in the fires of hell—involves contradiction, it is often easy to prove the negative. Or consider the more humdrum negative, ‘There’s no butter in the fridge.’ This negative can be proved empirically by removing the fridge contents and looking carefully. In this case, the idea of there being butter in the fridge— unlike the idea of a greatest prime number—is consistent with itself but inconsistent with the evidence. In like manner, I would argue that certain concepts of God, though not self-contradictory, are inconsistent with indubitable evidence about the nature of the world, such as the fact that it contains evil. And another point that is often neglected. In many instances the demand for so-called proof of the negative is asking too much. I would not dream of asking you to prove, in either of the foregoing senses, that Santa doesn’t exist. Nevertheless, I bet you don’t believe in Santa. And I bet you think your non-belief justified. The existence of Santa, you might say, is not impossible, but it is wildly improbable. Why? Well, it’s not just that you have not yet come across good evidence of his existence, for after all you would have to concede an element of truth to the slogan: ‘absence of evidence isn’t the same as evidence of absence.’ Rather it’s that there is a cumulative case to be made for Santa’s non-existence. You reason that if he did exist then it would be rational for you to expect a lot of evidence to turn up that in fact never has turned up. The hypothesis that Santa exists generates a whole lot of reasonable expectations all of which are unfulfilled. If Santa existed, it would be reasonable to expect, for instance, that he would leave sooty footprints as he made his way from the chimney to your bedside. It would be reasonable to expect

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that someone would have actually seen him careering across the sky behind his reindeer fast enough to visit, and spend a little time with, every child in the world in the space of a single evening. You would expect someone to be able to give you a plausible account of how he could break the laws of physics in this way. And so on. These kinds of evidential considerations, I want to insist, are much more powerful than any to do with simple lack of evidence. The existence of Santa is implausible, improbable even, insofar as there are cumulative rational expectations about his existence none of which is fulfilled. I have coined a name for this sort of implausibility argument. I’ve christened it the argument from Cumulative Unfulfilled Rational Expectations or CURE, for short. In what follows I will sometimes appeal to the power of CURE arguments as a cure for those who, in my view, suffer from implausible beliefs in the existence of God. THE CONCEPTS OF NATURALISM AND SUPERNATURALISM The third set of terms requiring some comment are ‘naturalism’ and ‘supernaturalism.’ Naturalism is a metaphysical worldview whose ontology comprises all and only the set of natural (physical or material) objects, together with their simple and emergent properties and relations. 3 Naturalism has no room, therefore, for the idea that we are ghosts in bodily machines or that we might survive our physical deaths. Supernaturalism stands in opposition to naturalism. Supernaturalism has a dualistic ontology. It recognises the existence of the natural world, of course. But it insists that there is more to reality than is conceived of in the naturalist’s philosophy, and more than is accessible to scientific investigation. In addition to the natural world there is a supernatural one: a world inhabited by beings such as disembodied souls, God and his angels, or Satan and his hordes. Some people say that metaphysical theories like naturalism and supernaturalism cannot in principle be empirically falsified. But this is a shibboleth, a product of shallow thinking. It is true that supernaturalism cannot be empirically falsified. There is no way, for example, of falsifying the claim that the natural causes of a phenomenon are the means by which God brings about the fulfilment of his plan. But by way of contrast, it is easy to conceive of a possible situation in which naturalism would be shown false. Just imagine the apocalyptic vision of evangelical Christians coming to pass in a way that defeated every attempt at a natural explanation, an explanation in terms of mass deception, for instance. Everyone in the world hears the deafening sound of trumpets. Everyone sees Jesus descend from the heavens in a cloud of glory. And, in the great Rapture of whose imminence true believers still have no doubt, the faithful around the whole globe are visibly swept up to join Jesus in the sky leaving cars driverless, husbands without wives, parents without children, and the earth’s population permanently depleted. If this confirmation of the

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Second Coming were to occur, I myself would be gob-smacked, even Godsmacked, so to speak, and might hastily mend my atheistic ways. I might even think it prudent to pray there’d be a Third Coming for belated believers like me. The problem for supernaturalism is that nothing remotely like this has ever occurred. Its track record is so abysmal that on a frequency interpretation of probability theory you would want to assign it a probability approaching zero. Think of the situation like this. Of the trillions of events, large and small, that are going on around us every second of every day, how many do you think still demand a supernaturalistic explanation? When some new event comes up for examination—the occurrence of a new phenomenon in the cosmos, perhaps, or the sudden appearance of a new virus—where would you put your money? Which would you think more probable? That a natural explanation can in principle be given? Or that some supernatural agent caused it? Supernaturalistic explanations of natural phenomena have fallen by the way. Gone are the deities of the ancient Egyptians, the Vikings, the Aztecs, and the like, all of whom once played a role in filling the gaps in human understanding of how nature works. Relatively few of those gaps are left. And, I’m going to argue, filling them with any surviving gods will not help. In order to make my case I’m going to consider, first, arguments from revelation (arguments for the sort of god purportedly revealed in the Bible), and second, arguments from reason and experience (arguments that appeal to non-revelatory reasons for believing in God). THE GOD OF REVELATION For nearly two millennia, Western civilisation has been held in thrall by God’s word, the Bible. And even today God, as portrayed in the Bible, is worshipped by well over half the world’s population. 4 God, the biblical god, is supposed to be all-knowing, all-powerful, and morally perfect; and the Bible is supposed to be his autobiography. 5 Now if that’s the case, then it is rational to expect that the Bible will always say only what is true, never what is false or even misleading. Such is the reasoning behind the doctrine of inerrancy, that the Bible contains no errors either as to matters of fact or as to matters of morals. You may think the doctrine of inerrancy the product of simplistic blackand-white fundamentalist thinking. You may think that I am setting up a straw man, the easier to demolish the God of the Bible. But I am not. Many of the finest Christian philosophers of our day endorse the doctrine explicitly. Among them we find such notables as William Alston, Peter van Inwagen, and Alvin Plantinga. All are, as Plantinga puts it, ‘people of the Word [who] take Scripture to be a special revelation from God himself’ (Plantinga 1991: 8). In his view, ‘Scripture is inerrant: the Lord makes no mistakes; what he proposes for our belief is what we ought to believe’ (Plantinga 1991: 12). Van Inwagen says, ‘I fully accept the teachings of my denomination that “the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the revealed Word of

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God”’ (van Inwagen 1993: 97). And Alston takes the view that ‘a large proportion of the scriptures consists of records of divine-human communications’ (Alston 1985: 6). Are these guys serious? What would be their line when confronted by 2 Chronicles 4:2, which gives a false value for the mathematical constant pi (the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter)? What would they say about countless inconsistencies the Bible contains? For example, between 2 Samuel 24:1, which says the Lord commanded King David to ‘number the people of Israel,’ and 1 Chronicles 21:1, which says it was Satan, not the Lord, who issued the command. What account would they give of scientific absurdities such as that of a six-day creation, the fixity of species, and the worldwide flood? Their most promising ploy would be to take recourse to figurativism. That is what Augustine did when dealing with literalists who spurned the science of his day. He wrote: Often a non-Christian knows something about the earth, the heavens, and other parts of the world, about the motions of the stars and even their sizes and distances, . . . and this knowledge he holds with certainty from reason and experience. It is thus offensive and disgraceful for an unbeliever to hear a Christian talk nonsense about such things, claiming that what he is saying is based in Scripture. (Augustine 1982: 67)

Augustine might well have been speaking about the defenders of today’s socalled ‘Scientific Creationism.’ In his view they would deserve to be laughed to scorn for what he calls their ‘utterly foolish and obviously untrue statements.’ Augustine would turn in his grave were he to have heard nineteenthcentury Philip Gosse claim that God put the fossils in place so as to test our faith. He would turn again if he heard the recent Creationist claim that God created the universe just a few thousand years ago with light already on its way from the distant stars. And were Augustine still around, he might even join me in pointing out that this sort of ploy makes God a great deceiver, not just a great designer. But figurativism poses grave problems. If passages that are literally false should really be interpreted figuratively, why didn’t God put them in innocuous allegorical form in the first place? For myself, I have no difficulty coming up with a version of the creation story that would be both intelligible to prescientific minds and amenable to interpretation in the light of current scientific understanding. Here it is: In the beginning, God created a great ball of fire. From the fire, in time, came the heavens and a multitude of stars. Among the stars was our sun, circled about by many planets including our own earth. And from the waters and the clay in the earth there grew the seeds of all life. In time these seeds sprouted into many different forms. Some grew into plants. Some grew into animals. And others remained so small that the eye of man could not see them. As the acorn becomes the oak, so many of the earliest plants and animals begat new forms of plants and animals. And as the oak tree reaches out its branches, so these new forms of life reached out their branches in

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many directions. In time, many of these branches died leaving their skeletons in the rocks. Yet many continued to branch out unto this day. From the earliest seeds of life there arose, at the tips of the branches, the fruit of today: the grasses and crops of the fields, the beasts that feed thereon, and man who feeds on both. And as the blink of an eye is to the life-span of many generations of men, so is the life-span of many generations of men to the time that hath passed since the seeds of life arose on the face of the earth. And God was content with all that had grown from the great ball of fire he had created. For all had gone as he had planned and it needed not his further help or guidance. My story, unlike God’s, would not have led to the condemnation of Giordano Bruno, burned at the stake for suggesting our solar system is not the only one. It would not have led to the condemnation of Galileo, held under house arrest for supporting Copernican cosmology. It would not have led to the condemnation of Darwin, whose name is still anathema to inerrantist know-nothings. It would not have led to the anti-intellectual, anti-scientific dogmas of fundamentalist Jews, Christians, and Muslims. Didn’t God know that most of his readers would construe his words literally? If so, he is not omniscient. Or didn’t he care about their misunderstandings? If so, he is not perfectly good. Or didn’t he have the linguistic competence to say what he meant? If so, he is not omnicompetent. How about the biblical stories of Moses and the exodus? And of the birth, death, and resurrection of Jesus? Are these any more deserving of our credence? Consider, first, the case of Moses and the exodus of the children of Israel from Egypt. The biblical book of Exodus tells us that the children of Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt for 430 years before escaping through the sea and wandering around in the Sinai desert for forty years. Yet the sort of evidence that a rational person might reasonably expect to find were this story true is entirely absent. The story is told in an ahistorical way: no dates, for instance, and no identification of which pharaoh was supposed to let them go. Egyptian historians, remarkable for the details they recorded of important personages and events, have nothing to say about any of these events or about the disasters the Bible says then befell them. Archaeologists can find no trace of more than a million people living in Egypt or the Sinai way back then, whenever ‘then’ was. What’s more, contemporary Israeli archaeologists like Israel Finkelstein have concluded that the whole scenario is a mischievous fable. The Hebrews did not come into the land of Canaan from the land of Egypt. Rather, they were high-country Canaanite tribes who gradually took over the rest of Canaan, tribes whose main contacts with Egyptians were limited to the period when Egypt occupied their land rather than they theirs. As for the person of Moses, grand hero of the Torah: research shows his story to be modelled on much older myths about figures such as Bacchus, Prometheus, and Sargon. ‘Was there ever such a person as Moses?’ asked Voltaire, a deist of prodigious scholarship and critical intellect. His conclusion? That the biblical god’s story of Moses and the exodus is both ‘absurd and barbarous’ (Voltaire 1980: 156). I concur. It is pure myth. But it isn’t a harmless one. Fundamentalist Jews cite it as warrant for their cruel and barbarous occupation of

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Palestine, the Greater Israel the Bible says God gave them. And Palestinians suffer for it unspeakably as I speak. How about the so-called historical Jesus? Once more the stories—for there are four different and inconsistent ones—are curiously bereft of a solid historical setting. We do not know the dates for Jesus’ birth or death or any of the events that supposedly took place during his life. Was he born when Herod was king, in 7 BCE perhaps? Or was he born fourteen years later at the time when Augustus Caesar commanded Cyrenius to carry out a census for tax purposes? Matthew’s gospel says the former; Luke’s, the latter. Why didn’t Josephus or any other contemporary record the massacre of the infants that Herod purportedly carried out after learning of Jesus’ birth? Why didn’t Seneca or the elder Pliny record the worldwide darkness that attended Jesus’ death? Why did none of the more than sixty secular historians and chroniclers who lived between 10 and 100 CE record any of the deeds of this Godman? Why wasn’t it until some sixty to ninety years after his birth that sketchy tales of his career were told by the pseudonymous authors of the four gospels? Why didn’t Jesus write his own autobiography telling his story straight from the horse’s mouth as it were? If he was God incarnate and had a care for the future of humanity in this world, not just in some kingdom yet to come, why didn’t he make permanent contributions to science and medicine, for example, rather than attributing phenomena like mental illness to demon possession? If he really existed in flesh and blood, why did so many early Christians—the Docetists—believe he was nothing more than a ghost or apparition? If he really was God incarnate, why did it take a majority vote of the Council of Nicea in 325 CE to settle his status? Why is the Jesus myth modelled on countless other myths of dying-and-rising-again deities such as Osiris, Adonis, Tammuz, Odin, and Mithras? Ask yourself enough of these questions about what it would be reasonable to expect to be the case, yet isn’t, and you will see for yourself the force of my CURE arguments for Jesus’ historical non-existence: my cumulative case from unfulfilled rational expectations. ‘Was there an historical Jesus?’ Albert Schweitzer asked the question in his Quest of the Historical Jesus (1968). But an answer will elude us unless and until we are given clear criteria as to what would even count as a positive answer. If you ask me whether there once was some ordinary man—a travelling magician, perhaps, or the character depicted in C. K. Stead’s delightful novel My Name Was Judas—who lived around that time and about whom the myths gradually grew, I am agnostic. But if you ask me whether a miracleworker existed who fills the bill of the Bible story, I am confident the answer is ‘no.’ About the historical existence of that Jesus, I am confidently atheistic. Apparently, the Talmud records the life and death of a man whose description resembles that of the biblical Jesus. But that Jesus—Jesus Ben Pandira—was hung from a tree on the eve of Passover during the reign of Alexander Jannaeus about 100 BCE. Does he count as the historical Jesus? 6 The intellectual credentials of the pagan gods, I said earlier, turned out to be abysmal. The same holds of the intellectual credentials of the revealed god of the Bible. We have the best of grounds, drawn from reason and experience, to dismiss that god’s main claims as scientifically and historically fraudulent. Were God to submit the Holy Scriptures as part of his CV to any

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appointments committee who did their homework, he would be dismissed as a charlatan. Sad, then, that over half the world’s population 7 has appointed him CEO in the citadel of their belief. How about the moral credentials of the biblical god? They are worse by far than those of the Huitzilopochtlis of paganism. Worse even than those of Satan, the biblical personification of evil. Why this harsh judgement? Answer: God provided the answer in his CV. For those who have never read it or who, having read it, have forgotten or turned a blind eye to its contents, I offer a few reminders. First, this god not only appropriates to himself the pagan gods’ discredited role as direct cause of natural phenomena such as earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, lightning, plagues, and famines. This god also boasts of repeatedly using them to injure, maim, starve, drown, and in other ways kill off millions upon millions of people (‘every living thing on the face of the earth,’ according to Genesis). Disease and disaster are God’s weapons of mass destruction. Or so, in effect, he tells us (see the books of Isaiah and Lamentations). Second, this god, in his role as commander-in-chief of his chosen people and role model for his followers, orders the slaughter, without compassion, of hundreds of thousands of women, children, and suckling babes; condones slavery and human sacrifice by fire; threatens to make people cannibalise their parents, husbands or wives, and their children; threatens, too, to have unborn children ripped out of their mothers’ wombs; and seems to relish the prospect. Third, this god, in the person of his son, Jesus, envisions the vilest of all possible fates for the majority of the human race: torture of infinite duration in the fires of hell. There are at least thirteen passages in Matthew alone in which Jesus talks about the fate of those who will go to hell—a fate that he describes as ‘eternal,’ as ‘fiery,’ as a place of ‘unquenchable fire,’ as a place where there will be ‘weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ The apostle Paul, in 2 Thessalonians 1:8–9, looks forward to the time when, in his words, ‘the Lord Jesus Christ shall be revealed from heaven with his mighty angels, in flaming fire taking vengeance on them that know not God.’ And John of Patmos, author of Revelation, paints a picture of hell in all its voyeuristic obscenity when he tells us that all whose names were not written in the book of life— all, that is, whom Jesus knew ‘from the beginning’ (John 3:18) would not believe in him—would be ‘cast into the lake of fire’ (Revelation 20:15), a place where all non-believers will, in his words, ‘be tormented with burning sulphur in the presence of the holy angels and of the Lamb [i.e., Jesus himself, please note], and the smoke of their torment ascendeth for ever and ever’ (Revelation 14:10–11). Fourth, God’s moral law, as detailed in the Old Testament, is a licence for mayhem. Consider the long list of offences—at least thirty-four—for which the Old Testament prescribes the death penalty. These include being a stubborn and rebellious son (Deuteronomy 21:18–21), hitting or cursing one’s father and mother (Exodus 21:17, Leviticus 20:8), desecrating the Sabbath (Exodus 31:14), being a woman who cannot prove she was a virgin prior to marriage (Deuteronomy 22:20–21), being a woman who did not protest loudly enough when she was being raped (Deuteronomy 22:23–24), being a

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blasphemer (Leviticus 24:16), being an adulterer (Leviticus 20:10–12), worshipping some other gods (Deuteronomy 13:6–9), and being a homosexual (Leviticus 20:13). God’s recommended penalty? Stoning, usually. Who today, you may ask, would take this sort of moral primitivism seriously? Well, many Muslim fundamentalists certainly do—the Taliban, for instance. And so do many Christian fundamentalists—the Reconstructionists, for instance. Comprising a sizable and increasingly influential proportion of the Southern Baptist Convention—itself the most potent force for evangelical Christianity—the Reconstructionists, like their Muslim brethren, demand their country become a theocracy and unflinchingly acknowledge that implementing God’s commands would inevitably result in the death of tens of millions of their fellow citizens. Has God changed his mind about any of his moral dictates? If so, he has kept it to himself. The biblical god is not what Saint Anselm thought he was: that than which no greater, no more morally perfect, can be conceived. Out of his own mouth God condemns himself as that than which no viler, no more evil, can be conceived. Turning in revulsion from the biblical god, let’s now take a look at some of the other supernatural entities on whom the title ‘God’ is bestowed. OTHER SUPERNATURAL GODS Theologians and philosophers of religion often distance themselves from the biblical god by talking more abstractly about what they call ‘the god of theism’ or ‘the god of deism.’ Putting aside arguments from revelation, they offer arguments from reason and experience for the existence of a designercreator God. When presented in their usual philosophical form, their arguments seldom have much appeal. But get the pundits of science to promote them, and give them media publicity, and the chattering classes are all agog to hear the latest news about God. I will briefly examine just two of the latest creation-design arguments in their fresh new garb, and show how shoddy they are. Both rely on naive and flawed conceptions of chance and probability. First is an argument from the improbability of a naturalistic account of biogenesis. Proponents begin from the assumption that, on a naturalistic view, life can only have begun as a result of ‘purely chance’ or ‘random’ chemical reactions. They then claim that the probability of all necessary elements coming together at random in the right sequence to form something like a simple protein—let alone the first self-replicating organism—is mindbogglingly small. They say that this probability is smaller by far than the probability (as calculated by astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle) of a blind man solving Rubik’s cube while making one random move every second, and smaller than the probability of a tornado passing through a junkyard containing the bits and pieces of an airplane and leaving a Boeing 747 in its wake, fully assembled and ready to fly. Finally, they flourish the conclusion that the

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occurrence of such a chance event since life first arose would be nothing short of miraculous, and that biogenesis could be brought about only by the intervention of God. But let’s not be dazzled by these mathematical fireworks. By way of logical analogy, consider the beginnings of life for any given human individual. Start with the assumption that each of us begins life as a result of random chemical interactions between the 3 billion or so base pairs that make up our 20,000 or so genes. Keep in mind that a typical adult individual’s body is made up of about 100 trillion cells, and that one’s brain alone contains approximately 100 billion neurons, each of which has about 7,000 synaptic connections with other neurons. Now let’s ask a good mathematician to calculate the a priori probability of all the foregoing ingredients being randomly arranged as to produce a healthy newborn child. My guess is that any mathematician crazy enough to go along with the assumption that all these factors are independent, would find the probability to be so ‘mind-boggling small’ that a nine-month gestation period would fall astronomically short of the time allegedly required to get all the arrangements right. The probability of any given individual’s make-up being what it is would be nothing short of a miracle. I doubt whether even the most credulous creationist would accept the reasoning of this parallel argument. The fact is that no one who knows the slightest bit of embryological theory would ever accept the original supposition that human life results from merely random chemical reactions. The probabilistic argument against naturalistic explanations of biogenesis is a fraud. We have good scientific reasons to suppose that the origins and makeup of a human embryo do not result merely from random throws of our prenatal DNA dice. Equally, we have good scientific reasons to suppose that the origins and make-up of the first living organism did not result merely from random throws of the prebiotic molecular dice. The argument is merely an argument from current ignorance—another appeal to a god of the gaps. But how—it may be asked—did the initial conditions and laws of the physical universe happen to be such as to produce a planet like ours that is life-friendly? One answer goes like this. A priori, we would have to judge that the probability of them being what they happen to be is infinitesimally low—so low that the best explanation for them being that way is to suppose that God set them up that way so as to execute his plan for the universe. This is the essence of the second probabilistic argument for the existence of a supernatural being, an argument that is sometimes referred to as the argument from fine-tuning. This argument can be dressed up in terms of an awesome array of evidence from contemporary physics and cosmology. The details needn’t concern us. It suffices to summarise thus: had there been complete symmetry between matter and antimatter in the early moments after the Big Bang they would have annihilated each other and the universe would have consisted of nothing but pure radiation, so that galaxies, stars, planets, and people would never have existed. Had the total mass and energy in the universe, or the strength of the gravitational constant varied by the minutest fraction, its rate of expansion would not have allowed galaxies, stars, and planets to exist

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today: if any faster they would not have been able to form; if any slower the whole universe would already have collapsed. We can envisage a whole array of universes each differing from all others in the precise values of their physical constants. So the probability that any particular one of them being our universe is extremely low. The best explanation for our specific universe being actualised is that it was selected from that vast ensemble by some being not in the universe but somehow ‘outside’ it, a supernatural being such as God. It was God, that is, who selected a universe whose parameters were so finely tuned that it would eventually produce life and the likes of us. Once more, a logical analogy exposes the flaws in this argument. Imagine a worldwide lottery in which a billion people are players, each of whom puts in a dollar. Every person is assigned a ball with their own individual number inscribed on it, the balls are placed in a giant lotto machine, and after numerous revolutions, just one ball drops out. Clearly the number of different physical parameters for each of the balls—its precise position and momentum, for instance—at the start of the process is enormously large and the probability of my ball being the winning one is incredibly low. Yet someone is going to win. Suppose it’s me. I win a billion dollars. Does the improbability of my winning make it correspondingly probable that the whole thing was fixed? In particular, does it make it correspondingly probable that the whole thing was fixed or fine-tuned by God? In any case, anyone who takes the fine-tuning argument seriously has some pretty difficult questions to answer. First, if you think that God fine-tuned the universe so as to bring us into existence, why did he not create us right at the outset in something like the way that the Bible envisages? Why did he let time grind on for something like 14 billion years to achieve his end? If you believe in a god of unlimited ability who intends to create us and bring us to a belief in his existence so that he can communicate with us, which scenario would you think more likely: that of the Bible, or that of scientific cosmology? On the face of it, the Bible story is more plausible by far. Yet that scenario is demonstrably false. Once more our rational expectations of what such a god would do are not fulfilled. Second, if you accept the fine-tuning argument for God’s existence, then you are logically obliged to reject both the other probabilistic arguments: the intelligent design argument from irreducible complexity, and the argument from the improbability of biogenesis. Both these other arguments say that God did not fine-tune the universe well enough at the outset to ensure the desired outcome. The fine-tuning argument says that he did. The intellectual case for believing in God as the designer of the universe is bankrupt. And the same holds when we turn to moral considerations. Any finetuning argument must take into account not only the bare fact that our universe is life-conducive. The Principle of Total Evidence demands that it also take into account the fact that, as Hobbes pointed out, the life of God’s creatures is ‘poor, nasty, brutish, and short’; must take into account, that is, what philosophers of religion call the problem of natural evil. Why would God fine-tune the universe so as to subject us to all the viruses, bacteria, and

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parasites that threaten us, causing illness, suffering, and in many cases death? Why would he beset us with diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's? Why did his fine-tuning of our planet yield all those natural disasters—all those ‘acts of God,’ as they’re aptly called—that take their toll on our lives: earthquakes, tsunamis, cyclones, floods, and the rest? Mark Twain, in his posthumously published Letters from the Earth, puts all these designer-creator gods into moral perspective. Referring to disaster and disease as the main battalions of ‘the Creator’s Grand Army’ marching against us with God, their Commander-in-Chief, leading them, he writes: The Christian begins with this straight proposition, this definite proposition, this inflexible and uncompromising proposition: God is all-knowing, and all-powerful. This being the case, nothing can happen without his knowing beforehand that it is going to happen; nothing happens without his permission; nothing can happen that he chooses to prevent. That is definite enough, isn’t it? It makes the Creator distinctly responsible for everything that happens, doesn’t it? (Twain 1962: 29).

Twain levels his charge against the Christian god, the self-incriminating god of the Bible. But he could well have levelled it against any designer-creator god that humans have imagined. If any such god were to exist he’d deserve to be tried and condemned for crimes against humanity. So I have a couple of final questions for you. Do you look forward, as I do, to a day when all the gods have gone to their graves—a day when a second memorial service can be held and all belief in them expunged forever? If not, why not? NOTES 1. His list totals 190 gods in all, but one of them is Allah, who does not count as pagan. 2. By way of contrast, the lower case term ‘god’ is a common noun used to refer to a hypothetical entity supposed to have a certain status. 3. More fully, metaphysical naturalism (otherwise known as materialism) is a philosophical—more specifically an ontological—theory about the nature of reality. It asserts that the ultimate constituents of reality are the sorts of things with which physics deals (subatomic particles and their basic properties), together with complexes of these and their emergent properties (properties possessed by complexes that are not possessed by their simpler constituents). 4. The biblical god is believed in by Jews to the extent that their holy scripture, the Tanakh, makes up over three quarters of the Bible. He is believed in by Christians in its entirety since the last quarter of the Bible comprises the New Testament revelation of God through his son Jesus. And he is believed in by Muslims despite the fact that they think the Bible is in need of supplementation by their own holy scripture, the Quran. 5. That is the essence of what we call Theism. It is distinct from Deism, the mere belief in a supreme being who created the universe but, without revealing himself to us, thereafter left it to its own devices. 6. Maybe Jesus Ben Pandira is the Jesus of the ‘other gospel’ that was repudiated by St. Paul.

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Chapter Three

Philistines, Barbarians, and the Death of Intellect Andrew Brennan

There are three issues about the university and intellectual life that have to be considered in conjunction with each other. First there is the global context of the spread of neo-liberal values and thought over much of the planet, aided and abetted by the intensification of financial and trade relationships. The problems faced by the academy in the industrialised world—ones which are exemplified in any of half a dozen countries—can be viewed against this global backdrop. Next, the academy, as a place of reasoned argument, unfettered speculation, a place for the open exchange of ideas by the best minds in the world, faces challenges induced by some of the uncertainties in the wider global context, challenges that raise profound questions about bureaucracy and what Hannah Arendt labelled ‘the public realm.’ Third, in the face of these questions, I will ask whether we should be concerned about the health of the contemporary university, and whether—and from what—the university needs to be protected. My conclusion will be that there are issues about diversity, standards, and structures that need to be addressed, issues that prompt philosophical questioning about the role of the university in the contemporary world. GLOBAL CONTEXT We live in an age of theory, and globalisation has been at the centre of much recent theorizing. This is strange, given that globalisation is not itself a new phenomenon. At the end of the nineteenth century trade was already a worldwide affair, the colonies of the industrialised nations were busy producing raw materials to be shipped to the mother country, then processed and reexported as high-value commodities. There were huge movements of people as the new industrial cities sucked in labour from the countryside, traders 25

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roamed the world, and legions of colonial civil servants and missionaries moved from place to place on missions deemed to be civilizing. That was indeed a globalised world. What is perhaps novel about the present age is the fact that cycles of capital movement and technological unification are occurring so close together as to make ‘geographical shifts a short-lived tendency rather than a process that can be fully realized’ (Friedman 1999: 396). According to some theorists, the globalised world is one in which we can no longer call any place home. The trauma of Thatcherism in the United Kingdom, and the resulting breakdown in what was fundamental in the postwar social contract, produced a generation of pessimistic sociologists, one of whom—Zygmunt Bauman—has coined the phrase ‘liquid life,’ to capture the idea that old certainties and stabilities have been lost in a world of shifting allegiances, short-lived relationships, and pragmatic politics. Childhood, Bauman argues, is no longer a protected zone, an exemplar of a kind of human innocence, but instead a cog crafted to fit a huge, demanding scheme of consumption, marketing, and brand placement. He asks us to think of how children now dress, wear make up, and sport brands so they present not as the emerging and unformed but rather as strangely diminutive adults. In place of the human qualities of childhood, Bauman claims, there has been a crude reprocessing aimed at producing a class of consumers, trained in shopping dependence and brand loyalty (Bauman 2005: 110–14). We might wonder if childhood was ever the protected zone of innocence envisaged by Bauman. But the point about the way that larger social and institutional structures shape both childhood and also adult behaviour is well made. If in the Renaissance man was the measure of all things, human beings—children and adults alike—are nowadays seen in more instrumental terms, as means to distant and compelling goals, whether economic, political, social, or corporate. And in the world of shifting capital, temporary relationships, and shifting allegiances, it is not surprising to encounter theorists who are nostalgic for an imagined, older order in which people found themselves in place, belonging, familiar with their station and its duties. The passing of that kind of human— the one whose nature was charted and nurtured by the modern liberal polity—is apparently well under way. So at least claim the Jeremiah theorists like Francis Fukuyama, who argues that we are in danger of losing our humanity to a new post-human being who is already emerging, transformed through biotechnology into a creature for whom current principles of equality and justice will no longer be applicable (Fukuyama 2002). The loss of the human is just one of many losses we supposedly face in the globalised world. In the 1990s there was a stampede of theorists who proclaimed the end of the nation-state—one of the most prominent being Arjun Appadurai (Appadurai 1996). As John Gray—another Jeremiah in the ranks of the social scientists—has recently pointed out, the idea that the nation-state would wither away to be replaced by an international system governed by global institutions was probably just a reaction to the gap at the end of the Cold War, a gap in which it seemed that the United States could impose a new international order free from challenge by any other power (Gray 2007: 138). Struck by the domination of our lives by larger forces over which we have little control, we may wonder in our darker moments whether the consumer society has replaced the ideal of the human being as a centre of

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value and dignity with a different being altogether: one who is seen in more instrumental terms as a means to achieve the goals of profit. In place of ‘man the measure,’ human beings are increasingly regarded as no more than wheels in a larger mechanism, not instruments of biology spreading their genes (as the sociobiologists have argued), but instruments of the markets helping to make profits. Gloomily, Gray announces that ‘the modern myth is that science enables humanity to take charge of its destiny; but “humanity” is itself a myth, a dusty remnant of religious faith’ (Gray 2003: 4). Appadurai’s prediction of the decline of the nation-state is now in retreat, and—thanks to impressive government action to bail out banks and failing financial institutions in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis—many theorists have now adjusted their thinking to recognise that at least some nation-states remain as powerful as ever and are likely to continue so for some time. However, there is no widespread agreement on this. It is notable that some professional philosophers still long for the death of the nation-state, while at the same time they look forward to a new deal for humanity promoted by a cosmopolitan world government. Peter Singer urges human beings to join together in establishing an ethical world community, one which would put individual human welfare above the profit of companies and individuals, and where each person—whether rich or poor—counts for one, and none counts for more than one (Singer 2002). Singer’s speculations are driven in part by two ideals: first, a hankering after utopia, and second, an optimistic faith in reason and consistency that is the hallmark of philosophy as practised in the academy. Not surprisingly, these ideals carry little weight with those caught up in the excitement of political and economic life. Philosophers are used to critiques of the impracticality of many of their recommendations, appearing to their critics as oblivious to reminders that theoretical speculation about what is good or bad has little impact on a world dominated by economic and political manoeuvres that reflect and support partiality, greed, self-interest, and a range of ethnic, group, and national loyalties. The usual defence of philosophy is that ideals and theories are worth exploring, even when they are developed at some remove from the social and political realities of the world. The strengths and weaknesses of philosophy in application to the real world are not the matters on which I want to give primary focus. What is more significant is the presence of two different orientations. If John Gray is typical of the Jeremiahs, then Peter Singer is a Pollyanna, optimistically advocating the dissolution of old evils and banishing of old ghosts in the hope of progress to a better world and a better life for all. I propose that the Jeremiahs and the Pollyannas represent two views on the current state of the world. On the one side, there is what might be regarded as a romantic and conservative position, one that sees people as essentially associated with various kinds of place, of which one is the nation-state, another is the family, another is the neighbourhood, and such places are loci of belonging, loyalty, of forms of partiality that are essential to our humanity and identity. For these romantics, contemporary globalisation poses a threat to identity, to who we are and what we can be. Romantics are well represented in discussions of identity and the philosophy of place. Australian ecological writers like Val Plumwood and Freya Mathews have celebrated the significance of place and

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the importance of our anchoring in what is local—to individual rivers and bays, mountains, trees, species, and ecosystems. American and European bioregionalists have championed the importance of gearing political organisation to aspects of geography and landscape—features like watersheds, coasts, valleys, and so on (see the description of bioregionalism in Brennan 1998). Many current environmentalists, following the lead of Aldo Leopold’s land ethic, urge us to remember that we are simply plain members and citizens of the larger biotic community. These romantic theorists believe that the questions of what and who we are cannot be sensibly separated off from the issue of where we are. It is not surprising that for them, globalisation in its present shifting and liquid forms is a threat to the indigenous, the local, the rooted, the very things that are central to community, home, and belonging and thereby constitutive of human identity. The romantics are not hostile to all forms of international action and global treaty making. However, their favourite slogan is ‘think globally, act locally,’ one that emphasises that what is local and related to us is of prime importance. Ethics, hence politics, is for them a set of practices both constituted by and governing inter-relatedness, and all relatedness comes in degrees, the local before the national or regional, and that in turn before the continental and global. By contrast, the insouciant cosmopolitan, or nomadic, view is that freemoving world citizens can enjoy significant possibilities of self-development and self-realisation precisely through their liberation from the very rootedness that the romantics so value. Singer’s Godwinesque version of utilitarianism, for example, has long advocated abandoning particular attachments and local loyalties unless they can be shown under an ‘impartial’ perspective to lead to good outcomes. The post-humanists who hurry to celebrate the death of humanity are but an extreme version of nomadism, with neo-liberalism as the political and economic mainstream of this position. These nomads are often jaunty about the prospects for modernity and globalisation, evident in the writings of Ulrich Beck, Anthony Giddens, and others (see, for example, Giddens 1990). In their forms of cosmopolitanism, a new world order will provide increasing opportunities for mutual interrogation between cultures in a world of shifting and fluid boundaries. The general openness and mutual understanding encouraged by globalisation, they say, provide multiple opportunities to tackle poverty and inequality, through processes that will be tolerant of flexibility, fluidity, and local experimentation. Thus conceived, globalisation has the capacity to renew and revive local traditions—which is quite remarkable given that it is also supposed to be engaged in spreading liberal Western values into the non-Western world. It is hard to see this position as other than utopian and progressive. What hope has the indigenous or the local of surviving the new nomadic world order? Where is the capacity for sensitivity and gentle interaction? It is ironic that Singer’s One World book was published in 2002 just before the invasion of Iraq. His chapter on the merits of humanitarian intervention to override national sovereignty, and commending such a role to the United Nations with the support of the United States, stands in stark contrast to the reality of the Iraq war itself. Yet again the philosopher has to defend the innocence of theory—that the particular circumstances of the invasion of Iraq are not a counterexample to the in-principle desirability of a humane

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world order that can intervene in ways that are blind to national borders. But even where invasion by armies is not at stake, the romantic conservative worries about what happens in the regular turn of events when capital moves in, communities are disrupted, resources are developed and traditional ways of life are either completely destroyed or at the very least lose the subtlety and complexity they once possessed. Suspicious of utopian theorizing in general, the romantic wonders where the tolerance, fluidity, and flexibility is to be found in the normal processes of economic development and global trade. Once the village has its hotels, supermarket, apartment buildings, smooth highways, fast food outlets, and shopping malls, it is no longer what it was, even if there is a shop somewhere selling ethnic prints and the local dance troupe performs nightly for the tourists. The nomads, of course, are at home everywhere, so long as there are bottled water, clean toilets, and reassuringly familiar shopfronts. But such being-at-home requires a transformation of the place that was previously there—a transformation that, for the romantics, destroys the very thing that we claimed to cherish. PHILISTINES IN THE ACADEMY It is against this background of debate on globalisation that the current state of the academy can be assessed. Universities, in theory, provide an independent source of advice and opinion to business, government, and the wider community. Among the ranks of academics are a fair sprinkling of nomads, romantics, and others who have not yet decided on their position, or have perhaps not noticed the historical tide on which they are being carried. In theory, then, the university should be a resource that supplies a very special source of commentary, advice, and provocation. Yet there are a number of challenges that interfere with filling these roles. These arise from the fact that universities over the last few decades have become training camps for the new world of intensified global trade and fluid politics. This increase in training function, and the move away from the university as a place where people have time to learn, reflect, and criticise, means that the residue of the traditional academy is—like the traditional village—in danger of disappearing. In addition, because of its professionalizing and training functions, the university can find itself increasingly under pressure to perform as a member of the utopian, neo-liberal project rather than as a source of critique of that very project. Adding to these pressures in the universities themselves are government actions which also make it more difficult for universities to perform their traditional role, the one that Cardinal Newman summed up so well when he discussed the difference between liberal education and merely ‘useful knowledge’: Education is a higher word; it implies an action upon our mental nature, and the formation of a character; it is something individual and permanent. . . . When, then, we speak of the communication of Knowledge as being Education, we thereby really

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Chapter 3 imply that that Knowledge is a state or condition of mind; and since cultivation of mind is surely worth seeking for its own sake, we are thus brought once more to the conclusion, which the word ‘Liberal’ and the word ‘Philosophy’ have already suggested, that there is a Knowledge, which is desirable, though nothing come of it, as being of itself a treasure, and a sufficient remuneration of years of labour. (Newman 1990: 92)

Governments in Australia and overseas have shown little patience for the distinction between Newman’s idea of liberal education—something worth pursuing and gaining for its own sake—and the role of useful knowledge. As participation in universities has increased, the emphasis on useful knowledge has also increased, and universities now regularly turn out graduates who have not received the character building that Newman thought was central to liberal education. Revealingly, Newman contrasts the term ‘liberal’ with ‘servile’: a liberal education is one that frees the mind and the person; a servile education equips the student, he said, for servile work. Later, he tries to correct the impression of elitism this terminology might suggest. He contrasts liberal pursuits with those which are not inferior, but are distinct, namely useful ones. The tension between the liberal and the useful has become intensified in recent years, though—as is clear from the context in which Newman wrote The Idea of a University—it is not itself a new one. The Newman ideal of university is one where the best minds pursue their studies while communicating something of their enthusiasm for liberal knowledge to their students. He sometimes writes of the very ‘air the students breathe’ as a way of capturing the ethos of an institution where some special activity of the mind, an activity of freedom rather than servility, of enjoyment rather than utility, is being cultivated. Yet we now live in an audit society, and not only are universities under pressure to produce those who can contribute usefully to the nomadic forms of cosmopolitanism, they are also subject to tests of their utility through the exercise of quality measures (Power 1999). The result is that institutions, at least some of whom are dedicated to the exploration of knowledge for its own sake, are now subject to scrutiny aimed at finding whether they are functioning in useful and effective ways, or—in the language of audit—to what extent their buildings, syllabus, and teaching practices are ‘fit for purpose’ (see Seymour 1995, McGhee 2003). There is nothing wrong in principle with the idea that university performance can be audited and that even the cultivation of liberal habits of mind can be done in better or worse ways. The problem is rather one produced by the changing nature of the university itself. As the training and professional education functions of universities have expanded, there is an increasing tendency to focus on what Newman called the ‘useful.’ As the number of students taking professional degrees increases, it can come to seem that what needs to be audited in terms of ‘fitness for purpose’ are techniques that secure measurable and readily defined outcomes, so that universities do not risk inflicting incompetent doctors, lawyers, physiotherapists, scientists, and librarians on the wider community. But while the standards that define quality work in medicine, law, or physiotherapy may be readily specifiable to a point, and determinately measurable, it is not clear that any similar audit

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standards can be applied to fine arts, literature and screen studies, philosophy, or any of a range of other higher education areas. Moreover, the language of ‘performance measures’ and ‘continuous improvement’ that is widely used in audit circles is itself hostile to the idea of learning for its own sake. ‘Continuous improvement’ is a particularly interesting term, one whose repeated use ought to be a warning about the unreality of the process we are dealing with. No one would expect teaching and research performance of serious academics to improve continuously throughout their lifetimes; nor would continuous improvement be a reasonable expectation of a genius: Wordsworth’s poetry was sublime on occasions and awful for much of the time. Another feature of contemporary audit culture is its claimed ‘lightness of touch.’ Departments and institutions are provided with the framework in which to carry out self-audit, and the self-audit materials and reports are then scrutinised by the higher-level audit agency. But this should also give pause for thought, as shown by the case of Isaac Newton, among many others. Newton thought that his work on physics was unimportant compared to his biblical hermeneutics, a verdict that would have no doubt been confirmed by any audit process of the late seventeenth century, and would probably meet with approval from contemporary auditors too. As time has shown, Newton was a genius, his work in the natural sciences was revolutionary, but his selfaudit was hopelessly wrong. Sociologists and anthropologists have been quick to point out the drawbacks to the audit society and the ways that university audits have been used to destroy quality, increase academic stress, and dumb down both teaching and research within universities. This is sometimes noted as part of a general concern about the ‘pathologies of audit’ (Shore and Wright 1999). Indeed, there is accumulating evidence that the audit culture is itself driving a new philistinism in universities in Europe, Australia, and other parts of the world. In the new philistinism, reputable staff are forced out of their jobs, good departments are closed down, and genuinely innovative and creative work is undermined. Cris Shore tells the salutary tale of how the Department of Sociology and Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham was closed in 2002. The news of this came as a shock, not only to staff in the department, but to the academic community in general. Why had Birmingham University’s new Vice Chancellor and management team decided to close one of their most prestigious and internationally successful departments—widely regarded as one of the jewels in its crown? Certainly not for financial reasons: the department was economically buoyant with 250 undergraduates and 50 postgraduate research students and with the anticipated arrival that autumn of a further 30, mostly high fee-paying, overseas research students (something that most university departments can only dream of). Nor for its poor reputation: the department had a proud heritage and enjoyed enormous international prestige as the founder of modern Cultural Studies. Nor too because of poor teaching records or low staff morale: the department had just achieved a perfect 24 in its last Teaching Quality Assessment and its staff were primarily young and highly motivated teachers and scholars. (Shore 2008: 101)

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The answer was simply that the department had not done well in the 2001 Research Assessment Exercise, and the new management team had brought in a strategic plan in which low-scoring departments would have to close. Shore and other writers have provided plenty of detail on how audit practices threaten universities in new ways, paradoxically undermining the very things they are meant to protect and measure: the quality of teaching, research, and the university experience the student undergoes. That is appropriate work for an anthropologist. But I am a philosopher, so I will take the dangerous route of theorizing the audit society and the philistine university from a different point of view. BUREAUCRACY AND THE PUBLIC REALM What most upsets romantic conservatives about the impacts of neo-liberalism, particularly as these affect the university, is an anxiety about the utopianism that underpins the dreams of enlightened globalism and a naïve progressivism that seems to be at the heart of cosmopolitanism. At the heart of the audit society, just as at the core of Singer’s dream of one ethical world free from pain and poverty, is an apparent trust in two things: rationality and bureaucracy. It may be for this reason that one journalist complained in a review that ‘Singer sounds like a bureaucrat who cannot understand why politicians will not devolve more power to him’ (Sheehan 2002). Bureaucracy seems to be one of the most rational ways of organizing our affairs, since a transparent bureaucracy operates according to rules that can be understood by all who are governed by it, and which in principle can apply fairly and without prejudice to everyone in a department, a company, a government, perhaps even to everyone on the planet—just as in Singer’s utilitarian fantasy. By contrast, as John Gray has pointed out, it was a commonplace insight of the Scottish enlightenment thinkers, particularly Adam Smith and David Hume, that humans are creatures of passion rather than reason, and that we do well to be suspicious of the reason or intellect when it operates without regard for sentiment. Jacob Viner, the American economic historian, reminds us that Adam Smith had no confidence in the free market as such, let alone in its rationality. Summarizing Smith’s view, Viner writes: ‘The sentiments are innate to man; that is, man is endowed with them by providence. Under normal circumstances, the sentiments are infallible. It is reason which is fallible. Greatest of all in degree of fallibility is the speculative reason of the moral philosopher’ (quoted in Gray 2007: 122). It is perhaps odd for a philosopher in Australia to be quoting these words—unless to dismiss them—for philosophy is the most rationalistic of disciplines, and Australian philosophy has an almost religious fervour in its faith in reason rather than passion as the great guide to life. In his prizewinning book, The Moral Problem, Michael Smith actually declares that rational consistency alone is the most important constraint in the choice of an ethical theory (Smith 1994: ch. 1). Smith is just one of many contemporary philosophers whose works illustrate Gray’s claim that contemporary thought

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and contemporary politics are mired in utopian fantasies, exemplified, for example, in the idea that by invading Iraq, the United States and its allies could create de novo a new society dedicated to democracy in place of the existing one. Recall Singer’s utopianism about the need to create a world in which only democracies can belong to international organisations such as the World Trade Organization, and in which impartial benevolence—each to count for one, and none for more than one—is the rule for distribution of goods and resources (Singer 2002). While philosophy may regard such utopian thinking as inspirational, setting out ideals that challenge the status quo, Gray argues that whenever utopian thinking influences those in power, the result is always catastrophic (Gray 1998, 2007). Such thinking encourages us to believe that through the use of rationality we can design good political systems and that reason will reveal the wisest ethical choices. Experience, however, suggests the contrary. Good political and economic systems are the result of accident and political contingency, and wisdom can consist in sticking with what we’ve got and with what works rather than trusting to our reason to devise anything better. From the romantic perspective, modernity is a movement dedicated to Enlightenment utopianism—trust in reason and science—a movement whose success is still on trial and whose deficiencies, as critics like Gray point out, are daily revealed. It is ironic that in thinking about the role of reason in the university, we find a reflection of the very impasse that splits the romantics and nomads in their reactions to the progressivist modern agenda. If some of the stresses in modern universities are a product of the instrumentalizing reason of the audit society, then where can we turn for considerations that help us in this situation? One way of doing this is to look afresh at the thought of Hannah Arendt, a romantic conservative with a prescient sense of the world that would emerge after her death. Her work was always informed by a sense of the political, and hence attempted to avoid the dangers of pure theorizing about ethics, truth or justice. To emerge as a fully human being, engaged in what Arendt called the vita activa, is to see, and be seen by, other agents in a public space within which we are able to articulate disagreements and compare and contrast our perspectives (Brennan and Malpas forthcoming). This public space contrasts with the private sphere, the place of getting and spending, the place where we engage in intimate and private activities, a space of consumption. Put in Arendtian terms, the nomadic neo-liberals are advocates of a shrivelling of the public sphere, in favour of a greater emphasis on the goods of consumption, the items of the private realm. While the benefits of consumer culture are important to our private needs and satisfactions, according to Arendt these goods play little part in developing what is human in us, as political and social beings. Indeed, the animal laborans—locked into the cycle of survival and consumption—is contrasted in her writings with homo faber, the being who genuinely creates new things, heroically defies nature and has the possibility of acting in the public realm. Citizens are, for her, contrasted with consumers, for citizens freely pursue projects in the public sphere through their interaction with other equally public figures. To emerge into a fully developed human being, one has to appear on the public stage, not simply consume and survive in private (Arendt 1958: chs. 1–2).

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What she feared was the death of the public sphere, bringing with it the death of the human as a political and creative being. In Australia, in common with other industrial economies, the increasing emphasis on the private sphere seems to provide a clear example of what Arendt feared. Large debates about tax concessions, economic management and social policy are often couched in terms of their impact on the ability of voters to pay their mortgages, pay for the education of their children, and replace their cars. This form of political discourse threatens to reduce the realm of public interaction, and the possibilities it offers for people with very different perspectives to engage in serious discussion of ethics and politics, to a different realm entirely—one concerned with private needs, self-interest, and animal functioning. Equally privatizing is the contemporary concern with the promise of biotechnology for disease control and life-extension. As already noted, writers like Fukuyama have deplored the threat to human nature posed by the potential emergence of post-human beings, creatures invincible to many of the diseases that have previously diminished the quality of human life, and able to look forward to lifespans measured in centuries rather than decades. For Arendt, such pursuits seek the wrong kind of immortality. The public realm, as she understands it, is what gives our actions immortality of a kind, inasmuch as our political engagements can build something larger than individual lives, a common world, that persists even as successive generations die. ‘If the world is to contain a public space,’ she wrote, ‘it cannot be erected for one generation and planned for the living only; it must transcend the life-span of mortal men. Without this transcendence into a potential earthly immortality, no politics, strictly speaking, no common world and no public realm, is possible’ (Arendt 1958: 55). Arendt herself put a rather high tone into what she wrote about the public realm, and my comments here are more in keeping with the spirit rather than the exact letter of her remarks. Applied to the debate between the nomads and the romantics, though, there is a clear moral to be drawn from her approach. As I read them, the jaunty cosmopolitans often describe the benefits of the new global age in terms of the large political and social matters that demand—on the Arendtian account—transparent communication and discussion in the public realm. Yet there is a gap between what they describe and what actually happens. In many cases, the interaction between cultures takes place only in the diminished terms of the private financial realm— money, consumer choices, biological enhancement, property. The celebration of cultural diversity in the city, for Arendt, would be ridiculous if confined to rejoicing at the choice of cuisines: yet in our diminished and privatised polity, this is likely to be the only thing politicians mention in their speeches on multiculturalism. If we are to assess the merits of nomadism versus romanticism, there is a necessity for distinctions, in particular for distinguishing public and private, the questions of civics and politics from the questions of getting and spending. Otherwise, we run the risk that, in a sense, we no longer inhabit political societies properly so-called and that we ourselves are no longer fully human. The hermit, for Aristotle, was not a fully-developed human being, and our new industrial societies are in danger of becoming collections of hermits, linked by the all-encompassing market and driven by what Arendt would view as animal desires—the desires of

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animals clever enough to make a niche for themselves in the system, but not wise enough to see the limitations of their form of life. By giving priority to the private over the public, the romantics may argue, our contemporary social formations have lost sight of truth in politics. In The Human Condition, Arendt grandly commented that ‘only where things can be seen by many in a variety of aspects without changing their identity, so that those who are gathered around them know they see sameness in utter diversity, can worldly reality truly and reliably appear’ (Arendt 1958: 57–58). Jeff Malpas has remarked that Arendt can be taken as warning against the kind of politics that is now commonplace—where public figures routinely lie, where balance rather than truth is the ambition of the responsible media, and where imagined threats to security are used to muffle dissent and close further the space for public debate (Malpas forthcoming). What Malpas does not mention is that Arendt herself was prone to look for scientific and administrative solutions to economic and social problems, and hence to relegate to the administrative realm some of the issues of economic policy and management that might better be debated in the public realm (Schwartz 1995: 210). For this reason, my closing comments are Arendtian in tone rather than being an endorsement of her own very specific position. For the Arendtian in this sense, bureaucracy has its own corrosive effects on public debate, truth, and freedom. The dangers of bureaucratic government can be likened to those of totalitarianism. In the totalitarian state, there is a ruler who controls everyone, a ruler who not only expects his subjects to do his bidding, but to sacrifice their own lives for—and to—him if asked. In the bureaucratic society of high modernity, it is harder to find the ruler, and there is—nominally at least—no tyrant. Even those at the top of organisations claim to be governed by the very rules their subordinates are following. But there are rules, Arendt points out, and rule by no one is not the absence of rules. As companies, universities and governments become more bureaucratic, there is an appearance of government by rules that are apparently impartial among competing partial and private interests. But what effect do such rules and systems of government have on public interests? Unless we preserve the places for public debate, and unless we maintain the meaning of the terms and language in which such debates can be constructed, then our society will be further diminished. Cardinal Newman’s university was one of the places where just such debates on matters of public importance could be conducted; we might say that other such places include open and free media, a good public broadcaster, and other spaces for public discussion. These places, however, need to be protected, as pillars of a democracy that is worth having. Without these additional pillars, democracies are in danger of losing the space of debate, discussion, and provocation that they need in order to plan and mis-plan their policies, their futures, to state their hopes, fears, and visions. The sociologist Richard Sennett has written at length about the corrosion of character under modern forms of capitalism, forms of life which put performance, profit, and getting ahead of the competition, as the prime goods— the very things that have to show up well under audit policies (Sennett 1998). The Enron guys were the smartest in the room, after all, and even Hume and Adam Smith would have recognised their cleverness. No doubt society, eth-

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ics, and democracy will all survive, one way or another, the corrosion of the present, and no doubt the debate between nomads and romantics has a way still to go. But the audit culture, the growth of bureaucracy and its peculiar faith in rationality, the instrumentalizing of higher education in the pursuit of ‘useful’ knowledge, the pressures of cosmopolitanism and globalisation— these things are in danger of combining to weaken the public sphere and thus affect the kind of people we become. The point about what is public and what is private, as I have tried to show, is a conceptual and not an empirical one. These two spheres are not ones between which people, as it were, commute: the public is more than the private becoming public. On the contrary, it is through committing ourselves to judgments, through taking positions on matters of public concern, that we make ourselves what we are. Emergence into the public realm is a transformation of the animal laborans into the homo faber, the entry into a space which by its very features changes those who participate in it. This is the key idea that the Arendtian takes from Aristotle’s notion that humans are political animals. We are not humans first, who then enter into politics. Rather, who we are, what we become, is in part a product of our public judgments, public commitments, and public action. Newman thought that by entering the university, the student entered on a process of character creation and character building—an idea that perhaps seems quaint in a world where students are consumers, education is a product, and the customer is always right. But this sense of quaintness is a warning to us that we may already have lost something important in the way we organise our society, our universities, and the other parts of our public spaces. ‘The point is,’ as Arendt put it, ‘that a consumer’s society cannot possibly know how to take care of a world and the things which belong exclusively to the space of worldly appearances, because its central attitude toward all objects, the attitude of consumption, spells ruin to everything it touches’ (Arendt 1968: 211). To the extent that the university aids and abets the values of the consumer society, to the extent that the processes of audit and accountability drive it in this direction, and so undermine the capacity of higher education to critique, to provide diverse and critical perspectives on social, ethical, and political quandaries, then the less the academy is able to fulfil its potential as one of the pillars of a healthy and flourishing polity, a place where democracy rather than bureaucracy or tyranny can be cherished and protected. Commitment to academic freedom, peer review, the unbiased judgment of the best minds— these qualities can be undermined by processes of management and accountability that favour the safe, the compliant, and the reduction of risk. Financial risk management is certainly a sensible precaution for any major organisation, including universities. The spread of risk management into non-financial areas has been a characteristic of the last decade of increasing ‘accountability’ in the university. The Arendtian would warn that in our attempts to assure the public that education funding is being well spent, in our enthusiasm to ensure that high standards in humanities and the social and natural sciences are being maintained, we have to be wary of killing the very thing we are trying to protect, and destroying the very quality that is supposedly being measured. To the extent that the university is a major element of a healthy public sphere, and so participates in the maintenance of a healthy

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democracy, there is a case for restricting the growth of bureaucracy and opening up spaces for more freedom within the academy. If bureaucracy can be worse than tyranny, and if the academy is to play its part in taking care of the world, then it is time to rethink the corporate model that has been adopted for universities across the globe and return—free from utopian delusions—to a serious examination of the idea of the university.

Chapter Four

Philosophy in Melbourne C. A. J. (Tony) Coady

Academic philosophy effectively began its Australian life in Melbourne where the first lecturer in logic was appointed at the University of Melbourne in 1881. The appointee was the Scottish-born journalist Henry Laurie, who had been editor and owner of the Warnambool Standard, and who five years after his initial appointment (in 1886) was elevated to become the country’s first philosophy professor at the University of Melbourne. Nothing so vulgar as advertising the position had been considered by the university and this procedure by which Laurie slipped smoothly into the chair aroused some controversy. 1 Prior to Laurie, some logic and political theory had been taught at Melbourne by the redoubtable W. E. Hearn, an extraordinary polymath, with an international scholarly reputation, who also taught at various times English, ancient and modern history, political economy, and classical literature before becoming the university’s first dean of law. In Sydney, some logic had been taught to accompany other subjects, but philosophy was not established until 1888. There had been a compendious chair in English language and literature and mental and moral philosophy established earlier at the University of Adelaide, but its first occupants had no philosophical claims and the professing of philosophy there really began in 1894 with the appointment of the gifted, if often obscure, William Mitchell, who gave the prestigious Gifford Lectures in Aberdeen in 1924–1926, later published as The Place of Minds in the World (1933). Academic philosophy in Australia in the late nineteenth century was an infant phenomenon and seems to have had no great impact on a well-known American philosopher who visited the country at this time. The idealist, Josiah Royce, took leave from his position at Harvard to sail to the Antipodes in 1887, seeking recovery from a bout of depression that seems to have left him close to a nervous breakdown. The visit cured him, and much that he observed filled him with admiration for Australia and New Zealand. Upon his return to the United States, he wrote extensively of his impressions, but made no comment upon the fledgling state of academic philosophy or, indeed, of university life at all. He was enormously impressed with the civic 39

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spirit of Melbourne and particularly with the public library. In political philosophy, Royce was an idealist and what would nowadays be called a ‘communitarian,’ and he was taken with what he thought was the more community-oriented nature of Australian attitudes compared to the individualism of the United States. He expressed some hope that Australia would become the first socialist country in the world, a view not so surprising then as it seems now. If Royce made no contact with academic philosophers, he did become acquainted with some influential politicians and was greatly impressed by the philosophical outlook and statesmanship of the Victorian politician Alfred Deakin, ‘affable Alf’ as he was affectionately known, who was to be one of the ‘founding fathers’ of the Federated Commonwealth, and eventually Australia’s second prime minister. By contrast, one hundred years later, when distinguished American philosophers like Princeton’s David Lewis spent time in Australia, they consorted almost entirely with academics, though Lewis also spent a lot of time at Essendon football matches. Royce described Deakin as ‘a lover of metaphysics’ (La Nauze 1965: 124) and continued to correspond with him after returning to America. Deakin seems to have drawn his philosophical inspiration mostly from overseas, though he later developed a close relationship with one of Laurie’s star pupils, Edmund Morris Miller, whom he met in 1907. Miller, it seems, wrote speeches for Deakin, 2 though it is unlikely that Laurie himself had any contact with Deakin since Laurie was a shy man who famously founded a monthly discussion dinner club and then was too inhibited to attend any of its meetings! (Scott 1936: 131). In spite of his reputation for shyness, Laurie was very active in the wider community; he wrote leaders for the Australasian newspaper and was particularly active in the art world. He also supported the emerging Heidelberg school and bought a number of their pictures even when they were unpopular. He was in fact the original owner of Frederick McCubbin’s now famous Lost and Tom Roberts’s Blue Eyes and Brown, and the two boys in Roberts’s The Violin Lesson are Laurie’s sons. There exist two portraits of him by outstanding artists in the Ian Potter Museum of Art at the University of Melbourne, one by Tom Roberts and one by Violet Teague. Laurie, though an excellent teacher, had no distinctive philosophy to impart, and was content to introduce his students to the mainstream of British and European philosophy. Most Australian philosophy in the latter part of the nineteenth century (and well into the twentieth century) was idealistic in orientation, eclectic in shape, and inspired by foreign models, especially European. It was also heavily dependent upon Scotland since most of its early academic practitioners were products of Scottish universities: Laurie was educated in Edinburgh (though he never completed his degree due to ill health), Mitchell in Adelaide was also from Edinburgh, and Francis Anderson in Sydney was a graduate of Glasgow University, as was his more notorious successor in the twentieth century, John Anderson. Scottish origins ensured the influence of Scots thought, but the great days of the Scottish School of Common Sense were past by the time philosophy began to be taught seriously in Australian universities. Thus it was Sir William Hamilton’s rather windy, neo-Kantian ‘corrections’ of Thomas Reid and A. S. Pringle Patti-

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son’s idealism that prevailed, rather than Reid’s own vigorous, realistic, and somewhat Aristotelian elaboration of a common-sense philosophy. Earlier in the century, Reid’s strong influence upon American philosophy contributed to the growth of a distinctively national style of philosophy in the form of pragmatism. In Australia, however, the initial Scottish influences gave rise to no native school. Laurie wrote a book on Scottish Philosophy in Its National Development (published in Glasgow in 1902) and published an article in Mind on Mill’s inductive logic (1893). Aside from the Scottish influence, there were also sources from Continental Europe—Hegel, of course, but subsequently Bergson, Husserl, and Eucken. These later influences were notably present in Laurie’s successor at Melbourne, W. R. Boyce Gibson. Just as there were two (unrelated) Andersons in the Sydney philosophical tradition, so there were two (closely related) Gibsons in the Melbourne tradition. The older Gibson assumed the chair in 1911 and his son Alexander followed him in 1935. The Gibson reign, father and son, lasted fifty-four years from 1911 to 1965. Gibson senior studied in Europe and, at Jena, came under the spell of Rudolf Eucken, while later he also attended Husserl’s seminars. It is a curiosity of the history of thought that Eucken (now almost utterly forgotten) should have so influenced the older Boyce Gibson in Jena when there was in that same university at the time a European philosopher at the height of his powers, who was destined to exert a massive influence upon modern analytical philosophy. This was Gottlob Frege, who was in the process of revolutionizing logic and inspiring a new approach to the philosophy of both logic and language. Of course, Frege was in the mathematics department and unacknowledged in his own time and his own university, but what a difference it might have made to the development of Australian philosophy had Gibson brought Frege rather than Eucken to Melbourne! Although Gibson had a mathematics background and was to co-author a logic textbook, he seems to have known little of Frege, though he was aware of Frege’s critical review of Husserl’s Philosophie der Arithmetic, and would have found Frege’s realism nowhere near as sympathetic as Eucken’s highly rhetorical personal idealism. It is also worth noting that Gibson’s admiration for Eucken was not at the time idiosyncratic. Eucken had after all been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1908 for vindicating and developing ‘an idealist philosophy of life.’ His subsequent disappearance from intellectual history is perhaps a salutary warning about the vagaries of intellectual fashion and the ephemeral nature of illustrious prizes and citations as a guide to lasting research excellence. Idealism was thought to support certain forms of religion, indeed certain forms of Christianity, and there is much emphasis upon the significance of religious belief amongst the early Australian philosophers. Idealism as a philosophy took different forms, but a central idea was the belief that the mundane world was merely an appearance or somehow unsatisfying manifestation of an underlying reality that was itself more rational, mental, or spiritual. In Eucken’s work this underlying reality is both spiritual and personal, and it was this that appealed to Boyce Gibson in its metaphysical and moral aspects. Idealism engaged with the anxieties of the Victorian and Edwardian eras about whether faith could survive the encounter with science, and, even more urgently, whether morality could survive the demise of relig-

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ion, though it was not of course the only philosophy to do so, as is clear from the pragmatism of the Americans, Charles Sanders Peirce and William James. The concern about morality and religion persisted beyond the eventual decline of idealism in Melbourne, so that moral philosophy, and to some extent philosophy of religion, remained significant markers of philosophy in Melbourne for a great part of the late twentieth century. The heavily inflated language and often murky logic of much idealist discourse led inevitably to a powerful reaction in the realist and analytical movements in British philosophy, promoted in England by two giants of twentieth-century philosophy, Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore, and in America by the New Realists and the Pragmatists, followed later in Europe by the Logical Positivists. But this reaction was a long while coming to Melbourne. In Sydney, John Anderson brought his unusual version of realism and empiricism to the country on his appointment to the Sydney Chair in 1927, but Melbourne philosophy remained largely immune to Anderson’s influence, though its commitment to idealism faltered in the 1930s and had largely disappeared by the 1950s. The first Boyce Gibson was also interested in the phenomenological movement. He studied under Husserl and translated Husserl’s Ideas (1967), and rates more than a passing mention in Spiegelberg’s book, The Phenomenological Movement (1960). His orientation to current British and Continental debates established the cosmopolitan flavour more characteristic of Melbourne philosophy in contrast to the more enclosed atmosphere of Andersonian Sydney. Even though he wrote a lot and was well known in his day, the changing philosophical climate would not be kind to him, as can be seen in the review of his early book on ethics, A Philosophical Introduction to Ethics (1904), by the emerging enfant terrible of analytical philosophy, G. E. Moore. Writing in the International Journal of Ethics for 1905, Moore devotes a ten-page review to a demolition of Gibson’s ideas, concluding with the sentence: ‘The book is a very poor book indeed’ (Moore 1905: 379). ‘Sandy’ Boyce Gibson, W. R. Boyce Gibson’s son, was Christian and a traditionalist with idealist leanings, but he appointed good people of all persuasions to the department. He was best known for his aphorisms, delivered with a slight lisp. One I recall as characteristic: ‘Aristotle—mediocrity carried to the point of genius.’ Either by design or accident, he managed to achieve a balance of religious and irreligious in his staff appointments. When I joined the department on a full-time basis in 1966, after study in Oxford, there was a fascinating mix of Catholics, Protestants, and agnostic/atheists. At one stage, after Gibson’s retirement, there were five Catholics amongst the fourteen full-time staff members, two Protestants, and the rest unbelievers. IDEALISM AND ITS DISPLACEMENT The idealists were heavily and often opaquely enthusiastic about metaphysics, and the metaphysical interest will later survive the disappearance of the original questions and the attempt to bolster religion. It is arguable that this

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metaphysical cast of mind has been a distinctive feature of the Australian philosophical tradition (though less so in Melbourne after the demise of idealism) and it early received one of its most striking manifestations in the work of an expatriate Australian, Samuel Alexander. Alexander was born in Sydney in 1859, but pursued undergraduate studies at the University of Melbourne before leaving Australia to study at Balliol College, Oxford. He was made professor of philosophy at Manchester in 1893, having earlier been the first Jew appointed to a fellowship at either Oxford or Cambridge (it was at Lincoln College, Oxford). During World War I, he gave the Gifford lectures in Glasgow, published as the book, Space, Time, and Deity in 1920. Alexander’s work has a traditional commitment to large-scale metaphysical vision, but was determinedly realistic in a way that placed Alexander with the burgeoning revolt against idealism. He gave a primary emphasis to experience and science, but insisted on finding a role for religion and God. In spite of his birth and upbringing, Alexander can only be considered an Australian philosopher in a peripheral sense since his philosophical career was spent entirely in Britain, but his mode of thinking had a powerful influence in his birthplace through its impact upon John Anderson and, to a lesser degree, its very different effect on the second Boyce Gibson. Anderson, who had heard Alexander’s Gifford lectures in Glasgow, took from him the opposition to idealism in any form, the resolute realism, the emphasis upon space-time and categories of reality, and the dedication to systematic thought. Gibson was impressed by the emphasis upon religious experience (even though its objects are described by Alexander in a heterodox way from the point of view of Christianity or Judaism). Interestingly, Alexander’s influence on Australian philosophy was not only abstractly intellectual; he was on the selection committees that appointed both of the Boyce Gibsons and seems also to have had a hand in Anderson’s appointment. In the 1940s, Melbourne became an outpost of the new philosophical revolution associated partly with logical positivism and more significantly with the later Wittgenstein. A primary influence in this development was the fortuitous arrival of G. A. (George) Paul in 1939 fresh from Wittgenstein’s Cambridge. Stranded in Australia by the outbreak of World War II, Paul was another Scots-born philosopher to exert a great influence upon Australian philosophy (his early education had been at St. Andrews). When Paul returned to England to a fellowship in Oxford at the end of the war, he was replaced by his friend, Douglas Gasking, whom Paul had earlier encouraged to migrate to a lectureship in Brisbane. Paul and Gasking had both studied under Wittgenstein, as did A. C. (‘Camo’) Jackson who went to Cambridge from Melbourne for PhD studies in 1946 and returned to a lectureship in the Melbourne department in 1948. Paul not only brought the new philosophy to Australia, but had an immense influence upon the development of other disciplines at the University of Melbourne, most notably history. In one year, all the full-time members of the history department attended Paul’s lectures on logic. Like Anderson’s, Paul’s impact could be partly explained by his being a big fish in a small pond (an especially small pond, in Paul’s case, because of the drainage of intellectual talent caused by the war in the period of his greatest influence). But unlike Anderson, Paul was not an original thinker, and the power of his ideas came largely from afar even if he (like

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Jackson) clearly was a remarkable teacher. He published very little, and that before he arrived in Australia; his paper ‘Is There a Problem about SenseData?’ (1936) is his best-known contribution, though he also wrote on the unlikely topic of ‘Lenin’s Theory of Perception’ (1938). After he returned to Oxford he made little further impact on the subject. Paul’s interest in Lenin was an indication of something very distinctive about the politics of Melbourne philosophy. Just prior to and after World War II, Melbourne philosophers made a distinct shift to the political left. Sandy Boyce Gibson was conservative in politics and suffered definite discomfort all his life from the fact that his brother Ralph was a luminary in the Australian Communist Party. But George Paul and his wife Margaret seem to have had left-wing sympathies, and some Melbourne staff and students played active roles in debates and intrigues about whether the university’s Labor Club should continue its association with the Eureka Youth League, which was communist linked and so a problem for the club’s connection to the Australian Labor Party. One Melbourne philosopher, Peter Herbst, was offered a lectureship in New Zealand in the late 1940s, but had to decline when, apparently on the intervention of the Australian government, he was refused a visa on the surprising grounds that he was a well-known antifascist. 3 Amongst some of the staff sympathy with the Soviet Union persisted long after it should have, even, for instance, into the 1960s. But with this interest, some of the fascination with religion also persisted; I remember that Camo Jackson, in the 1960s, subscribed both to the liberal Catholic journal, The Catholic Worker, and the Communist Party paper, The Daily Worker. The Wittgensteinian tradition that Paul, Gasking, and Jackson established in Melbourne began with a somewhat positivist flavour, but later broadened under the impact of Oxford philosophy and the arrival of refugee intellectuals from continental Europe, some of whom had been absurdly deported from Great Britain in the ship ‘Dunera’ and interned in Australia during much of the war. The Melbourne department during the 1950s was host to a number of philosophers, both foreign-born and locally educated, who later left to pursue philosophy overseas. These included such well-known names as W. D. Falk, Kurt Baier (his New Zealand wife Annette also worked in Australia), Alan Donagan, Brian O’Shaughnessy, Paul Edwards, and Michael Scriven. This established a trend for a later export industry, that included such Melbourne philosophers as Jenny Teichmann, Peter Singer, Mark Johnston, and Rai Gaita, to name a few. Where Andersonian Sydney into the 1950s was confidently parochial and mostly contemptuous of recent developments in international philosophy, Melbourne stood for a more cosmopolitan and contemporary approach (though many of Anderson’s students later achieved international recognition and even fame). Melbourne also hosted, under the influence of Sandy Gibson, a diversity of outlook and a professional, problem-oriented approach to the subject that Anderson dismissed as ‘eclecticism.’ The influence of Wittgenstein in Melbourne was strong, but not overwhelming, and indeed many of the best-known philosophers at Melbourne University in the 1950s and 1960s, such as H. J. (‘Honest John’) McCloskey and Max Charlesworth were not in any sense Wittgensteinians. Douglas

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Gasking succeeded Boyce Gibson in the Melbourne Chair in 1966 and the Melbourne Department remained less metaphysically oriented than other departments in the country or indeed the new departments in the city of Melbourne, at La Trobe and Monash. The first chair in philosophy at Monash was filled by D. H. (Hector) Monro in 1961 and a second chair by Camo Jackson after his move from Melbourne University to Monash later in the 1960s. Monro, a New Zealander who had taught at Sydney University, was a man of considerable range and erudition who had served a spell in librarianship in New Zealand and worked mainly in moral philosophy, but also wrote a very interesting book on the nature of laughter (Monro 1951). He also published amusing verse on philosophical topics, much of it collected in his Sonneteer’s History of Philosophy (1981). Brian Ellis went from the Melbourne History and Philosophy of Science Department to the foundation chair at La Trobe, and was later joined by John McCloskey from the Melbourne Department in a second chair. In its early years, the La Trobe department was the largest philosophy department in the country, and one of the best. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, it fell upon hard times, being much reduced in numbers and without a professor for many years. This is a grim distinction it shares with the small philosophy unit at Deakin University, which seems destined never to replace Max Charlesworth who moved from the University of Melbourne to be professor of philosophy and foundation dean of humanities in 1977 and was not replaced when he retired in 1990. The rapid expansion of university education in Australia from the 1960s eliminated the dominance of, and the opposition between, the University of Melbourne and University of Sydney; what remains is partly an Hegelian synthesis of the metaphysical interests derived from Sydney and the internationalist ‘analytic’ professionalism drawn from Melbourne. One curious contribution of Melbourne to Australian philosophy was the provision of the key figure in a major public scandal, the Orr case. Sydney Sparkes Orr had been an undistinguished philosophy lecturer at Melbourne when appointed to the chair in philosophy at the University of Tasmania in 1952 against a hot field. Boyce Gibson was widely regarded at the time as having secured Orr’s appointment in order to get him out of Melbourne, where his curious marital arrangements and poor philosophical merits made him an embarrassment. But it is now clear that Gibson’s advice to the appointment committee ranked Orr comfortably last of the applicants. In addition, Orr’s application contained significant erroneous claims about his accomplishments. Nonetheless, he was appointed, and it seems this was largely because he was regarded by the university authorities and by mainland establishment figures as a sound Christian, untainted by the dangerous philosophies of either Anderson in Sydney or Ryle in Oxford. Ironically, the ‘sound’ Orr was then accused in 1956 of seducing a teenage student, and was dismissed by the university in circumstances that led to an academic staff association ban on appointments to the philosophy chair from 1958 until 1966. The dispute divided Australian intellectuals for more than a decade, its saucy details and related rumours titillating the public for much of that time, and it was only ended when Orr accepted a substantial settlement from the university in 1966 on his deathbed. 4

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AUSTRALIAN MATERIALISM Since the late 1950s, the metaphysical stream in Australian philosophy has been in flood, first in the theory known as central state (or ‘Australian’) materialism, and then in a particularly forceful version of metaphysical realism. Key figures in these movements of ideas were J. J. C. Smart, who came from Oxford to Adelaide in the 1950s, and D. M. A. (David) Armstrong, first at the University of Melbourne and from 1964 in the chair at the University of Sydney. This is not the place for a detailed discussion of materialism and its varieties, since the theory was less influential in Melbourne than elsewhere, until it became a widespread movement. Initially more influenced by Wittgenstein or Oxford, Melbourne philosophers tended to think of the mental in linguistic or social terms; they were suspicious of ontology, especially a radically simplifying ontology, though some were attracted to the ambiguous physicalism of Donald Davidson. At the University of Melbourne epistemology, philosophy of language, and moral psychology were for some time seen as more important than ontology, though materialism was taken more seriously elsewhere in Melbourne, especially by Frank Jackson who succeeded his father Camo as professor at Monash in the late 1970s. Jackson and Peter Singer (with very different interests) were a formidable team as the two professors at Monash in the 1980s. Australian materialism and realism owed much to a particular picture of science, and the philosophy of science had a good record at Melbourne University. The Melbourne History and Philosophy of Science (HPS) department was in fact the first of its kind in the world and produced such wellknown philosophers as Gerd Buchdahl, George Schlesinger, John Clendinnen, Hugh Lacey, and Brian Ellis. There were also critics of materialism, more sympathetic to the ontologizing mood, who held out for some residual dualism, often centred on the recalcitrance of ‘qualia’ to the materialist reduction. Both Frank Jackson (at Monash) and Keith Campbell (at Melbourne, then Sydney) defended the ontological significance and irreducibility of the experiential, of what it is (and is ‘like’) to be aware of one’s surroundings. Jackson (as noted, the son of A. C. Jackson) is a product of the University of Melbourne who left Monash to follow Jack Smart as professor at the Australian National University. In a curious repetition of the Gibson dynastic tradition at the University of Melbourne, Jackson had succeeded his father in the chair at Monash, and in 1995 became only the second Australian to give the prestigious John Locke lectures at Oxford. In 2010, a third Australian, David Chalmers, gave the Locke lectures. Naturally, his father was the first! (It is worth noting that not only were Jackson father and son philosophers, but so was Camo’s wife, Frank’s mother, Ann Jackson who taught in the Melbourne Department for many years.) The sympathies of Frank Jackson and Campbell with the scientistic mood of their materialist colleagues, however, led them to favour an epiphenomenalist account of ‘qualia’ so that the reality of the mental items they hoped to reinstate is somewhat pallid and causally ineffectual. Subsequently, Jackson has surrendered to materialism. The expatriate Australian, Brian O’Shaughnessy (a product of the Melbourne depart-

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ment who spent most of his philosophical life in the University of London) developed a more positive and original, if sometimes more elusive, double aspect theory of the mind that was well reviewed internationally. Melbourne was for a long time unsympathetic to the teaching of and researching in developments in modern logic. Douglas Gasking, professor from 1966 to 1975 at Melbourne University, emphasised ‘informal’ logic, but a change to more formal interests began with the creation of the new universities and was heightened with the appointment of Len Goddard to the chair at the University of Melbourne in the late 1970s. Goddard was a logician sympathetic to alternative logics and this is a development that has been reinforced and extended under the present Boyce Gibson professor, Graham Priest, who has an international reputation in both logic and philosophy of logic. Another area, traditionally somewhat neglected in Melbourne departments, is ancient philosophy, though Dirk Baltzly at Monash is an internationally respected practitioner. In ‘pure’ moral theory, many of Australia’s most notable achievements have been produced by expatriates. Kurt Baier’s The Moral Point of View (1958) and Alan Donagan’s The Theory of Morality (1977) were cases in point. Locally, D. H. Monro and H. J. McCloskey published books discussing fundamental moral theory, but they were basically intelligent refurbishings of, respectively, subjectivism and intuitionism (see Monro 1967, McCloskey 1969). Rai Gaita is an interesting case. He lives partly in England where he is a professor at King’s College, London, and partly in Melbourne where he has a chair at the Australian Catholic University. His major book in moral theory, Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception (1990), was produced before he half-returned to Australia. He was a student at the University of Melbourne and then Leeds, and the book shows the influence of Wittgenstein and also other unusual influences like Simone Weil. Gaita’s thought is not always easy to follow, but he has the considerable virtue of a distinctive, somewhat non-conformist voice in moral philosophy in a country that tends to be dominated by more conventional outlooks. He is also well-known in the wider community, partly because of the huge success of his memoir, Romulus, My Father, as both book (published in 1998) and film (released in 2007). In political philosophy, McCloskey’s most influential work is found in his stern critiques and analyses of liberal political theory and his trenchant criticisms of utilitarianism as, for example, in his John Stuart Mill: A Critical Study (1971) and his article, ‘An Examination of Restricted Utilitarianism’ (1957). In spite of McCloskey’s denunciations, one notable feature of Australian moral philosophy in the latter part of the twentieth century has been the prevalence of utilitarianism. This parallels the dominance of materialism and the yearning after a scientific worldview, although many materialists were indifferent to ethics, one of them famously sneering that ‘ethics is for girls’—a delicious combination of sexism and philistinism. The Melbourne department had seldom been sympathetic to utilitarian thought: in the early years Henry Laurie condemned utilitarian thinking about education and the Wittgensteinian influence tended to see utilitarianism as too crude to account for the complex, even mysterious, nature of morality. Sandy Gibson would have endorsed Eucken’s view that utilitarianism, ‘which ever form it assumes, is irreconcilably opposed to true intellectual culture.’ 5

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Nonetheless Australia’s best known moral philosopher, indeed possibly the best known philosopher outside academia, the Melbourne University–educated Peter Singer, has been an enthusiastic utilitarian and has deployed the theory in his various writings and activities in applied ethics. Singer’s books, especially Animal Liberation (1975) and Practical Ethics (1979), are amongst the few books by professional philosophers in the latter part of the twentieth century to have achieved something like best-seller status, and to be widely read well beyond academic circles. Moreover, Singer is (I think) the only Australian philosopher to have stood for Federal Parliament, with, it must be said, conspicuous lack of success. Singer was in the forefront of developing the move to applied philosophy in Australia by establishing the Monash University Centre for Bioethics, and there is now a very healthy movement in applied philosophy in Melbourne. Singer’s early career was at LaTrobe University where excellent work in applied philosophy has continued, Janna Thompson, Freya Mathews, and Robert Young being prominent exponents. In 1990, the first institution to concentrate wholly on applying philosophy across a range of public questions, the Centre for Philosophy and Public Issues, was established at the University of Melbourne with the present author as director, and it existed until 2000 when it was absorbed into the ARC (Australian Research Council)-funded Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE). The latter ‘special research’ centre jointly operates at Charles Sturt University and the University of Melbourne, with Seumas Miller as director at Charles Sturt and myself as deputy director in Melbourne. It is still going and now involves the Australian National University as a division as well, though after 2008 its primary ARC funding ended. Peter Singer went to the United States to a chair at Princeton University in the late 1990s, but is now half-time in CAPPE Melbourne, so like Gaita he spends half his time overseas and half in Australia. Another Melbourne philosopher who spends time in Australia and England is Julian Savulescu, who is a former pupil of Singer’s at Monash with rather similarly confrontational views and is now a professor at Oxford University heading the Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics. The Uehiro Centre sponsors an invited annual lecture series called ‘The Uehiro Lectures on Practical Ethics’ each year in Oxford and so far two Melbourne philosophers, myself and Peter Singer, have given them. If philosophy in Melbourne was marked until the 1920s, and to some degree beyond this, by a desire to reconcile religion with the rise of science and to show the continued relevance to ethics of a religious sense of life, there remains less sign of such concern today. There are a number of committed Christians amongst Australian philosophers and some recent work in the metaphysics of religion, notably from Bruce Langtry at Melbourne (see, e.g., Langtry 2008), Peter Forrest at the University of New England (see, e.g., Forrest 2007), and Graham Oppy at Monash (see, e.g., Oppy 2006), but much less on the role of religion in morality and life. There is interest in religious or quasi-religious impulses in philosophical engagement with problems of the environment. This is another area of applied philosophy that has had a notable currency in Australia. A good deal of writing in this area invokes utilitarian or other more traditional considerations, but that which appeals to the intrinsic value of the natural order often

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honours an ideal of respect and even reverence for nature that has distinct religious echoes, though these are seldom standardly Christian. This connects with the metaphysical impulses of Australian philosophy which can be seen at work in the La Trobe philosopher Freya Mathews (1991), who presents an holistic metaphysics as the basis for appropriate environmental attitudes. The role of feminist thinking in Melbourne philosophy raises interesting questions that are too complex to address in a short space. Suffice to say that philosophy departments have not been immune to the patriarchal tendencies of Australian society at large, though there has recently been an increased emphasis on the work of women philosophers. Given the influence of some Continental thinkers on feminism, the analytic orientation of most Melbourne philosophy departments may partially explain a relative indifference to feminist thinking, though there are now many feminist analytic philosophers. The great divide between contemporary Continental philosophy and the analytic tradition is less emphatic than it once was, though differences remain. In Melbourne, the small Deakin University unit established under Max Charlesworth’s influence has been the most Continental in orientation. PUBLIC INFLUENCE Philosophy has always had a strongly technical element, as a cursory dip into Aristotle’s Metaphysics will show, and so its influence on public life is often indirect. Nonetheless, Melbourne philosophy from its earliest years has exerted a more direct influence than usual upon the broader community. Henry Laurie, in spite of his shyness, gave many public lectures on important topics, but the sensitivity of the university’s authorities to anything that seemed controversial, especially in the area of religion, created a crisis when Laurie sought permission in 1890 to deliver a lecture on ‘The Teaching of Morality in State Schools’ to the Melbourne Head Teachers Association. The University Council had some twenty years earlier refused permission to the professor of anatomy, physiology, and pathology to give a public lecture on protoplasm because the Bishop of Melbourne thought it might have undesirable political and religious consequences! In light of this, Laurie’s proposal clearly meant dynamite and the chancellor declared it ‘a very dangerous subject indeed’ (Scott 1936: 44–45). Laurie was at first forbidden, but he protested that it was surprising that ‘the Professor of Moral Philosophy is not to be allowed to lecture on the teaching of morality in the schools!’ (Scott 1936: 45). In response, the Council lifted the ban on condition that Laurie did not ‘introduce either party politics or sectarian discussion’(Scott 1936: 45). Laurie was also a strong advocate for philosophy as an important factor in the cultural and intellectual life of the wider community. In 1881, just prior to his appointment as lecturer in logic at the university, he published a paper in the Victorian Review entitled ‘A Plea for Philosophy’ which argued the importance of the study of philosophy against the utilitarian spirit that he thought too influential in Australia. Laurie claimed that this utilitarianism (which in its emphasis might better be called philistinism and was a clear forerunner of contemporary government attitudes to universities) was actually ‘as inimical

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to individual or national progress’ as it was to ‘the spirit of philosophical research’ (Laurie 1881: 15–16). In fact, several of Laurie’s pupils were active in the cultural life of the city. One form of this activity was in the area of libraries. Both Morris Miller and another philosophy graduate Amos Brazier worked at the Victorian Public Library, and Miller published the first Australian monograph in librarianship, Libraries and Education (1912), as well as being influential in founding the Library Association of Victoria in 1912. Miller and Brazier were involved in lengthy internal disputes with the chief librarian La Touche Armstrong over many things, including the building of the famous reading room dome and the introduction of the Dewey decimal system. The philosophy graduates were hotly opposed to the Dewey system and much of their opposition seems to have sprung from the fact that philosophers were long regarded as the ideal people to classify and categorise books, and Dewey’s system would put most of them out of this enjoyable job since it could be applied fairly mechanically. Miller’s opposition was so strong that when he became professor of philosophy and psychology at the University of Tasmania in 1928, and later vice chancellor of that university, he used his influence to keep the Dewey system out of the university library until the 1950s. The two Boyce Gibson’s were less involved in public life but, as noted previously, the later one initiated a great expansion in both the size and the intellectual scope and quality of the Melbourne Department. I have already mentioned the polyglot religious background encouraged by Boyce Gibson, and when Max Charlesworth proposed a course in the philosophy of religion in the early 1970s grave reservations were expressed at the academic board about how such a course could be given in a secular university, and possibly in response a department rule was instituted that if a Christian was lecturing in the subject, it must be tutored by atheists and vice versa. This persisted for many years. The shades of the university council members of 1890 must have looked down in amusement from their heavenly abodes. This mixture of influences had a certain impact more widely than the classroom. The Rationalist Society and the Newman Society had many philosophy postgraduates and staff as members. Hot debates were held at lunchtime to packed audiences between Rashos and Catholics or other Christians. One of the most notable debaters and argumentative fraternisers in local pubs was the eccentric Catholic lecturer, Dr. Vernon Rice. Vernon professed stern Catholic orthodoxy and an idiosyncratic version of Thomism, and in spite of his orthodoxy was evidently homosexual at a time when this was not something openly declared. Vernon was not out of the closet, but neither was he altogether enclosed by it. Other Catholics in the department were less concerned with combating atheism and professed a brand of liberal Catholicism that was associated with the magazines Prospect and The Catholic Worker. The latter magazine, which notably opposed Santamaria’s movement, was co-edited for many years by Max Charlesworth and myself (with unofficial help from the journalist Paul Ormond). This led some to declare that the journal should be renamed ‘The Catholic Senior Lecturer.’ From the 1950s some Melbourne philosophers were involved in the Bohemian artistic life of the city, notably in the odd movement called ‘the drift’ which, as the name suggests, was a faint echo of Sydney’s ‘push.’ The Sydney phenomenon

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drew artists and writers into its sway but was directly inspired by an ideology of ‘liberation’ drawn from John Anderson’s philosophy (though disowned by him). It celebrated sexual freedom (or promiscuity, depending on your perspective), vaguely anarchist politics, anti-censorship, and a great deal of gambling, drinking, and drug-taking. The ‘drift’ involved some of this but had no ideology or philosophical inspiration. The philosophers Don Gunner and David Armstrong were part of it, but the principal figure seems to have been the film-maker Tim Burstall. In today’s globalised world, there is much less that is distinctive of Melbourne, or indeed Australian, philosophy, though the quality of local work remains impressive. In Berlin, a well-known German philosopher once expressed his amazement to me that such a small country as Australia could produce so many outstanding sportsmen and also fine philosophers—he didn’t mean in the same persons. But like philosophy elsewhere in the English-speaking world, the Melbourne practitioners have acquired the polished professionalism that is part of a relatively homogenised international product. It is often technical and can seem remote to other thinkers and laypeople, though there are a number of Melbourne philosophers who are adept at communicating with the broader public. The frenzied drive for research ‘product’ enforced by successive federal governments and internalised by university administrations has undoubtedly promoted some pedestrian, if not outright boring, publications from our philosophers, but they are also communicating much that is exciting and noteworthy. We can only hope that the wretched government funding and subsequent commercialisation of the culture of Australian universities that were such features of the 1990s and early 2000s do not result in entirely ‘outsourcing’ our philosophical understanding to foreign lands. NOTES 1. See Selleck (2003: 227–28). There is also a slightly veiled reference to this feature of the appointment in Blainey (1956: 19). 2. Personal communication from Bill Garner. Garner is an outstanding actor, writer, and director who himself graduated with honours in philosophy from the University of Melbourne in the late 1960s. 3. My source for this information is John Clendinnen, formerly of the History and Philosophy of Science Department at the University of Melbourne, who knew Herbst well at the time. 4. For a good account of the details of Orr’s appointment, see Pybus (1993). Pybus’s full account of the Orr affair is a revisionist reading of the matter that puts a feminist perspective on it. She is dismissive of the arguments that, whatever his faults, Orr was done an injustice by the university. 5. This is from the fourth-last paragraph of Eucken’s acceptance speech for the Nobel prize. See http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1908/press.html.

Chapter Five

Missing the Point Many Times Over?: Australian Philosophical Atheism Peter Forrest

The history of Australian philosophy of religion—what a topic! 1 Who gives a Donald about Australian history, the history of philosophy, philosophy of religion, or Australian philosophy? Well, I care and my caring is one part pride to two parts anger. And the anger is way beyond your average grumpy old professor—by anger I mean wrath. To explain why, I shall eventually concentrate on Australian philosophical atheism. First, though, I should state that a list of Australian contributions to philosophy of religion would exhibit both quantity and quality. I shall spare you the ten-page footnote! As Australian philosophers say over and over again, philosophy is one of the things we do very well. Next let me pay homage to Max Charlesworth, who founded a rather good little journal, Sophia, and championed a sensitive approach to philosophy of religion at the height of philosophical machismo. Again, let me delay my topic by noting a rather interesting phenomenon concerning Australian philosophy of religion, the interest in the ontological argument. This is rather curious: Max Charlesworth (1965), Richard Campbell (1976), and Graham Oppy (1995) have produced books on the topic some years apart. The version considered by these authors is largely St. Anselm’s, which starts from the premise that when something is understood it may be said to have a certain sort of existence, in the understanding. It is then pointed out that God, being that than which no greater can be understood, could not have anything less than full-blooded existence, namely in the understanding and in reality. If we replace the scholastic idea of something existing in the understanding alone by the more familiar idea of something existing in the same manner as mathematical entities such as numbers, and call these things ‘abstract entities,’ we have a rather good argument that God is not the sort of thing that can exist as a merely abstract entity. So if God exists in any sense, God is a concrete thing. If we then add the rather controversial thesis that all direct awareness is infallible, with so-called non53

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veridical awareness being merely of an abstract entity, we obtain an argument from the premise that someone at some time has had an experience as if of God to the conclusion that there is a God. Likewise, if our concept of God is simple and simple concepts just are perhaps abstract objects, then St. Anselm would be right: that anyone ever has a genuine concept of God would prove the reality of God. Interesting—but it does not explain the Australian connection. One of the things that anger me about philosophy is its slavery to fashion, something from which the right sort of historical approach should rescue us. So the next thing about the history of Australian philosophy of religion I want to discuss is idealism, the philosophical theory that nothing exists that is not mental in character. Now there are arguments for and against idealism, but the influence of fashion is seen in its rapid rise and even more rapid fall, regardless of the arguments. There was nothing distinctively Australian about this, until we get to the reaction against idealism, which has quite a lot to do with John Anderson and hence with Australian philosophical atheism. The British idealists of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century included such notable philosophers as Bradley and McTaggart—John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart: he was so good they had to name him twice! These idealists, who are still taken seriously, were genuine philosophers, attempting to be clear about difficult topics. But the appeal of idealism to so many intellectuals had nothing to do with clarity and argument. It was as an obscure and deep worldview that could underpin spirituality and a sense of duty in a post-Darwinian world. Mostly, as with Bradley, this was absolute idealism, where the absolute was thought of as an impersonal God rather like Brahman in the Advaita Vedanta expounded by Sankara. For the most part this was a philosophical substitute for religion, and not conducive to the philosophical discussion of specifically religious topics. At the time, the most notable English-speaking philosopher of religion was William James, but there was little American influence, professors being imported from Scotland in their youth along with the ideas of their influential teachers. Still less was there influence from the only part of the planet where philosophy was really flourishing, the soon to perish Austro-Hungarian Empire. After idealism the thought of Wittgenstein became highly influential in Melbourne, but in Sydney there arrived the once-notorious Scottish-educated John Anderson, Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University from 1927 to 1958. For a sober scholarly account of Anderson, see Selwyn Grave’s A History of Philosophy in Australia (1984). For a slightly more opinionated but wittier story, see James Franklin’s Corrupting the Youth (2003). Here is my potted version. Being barking mad is part of the job description for a philosophy professor, but Anderson’s hypnotic eyes are less usual and altogether scarier—a bit like Rajneesh. So he had disciples, young students most of whom were all too eager to be indoctrinated out of the Christianity they had been previously been indoctrinated into. Naught so gullible as a sceptic, I say. Some of his students who were not disciples acquired an international reputation far greater than their teacher: John Passmore, whose Perfectibility of Man (1970) could be interpreted as anti-religious but is not based upon atheism; Eugene Kamenka, a leading scholar on Marxism; David Armstrong, who though an atheist is not by temperament

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anti-religious; John Leslie Mackie, who held the chair at Sydney for four years between Anderson and Armstrong; and someone who unfortunately is remembered as a right-wing rat bag, but in fact was a good philosopher and an even better stylist, David Stove. Something of Anderson may be conveyed by his dismissal of Einstein as confused and his comment on some rather brilliant lectures by Mackie as ‘me and piss.’ A man not affected by false modesty. Anderson was an enemy of religion, his views being summed up in his wartime lecture on religious education, where he likened that topic to ‘snakes in Iceland.’ His position, as with many secularists, was based upon the premises that education is opposed to indoctrination and that religious schools indoctrinate. Now there is a perfectly good sense of ‘indoctrinate’ which just means to teach that something is the case rather than teaching how to do something. And in spite of the influence of Dewey, education cannot occur without indoctrination in this benign sense, and the pretence that it can is hypocritical. There is also a less benign sense in which to indoctrinate is to teach in ways that tend to prevent subsequent critical reflection. This is contrary to a certain ideal of education, which I uphold, and it is the case that religious schools often used to indoctrinate in this sense. To their credit, my Benedictine teachers never did. So there is something to Anderson’s case for secularism, but it is too crude, crude in a way that reflects a stereotype of Australia and one that is unfair to Melbourne. I am tempted to say that the subtlest thing about Anderson’s hatred of religion is his use of ‘Iceland’ not ‘Ireland.’ The robustness of Anderson, perhaps even some of his intellectual crudity, has remained a characteristic of Australian philosophical atheism, although lessening over the years. It is there in the work of Mackie, and in Jack Smart who took up the chair in Adelaide in 1950, perhaps the two best known Australian philosophical atheists. Interestingly Smart comes from Glasgow, like Anderson. Let me now return to my mixture of pride and anger. When discussing something so wrapped up in emotion and a sense of identity as religion, intellectual crudity among those with some authority is wicked. Note, it is not the vocal opposition to people’s convictions that is wicked, but the zealot’s inattention to detail. So why my pride? Serious vice, as opposed to mediocrity, is an excess of virtue, and the intellectual crudity of Anderson, his seeing things in ‘black and white,’ is an excess of the virtue of clarity and the associated impatience with the intellectual fog prevalent among the idealists. Perhaps Anderson felt at home in Australia because of the irreverent dislike of the pretentious nonsense and priggishness that we associate with the Victorian era—an irreverence exemplified by Furphy’s Such Is Life. Early last century, Glaswegians shared this down-to-earth irreverence with the majority of Australians, at a time when idealism along with the Anglican Church had that musty Victorian smell. I am proud of this aspect of Australian culture, and sad that it is vanishing. Anderson was not just a hater of religion but a God-bashing atheist, of the same religion as Richard Dawkins today. Why an atheist rather than an agnostic? His case for atheism was not the familiar argument from evil, but

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relied on the premise that there is only one way of being, that of objects in space and time. This is in turn derived from the observation that if, as many idealists liked to say, there were levels or degrees of truth, then characteristically philosophical assertions, such as that there are many levels of truth, must be proposed as true without qualification, so the thesis of many levels of truth cannot coherently be said. The argument then proceeds as follows: if God is just another such object then, Anderson says, we have got nowhere explaining the world as God’s creation. This is the familiar ‘Who designed the designer?’ jibe. But if God is supposed to be out of space or out of time or necessary or in some other way different from ordinary objects, then theism is ruled out by the ‘one way of being’ premise. This kind of abstract philosophical argument is suspect, for when not anchored in greater detail there is a tendency for the premise to be accepted and interpreted in one way, but then used with a different gloss in other contexts. We have, then, the story of an arrogant philosopher reacting against the previously fashionable idealism and indoctrinating his students in his own peculiar metaphysics that left no room for God. Is that all there is to it? Not quite. Anderson was quite innocent of self-directed irony. He thought he knew. It was joked that, like Hegel, he had in his philosophical system an answer to every question, but that unlike Hegel it was always the same answer: ‘no.’ Those he said ‘no’ to included: idealists who thought that their answers had some degree of truth but were not 100 percent true, those influenced by Spencer who aimed to make progress rather than find the truth, and assorted relativists. Even Anderson’s famous British contemporaries, Russell and Moore, also reacting against idealism and neither of them lacking in selfconfidence, were not as robust as Anderson. Russell kept changing his mind and Moore late in life seemed to reject the objectivism about goodness that Anderson defended. None of that for Anderson. He claimed to know and he never changed his mind. Monstrous arrogance? Yes, but there is an important lesson that was not lost on his abler pupils and which informs Australian philosophical atheism. Although philosophy is characterised by a love of clarity and a concern for reasoned argument, those are merely means. The goal of philosophy is to separate the true from the false. Philosophy is not an abstract art form whose medium is ideas, philosophy is not self-expression; it is not a game in which you get more points for defending more bizarre positions; it is not even, I say, a matter of sorting out the rational from the irrational. It is an attack on the false and a defence of the true. Postmodernists, may they rest in peace, used to call this Platonism. If so, then Whitehead was right: philosophy is a series of footnotes to Plato. If like the idealists you blather on about degrees of truth, if like your common or garden relativist you talk of what is true for me or true for us, if even like Russell you keep changing your mind, or if like Alvin Plantinga and many others you are concerned merely to show that no good case can be made for the irrationality of Christianity, then you have not, I submit, taken seriously the fundamental question: ‘But is it true?’ By the way, I am not here advocating the love of truth, but the fear of falsehood. There is a wisdom in negativity. I recall that after I had moved from Sydney University to Macquarie, I used the phrase ‘going soft on truth’ to the amusement of one of my new

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colleagues, who said ‘What a wonderful Sydney expression!’ The legacy of Anderson was, for a while at least, a curious reluctance to go soft on truth. And it is this that informs Australian philosophical atheism, the refrain: ‘But it is just not true.’ I shall now relate two incidents in the history of Australian philosophical atheism, involving two of Anderson’s famous students, Passmore and Mackie. The first is the de-conversion of Smart, professor of philosophy at Adelaide and not long out from Britain. When he came out he was under the influence of the later Wittgenstein, and he wrote a paper on philosophy of religion with the remarkably unoriginal title, ‘The Existence of God’ (1955). Smart there asserted that the question ‘Does God exist?’ does not arise within religion, being taken for granted, and has little meaning outside religion. Passmore (1957) responded that the many atheists who were once Christians provide counterexamples to Smart’s assertion because the question ‘Does God exist?’ must have arisen for them. Smart (1958) agreed, himself becoming one of the couterexamples. Here we see how Passmore used Anderson’s ‘one kind of truth’ thesis to good effect. We also see the victory of the crude over the sophisticated. The early Wittgenstein had been an analytic philosopher of the same movement as Russell and indeed Anderson himself, but Wittgenstein reacted against what he considered the crudity of his earlier thought, its one-eyed concern with language as description. And as part of that reaction Wittgenstein, who was of Jewish extraction and was brought up Catholic, had given a superficially attractive account of religion as a form of life, an integrated system of beliefs and practices that could not be criticised from outside. After a few years in Australia Smart abandoned this sophistication under the influence of Passmore’s Andersonian argument, apparently missing the point of a religion, which almost everyone agrees is a complex subculture, not primarily a system of propositions. Mackie, another of Anderson’s famous students, provided much more incisive criticisms of theism than his teacher. And although we should not forget others like McCloskey and Smart, I am taking Mackie as the paradigm Australian philosophical atheist. In his later work, The Miracle of Theism (1982), written in his time at Oxford, Mackie looks with some detail at various ways of arguing for theism, but it is his earlier, widely cited 1955 article, ‘Evil and Omnipotence,’ that I shall comment on. Mackie is better described as robust rather than crude, and he reworks the traditional argument from evil in an interesting way. It is no use defending the existence of a good and omnipotent God from the existence of evil simply by appealing to human freedom if, as Mackie assumes, omnipotence implies that God can bring about any possible situation. For in that case, God can ensure that we always freely do what is right. The obvious response is that it is absurd to suppose God can ensure that we freely do what is right. But that does not affect Mackie’s point. Whether absurd or not, this is a consequence of omnipotence, as Mackie defines it. Later, Plantinga was to call this analysis of omnipotence ‘Leibniz’s lapse,’ so Mackie is in good company. What Plantinga in effect points out is that omnipotence would be better characterised as the ability to perform any possible type of act rather than to bring about any possible situation, and although there is a possible situation of all the many human beings always

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freely doing what is right, bringing that situation about is not a possible act of any individual, not even God. Should we then say that Mackie just made an understandable error in analysing omnipotence? Not exactly: Mackie states clearly that religious beliefs are irrational because the ‘several parts of the essential theological doctrine are inconsistent with one another.’ Suppose Mackie’s analysis of omnipotence had been precisely what theists had had in mind and let us call being able to perform any possible type of act ‘being almighty,’ to distinguish it from omnipotence. In that case theists who continued to insist that God was omnipotent would have been irrational. Most would have just shrugged and said, ‘Sorry! We should have said ‘almighty,’ but so what?’ This situation would have been analogous to the reaction of most logicians to the Liar Paradox, generated by the assertion ‘What I am now asserting fails to be true.’ Logicians do not say, ‘Gotcha! There is no such thing as truth,’ but ‘Sorry! The rules governing truth are not quite what we thought.’ Mackie misses the point by attributing to religion a precision that, for instance, no philosopher would require of a physical theory such as relativity or quantum theory. SOME CONCLUSIONS One reason why I am an angry, though alas not young, philosopher is the slavery of philosophers to fashion. My brief account of some Australian philosophical atheists illustrates another reason for being angry: when it comes to religion many philosophers don’t feel the same need to understand what they criticise as they do when it comes say to psychology or neuroscience or quantum mechanics. There was a crudity, or, more charitably, a robustness about Australian philosophical atheism that reinforces some unflattering stereotypes. This crudity includes the failure to come to grips with the cultural complexity of religion, and a somewhat juvenile point-scoring attitude towards opponents based upon an unfair attribution of precision. Yet I have this admiration for Anderson and his students, as well as other Australian philosophical atheists such as Smart. For it should be obvious that all the ritual, the stories, the emotions, the aesthetics, and so on that make up a religion are as empty as a procession of academics accompanied by a recording of Gaudeamus Igitur, unless the underlying metaphysics is true. Islam without rigorous monotheism, Christianity without the trinity and incarnation, Theravada Buddhism without reincarnation—all these are emptiness. To their credit the Australian philosophical atheists recognised this, and rejected the conceptual fog that for over a hundred years has obscured this, to my mind obvious, point. A pox on all the Wittgensteinians, postmodernists, and common or garden relativists who deny it.

Missing the Point Many Times Over?

NOTE 1. Many thanks to Nick Trakakis for his helpful editorial suggestions.

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Philosophy in Sydney James Franklin

Philosophy is a uniquely important subject, dealing as it does with the most important questions there are. Sydney has a unique way of doing it. Does life have a meaning, and if so what is it? What can I be certain of, and how should I act when I am not certain? Why are the established truths of my tribe better than the primitive superstitions of your tribe? Why should I do as I’m told? Those are questions it is easy to avoid, in the rush to acquire goods and prestige. Even for many of a more serious outlook, they are questions easy to dismiss with excuses like ‘It’s all a matter of opinion’ or ‘Let’s get on with practical matters’ or ‘They’re too hard.’ They are questions that may be ignored, but they do not go away. They are philosophical questions. There is a right way to approach them—you read the writings of the classical and recent philosophers, and consider carefully their arguments back and forth. There are many wrong ways to approach them, such as choosing at random among the ideas your parents or friends or gurus have, or ideas that feel good. Or you can just not bother. Sydney has a certain reputation for superficiality in this regard. A character in David Williamson’s Emerald City says: ‘No-one in Sydney ever wastes time debating the meaning of life—it’s getting yourself a water frontage’ (Williamson 1987). If there is a writers’ festival or a conference on happiness in Sydney, philosophers are not normally invited. Caroline Jones’s radio series, ‘The Search for Meaning,’ elicited the opinions of environmentalists, artists’ models, former prime ministers, and herbalists, but not of any philosophers. My book, Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia (2003), which is focused on Sydney, was reviewed in The Age and The Australian, but not in the Sydney Morning Herald, where the literary editor thought readers would not be interested. Still, even Sydneysiders show an interest in philosophy from time to time. Very many people turned up to see Alain de Botton at the Opera House, and in 2008 there were an amazing number of people reading Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion on the bus. Dawkins may not be top-flight as a philoso61

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pher but he was certainly arguing directly about one of the classic philosophical issues: does God exist? And Sydney was, in a certain sense, started as a philosophical experiment. Dumping convicts was its purpose, certainly, but there was also a highminded vision about what should happen to them when they got here, based on Enlightenment concepts of the reformability of humanity. The vision is imaginatively realised in the first seal of New South Wales. On 21 September 1791, the colony was delighted by the arrival of His Majesty’s Ship Gorgon, bearing a quantity of food, fruit trees, and cows, and a public seal, extremely well executed in silver. It bore ‘a representation of convicts landing in Botany Bay, received by Industry [that is, an allegorical figure in a toga], who, surrounded by her attributes, a bale of merchandize, a beehive, a pickaxe, and a shovel, is releasing them from their fetters, and pointing to oxen ploughing, and a town rising on the summit of a hill . . . and for a motto, “Sic fortis Etruria crevit” [“Thus Etruria grew strong,” a quotation from the description of the Golden Age in the second book of Virgil’s Georgics]’ (Collins 1798: 179). The plan had some success, too, with a surprising number of petty thieves turning into respectable citizens. That is very unlike the religious formations from which the United States grew. Australia has continued to have a more secular approach to its institutions, that is, philosophical as opposed to religious. There was no established church, Sydney Grammar School and the universities were secular foundations, and the state education systems were non-religious (Franklin 2003: ch. 10). Whatever may be true of the philosophical shortcomings of the average Sydneysider, Sydney philosophers themselves have made a substantial contribution, and a distinctive one, well recognised in the wider philosophical world. We need to start with John Anderson, professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney for thirty years from 1927. He was Sydney’s bestknown academic. He dominated the higher reaches of Sydney intellectual life for those thirty years. His students played a leading role for another thirty, not only in academia, but also in politics, law, journalism, and teaching (Franklin 2003: ch. 1). Anderson’s arrival marked a sharp break which set Australian philosophy on its characteristic course. His philosophy was realist, in the sense of being concerned with the ways of working of real things in the world, rather than having our ideas as the central focus of philosophy. It was also materialist, atheist, and more interested in criticism than in synthesis or moral uplift. Sydney philosophy, especially but not uniquely, has maintained those biases. To be realist about something, such as ethics, as opposed to idealist or constructivist, is to believe it really exists, as opposed to being ‘in the eye of the beholder.’ So what about, say, forces? Among the items in the world, such as physical objects, are there also forces—or are they just a way of talking about something else, such as accelerations? Here is an argument for realism about forces: put your two index fingers together lightly. Now press twice as hard. It feels different. There is no movement in either case. So you have felt a force. Therefore forces really exist. (Or . . . do they? Did you really feel just a difference in shape of the fingers?) That is the kind of debate that is had in philosophy—in the part of philosophy that looks at the foundations of science.

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Anderson was also a materialist (meaning he thought there were only material things, not such items as immaterial minds or souls, angels, or disembodied numbers) and atheist (meaning he did not believe in any sort of God). That created trouble in the atmosphere of the 1930s and 1940s. His statements on why education should be free of religion were condemned by the New South Wales Parliament 1943 as ‘calculated to undermine the principles which constitute a Christian State.’ His ideas were ‘calculated to undermine’ Christian principles in both senses of ‘calculated’: Anderson calculated they would, and they were in the absolute calculated, as in likely, to undermine them. It is encouraging to see a Parliament troubled by philosophy—and rightly: they were well aware that the state’s future schoolteachers had access to philosophical ideas almost entirely through him. And Anderson had a view of philosophy itself as primarily critical. He wrote: ‘The work of the academic, qua academic, is criticism; and whatever his special field may be, his development of independent views will bring him into conflict with prevailing opinions and customary attitudes in the public arena and not merely among his fellow-professionals’ (Anderson 1980: 214). It was said: ‘John Anderson had an answer to every conceivable question. It was “No’’’ (J. McAuley, quoted in Bogdan 1984: 6–7). One follower wrote: ‘As regards students, Anderson contended that the morality of criticism would reject the current talk of their “corruption.” If this “corruption” means a departure from established views on the part of students, then the job of the university is to corrupt the youth’ (A.R. Walker, quoted in Franklin 2003: 31). He addressed that task directly, initiating an affair with a second-year undergraduate whom he eventually appointed a lecturer in his department. This is a quote from David Stove, a Sydney philosopher who was a student of Anderson and admired his work, while believing his influence was morally bad. It gets to the point of what philosophy is for: The influence Anderson exercised was purely, or as purely as a human influence can be, intellectual. I never felt anything like the force of his intellect. Disagreeing with Anderson was (to compare it with something most people have experienced), like playing chess against someone altogether above your own class. Your strongest pieces are, you cannot tell how, drained of all their powers, while on his side even pawns can do unheard-of things; and as though by invisible giant fingers, you are quickly crushed. . . . He was in love with philosophy himself, and he communicated the love of it to others so effectively that many will have it while they live. This is the greatest service he did. Yet for every person whom he made a philosopher he left ten people, I should say, with a respect for philosophy, and a recollection of what it is like to wrestle in earnest with desperately difficult intellectual questions. This may not sound much, but I think it is much. Whoever can remember what serious thinking is like, is to some extent armed against all the enemies of education. He is armed against the acknowledged leaders of the war against education, the educationists. He is armed against educational levellers of every kind. And he is armed against systems, such as Marxism, which pretend to answer every question out of a little holy catechism, and

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which just for that reason often act like a revelation on unfurnished minds. (Stove 1977: 45–46)

One independent thinker who studied with Anderson and wrote of his influence was Sir John Kerr. Then there was the Sydney Push, a group of intellectuals who hung around several Sydney pubs in the late 1950s and early 1960s, drinking and debating the evils of what they called ‘moralism.’ They were, in Barry Humphries’ words, ‘a fraternity of middle-class desperates, journalists, drop-out academics, gamblers and poets manqués, and their doxies.’ And according to feminists, a lot of sexist bastards. Possibly all true. But they had a number of Anderson’s students among them and they went in for some serious criticism. They had an influence they did not expect in creating ‘The Sixties.’ One of their core members, Germaine Greer, produced one of the most influential of Sixties books, The Female Eunuch. It is unusual among the feminist books of the time in not being about reform. ‘Privileged women will pluck at your sleeve and seek to enlist you in the “fight” for reforms, but reforms are retrogressive.’ As with all true Andersonians, it is all criticism (Franklin 2003: ch. 8). Let us go back to something more abstract and less personal and deal with less emotionally charged questions such as whether forces exist. Two of Anderson’s main students to become philosophers were David Armstrong and David Stove. Armstrong, who like Anderson was Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney for thirty years, is known for his realist theory of universals. What are universals? The world consists of things and stuff: people, horses, water, atoms, or whatever observation and science advise. Does it also consist of the properties of things, such as their colours and shapes? Those properties, called universals or repeatables because they can occur in many things—are they real? Or put in a more linguistic way, do adjectives, like ‘blue,’ name something real? A confusing question. Armstrong says, yes, universals are real—science depends on them. When Newton’s law of gravity describes how bodies attract, it says they attract in proportion to their masses, and mass is a universal. Laws of nature, Armstrong argues, are connections between universals. And you only perceive an apple in virtue of its shape and colour, so the shape and colour must be real, as they are what is affecting your senses (Armstrong 1997, Franklin 2003: ch. 12). That is one example of Sydney-style realist argument. Next let us consider some logic, looking at the work of David Stove, the Anderson student quoted earlier, who also became a philosopher at Sydney University. Since the ancient Greeks there has been discussion of the syllogism, an argument such as the following. Suppose you have the premises: All men are mortal. Socrates is a man. Then you can conclude with certainty that Socrates is mortal. It is impossible that the premises ‘All men are mortal’ and ‘Socrates is a man’ should be true

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and the conclusion, ‘Socrates is mortal,’ should be false. That sort of deductive logic is well understood. It is essential in mathematics, for example. Now suppose instead that you have the premises: Ninety-nine percent of men are mortal. Socrates is a man. What should you conclude about whether Socrates is mortal? Well, you cannot be certain, since (according to the premises) some men are mortal and some not. Still, surely it’s likely, given that the vast majority of men are mortal, that Socrates is mortal. That is the sort of reasoning we use all the time when we say: nearly all plane flights land safely, so I’m relaxed on takeoff, or, most sufferers of disease X who take drug Y are cured, so it’s worth taking it in my case. So what is that ‘likely’? Stove said it is a matter of strict logic, just like the syllogism. He was one of the rather few people to explore the field of non-deductive logic, or logical probability. He argued that with those concepts, you could solve the ‘problem of induction,’ which is the question why, having observed that all swans so far have been white, that gives you reason to believe that the next swan will be white (Stove 1986b). Now let us move to a topic where there is a tendency for everyone to consider himself an expert: ethics. There, the debates are particularly intense between realists (who think there is an objective right and wrong) and constructivists or relativists (who think ethics is a matter of tribal custom or evolved behaviour that could easily have been different) (Franklin 2003: ch. 16). Obviously that has major consequences for how one goes about solving ethical conflicts. Anderson had a realist view of ethics, but a very peculiar one. He thought that some things were objectively good, such as—you guessed it—criticism, but he did not think it followed that anyone ought to do those things: he believed there were no ‘oughts.’ The more usual form of ethical realism has been mostly pursued by Catholic philosophers. Their view is that ethics is based on what they call ‘natural law.’ That does not mean, ‘If God had meant us to fly he would have given us wings.’ It means more like: persons have an inherent worth, and therefore, for example, destroying one is an evil. The former governor-general, Sir William Deane, explains it like this: The basis of natural law is the belief that some things are innately right and some innately wrong, flowing from the nature of things, including our nature as human beings. That approach provides a philosophical basis for seeing such things as human rights as going deeper than any particular act of Parliament or what have you. That is not exclusively Catholic. It runs through Christian belief. (quoted in Stephens 2002: 100)

Deane’s approach has had consequences for Australia. He and another Catholic judge steeped in natural law theory, Sir Gerard Brennan, were the leaders of the High Court in the Mabo decision, which overthrew precedent over aboriginal land rights in favour of a deeper moral value in the law, the equality of persons.

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In 2008 the University of Notre Dame, Sydney, held an excellent conference with all the world’s leading thinkers on natural law ethics. The issues are still live. Most of the above is about times long past. It is hard not to see a decline since the old days when giants walked the earth, but perhaps someone younger than myself will be better able to discern great minds in the current generation. Professional philosophy in the last forty years has certainly expanded, and it has made a lot of money by venturing into fields like business ethics and bioethics. But it has been subject also to many stresses. There was a wave of post-sixties Marxism that created trouble in the 1970s, leading to the celebrated split of the Sydney University Philosophy Department (Franklin 2003: ch. 11). Then there was the juggernaut of French-inspired postmodernism from the 1980s, a form of resentment-fuelled constructivism that questions all attempts to reach the truth. Its end has been often predicted but is not yet in sight. Still, virtue is not wholly extinct. At all Sydney’s universities and beyond, there are serious philosophers who get on with the job—for example, those in Sydney University’s Centre for the Foundations of Science. You might like to join them.

Chapter Seven

Australian Women Philosophers Karen Green

Philosophy’s self-image is, and has been, extremely male dominated. This is true both internationally and in Australia. Asked to name philosophy’s stars, one is inclined to begin with the Greeks: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle . . . to move on to the Medieval thinkers: Augustine, Aquinas, Abelard . . . followed by the Early Modern rationalists: Descartes, Leibniz, and Spinoza . . . and their English Empiricist cousins . . . Locke, Berkeley and Hume. Only when one gets to the mid-twentieth century does it begin to be easy to mention some women: Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and Philippa Foot, for instance, as counterweights to Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, or in the European context, Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, and Simone de Beauvoir as women who have achieved a status approaching that of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, or Jean-Paul Sartre. Yet, even in these cases, the women are not taken as seriously as the men, and one wonders whether their names will survive down the centuries. Research indicates that while there were women philosophers in the past, their works are lost, forgotten, and where they still exist, little read (O’Neill 1998). In Australia the situation of women philosophers, in the early twentieth century was even bleaker than in Europe. In other papers in this collection we are told about the Australian metaphysicians: Alexander, Anderson, and Armstrong; the Melbourne dynasty of the Boyce-Gibsons; and the Monash dynasty of Camo and Frank Jackson. Other philosophers including John Mackie, Jack Smart, and Peter Singer have warranted a mention . . . but women have been notably absent from the story. Is this because there have been no women involved in philosophy in Australia? Or have they simply been overlooked, and if so, why? Beginning the research for the talk on which this chapter is based, I asked an aged male colleague whether he was aware of any women in the Australian philosophy scene in the 1950s. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘there weren’t any who were any good.’ But he did ultimately proffer some names . . . in Sydney, for instance, Mrs. Roxon and Alice Walker, the latter being at one time John Anderson’s mistress. And oh yes, he nearly forgot, at La Trobe there was 67

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Dorothy Mitchell who taught Aristotle. He went on: ‘Once when the cleaning ladies went on strike, they, being Greek, continued to clean her room, because they were impressed by the Greek texts she read.’ It is amusing to see how all that he distinctly remembered of his female colleague was her affinity with the Greek cleaning ladies. Pursuing my project at a talk about philosophy in Melbourne, I asked Professor Tony Coady why the account he had given was so lacking in female figures, for he had not considered any women worthy of being included in his account of the history of the Melbourne department. He said something about the women having ‘gone Continental,’ not doing analytic philosophy and having left the fold. He failed to mention any women’s names. He surely might have remembered some of the Australian women from his own department, or even members of the rival ‘Continental’ school, but he seemed reluctant to mention them, as though fearing that they might accidentally be rescued from a deserved oblivion. So this chapter could be seen as a something like a session of therapy. It aims to uncover and reveal the repressed underside of Australian philosophy. Some of the information that I have gleaned was supplied by women who answered a questionnaire that I circulated, in order to elicit personal histories of women in Australian philosophy. But, as is often the case with questionnaires, the responses I received were patchy, and I have supplemented them with the rather dry facts available from university calendars and yearbooks. I have also made this a somewhat personal history. In it I have limited myself to discussing women who had positions in academic philosophy departments in Australia. There are many other women whose work deserves to be considered as contributing to philosophy in Australia in a broad sense, for instance, Catherine Spence, Dale Spender, and Germaine Greer, to name only the best known. There are also political scientists and sociologists such as Carole Pateman and Ariel Salleh, whose work is philosophically informed and who have had an impact on women philosophers, but they get only a passing mention in this story. I have also not attempted to incorporate the contribution of women to philosophy in New Zealand. DISTANT SHADOWS: 1900–1950 With a few notable exceptions, academic philosophy was not established in Australian universities until after the beginning of the twentieth century. At the time of the First World War philosophy departments were small affairs, made up of two to four individuals, and in some cases one of these was a woman. So, ironically, women were proportionally better represented in some departments, in the very earliest periods of Australian philosophy, than they have been subsequently. Based on the evidence provided by Commonwealth University year books, Sarah E. Jackson was the first woman to have held an academic post in an Australian philosophy department. She was a tutor at the University of Adelaide from 1918 until 1922, during William Mitchell’s period as professor. She had studied ethics, logic, and philosophy at Adelaide and received

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the John Lorenzo Young scholarship in 1918. She constituted 50 percent of the philosophy department while she was there, but she died young from a lingering illness and was unable to make a lasting contribution to the profession. In his history of Australian philosophy, James Franklin assumes that when appointed in 1947, Alice Ruth Walker (generally called Ruth Walker) was Australia’s first woman lecturer in philosophy and, in the light of her relationship with John Anderson, Franklin quips that she was the beneficiary of positive discrimination (Franklin 2003: 31, 44). This witticism is indicative of the problems women face entering the profession, for Ruth Walker’s status as a philosopher is immediately undercut by her relationship with Anderson. Many philosophical appointments are due to patronage, but Walker’s appointment is attributed to the wrong kind of patronage. The assumption being, presumably, that sexual attractiveness is incompatible with rational capacity. In any case, Ruth Walker was not in fact Australia’s first female philosophy lecturer. That honour goes to Miss Isabel M. Flinn, whose MA from Melbourne was awarded in 1918, and who took up a lectureship at Queensland in 1922, when there were only two other members of the department. She held this post until 1924. In that year Vera A. Rosenblum, who was awarded an MA from Melbourne in 1919, was briefly a tutor in philosophy at the University of Melbourne, but in the next year, 1925, Olga Parker, who had gained her MA in the same year as Isabel Flinn, seems to have taken Rosenblum’s place. She became Olga Warren in 1932, and in 1942 she was promoted from tutor to lecturer. She continued teaching at the University of Melbourne until 1955. For most of the time she was the sole woman, but in 1946–1947 Beryl J. Crawford and Lucy M. Shaw were also tutors. In 1949, Warren was joined in the department by Mary McCloskey, who would teach there, with a few breaks, until the 1980s. Looking back, the First World War period seems to have been a high point for women’s engagement with philosophy, as with other arts subjects. In 1917–1918 there were seventeen MAs awarded at the University of Melbourne, nine of which were taken out by women. It is interesting to compare this with 1950, when there were seventeen MAs, only two of which were taken out by women. In 1927 the University of Western Australia appointed Ethel T. Stoneman to a lectureship. She taught there until 1930, in which year she was joined by Mabel H. Grubb. In 1929 the University of Adelaide appointed Constance M. Davey, who had a PhD from London, as its evening lecturer. At the time of her appointment there were just two members of the department. She taught there until 1951. Doris E. MacCulloch was appointed as a tutor at the University of Queensland in 1938, but she left in 1940 and was replaced by Elsie Harwood, who was still teaching there in 1955. At this stage the department included psychology, and this appears to have been her area of specialisation. None of the other early philosophy departments seem to have appointed women, and the women I have noted have left few publications. Alice Ruth Walker is the one who is best represented in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy. She published a number of reviews and an article which is now almost impossible to read, since it assumes a knowledge of Anderson’s version of syllogistic logic. 1 Constance M. Davey published a book on juvenile offenders, which suggests that like Harwood she was a psychologist rather

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than a pure philosopher (Davey 1956). So, women were represented in the early years of academic philosophy in Australia, but largely in the ancillary role of tutor, which they soon left, presumably to marry and have children. THE AGE OF THE MALE ESTABLISHMENT: 1950–1970 Two images sum up the situation of women in philosophy during the 1950s, one relating to the University of Sydney Department, the other to the University of Melbourne. In both cases there are two women among twelve men. In the photo of the Sydney Department one sees Ruth Walker and Barbara Roxon, who was to be appointed to a position at UNSW (University of New South Wales) in 1960. At Melbourne, there are Olga Warren and another woman, either Barbara Coates or Mary McCloskey. During this period, departments had one or at most two continuing female members of staff. At Melbourne, Mary McCloskey had joined the department as a tutor in 1949, stopped teaching during 1952–1956, taught again in 1957–1958, and then in 1959 stopped again. This then became the first year since 1919 when the department, now numbering eighteen in all (including part-time tutors), had no female members. Tradition was re-established in 1960, when McCloskey was appointed to a lectureship, and in 1961 she was joined by Ann Jackson, who was to rise to the position of senior tutor and remain in that position in the department until 1984. It is perhaps noteworthy that both Mary McCloskey and Ann Jackson were married to other Melbourne philosophers—John McCloskey and Camo Jackson, respectively. A number of other women passed through as tutors, including, in 1955, Jenny Jorgenson, who was to become Jenny Teichman. She also taught at Monash in the 1960s and published widely during a long career. 2 She later held a position for many years at New Hall College in Cambridge, where she continues to be an emeritus fellow. In 1964–1966, Marion Knowles and Helen Knight were also tutors at Melbourne. Interestingly, given the cultural image of science as masculine, women had considerable success on the margins of philosophy in departments of the history and philosophy of science, and as contributors to the history of ideas. Diana Joan Dyason was trained as a scientist, earning her BSc in 1943. She was appointed as a demonstrator in the physiology department of University of Melbourne in 1943. When the department of the history and philosophy of science was formed she became senior lecturer, a position she held from 1957 to 1965. Dyason was in charge of the department from 1958 until appointed reader and head of department in 1965. She remained head until 1974 and reader until her retirement in 1984. In 1967 she was the foundation president of the Australasian Association of the History and Philosophy of Science. Elizabeth Gasking also lectured in this department and published in 1967 Investigations into Generation 1651–1828 . Patricia Baillie also published a number of papers in the philosophy of science during the 1970s (see Baillie 1970, 1975). In the1960s new universities and new philosophy departments were being set up around Australia. As at the beginning of the century, women were

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often, proportionally, better represented in the first years of a department than they were later. The Monash department began with three members, one of them being Dorothy Mitchell, but she soon took up a scholarship to go to Oxford, where she studied ancient philosophy and was mentored by Elizabeth Anscombe. Jenny Teichman passed through as a tutor, but it would be 1972 before Monash would have another full-time female staff member, when Janna Thompson was appointed to a tutorship. She soon moved on to a lectureship at La Trobe, which she left for a stint at CAPPE (Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics), and where she has now returned to the position of professor. When I arrived at Monash, as an undergraduate in 1969, the atmosphere was resolutely male and the curriculum largely analytic. Nevertheless, we did benefit from the Boyce-Gibson’s interest in Continental philosophy. In a rather perversely constructed third-year unit, Alexander Boyce-Gibson taught us Jean-Paul Sartre for half the year, and Dr. Rothfield (Philippa Rothfield’s mother) lectured us on Freud for the other half. This unit gave me my first taste of the dangers inherent in mixing feminism and philosophy. I had read Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex while in Paris, and in my major essay for the Freud part of the course I launched into an existentialist attack on Freud’s theories of femininity. This earned me my first fail for a philosophy essay, a mark that was graciously amended to a pass by the professor, Camo Jackson. During the 1980s Elizabeth Prior Jonson, Karen Jones and Catriona Mackenzie passed through as tutors. Later, during the mid-1990s, when Rae Langton, Monima Chadha, Jeanette Kennett, and I were all teaching at Monash, women made up almost a third of the department, but this was a brief interlude. Some of the new universities saw the need for at least some female representation on the staff. Founded in 1967, La Trobe was a large department, which has always seemed rather hospitable to women. Janna Thompson was appointed in 1974, Anna Cushan, Jan Crosthwaite, Alwynne Mackie (née Smart), Sue Uniake, and Barbara Davidson all passed through in the seventies, the last two moving on to Wollongong in the late seventies. In the 1980s Freya Mathews and Philippa Rothfield joined the La Trobe department. Nevertheless, this was a large department and so women did not make up a huge proportion of the staff. Also established in 1967, Macquarie University appears not to have appointed any women until 1973, when San MacColl joined the department, teaching there until 1990. She left to take up a contract position at the UNSW, where Genevieve Lloyd was professor, expecting to be offered a continuing position. When this expected continuing position was not forthcoming, she left the profession. During the eighties various women passed through the department, including Luciana Dwyer (1978–1989), Val Plumwood (1985–1989), Karen Green (1985–1986), and Elizabeth During (1986–1988). In 1991 Catriona Mackenzie, who had previously been at Monash, secured a position and has risen to associate professor. Kim Atkins also tutored there from 1992, and since then Macquarie has continued to appoint women, giving it a claim to having one of the best ratios of female staff in the country. The University of Wollongong was not founded until 1975, but it repeated the pattern of a larger proportion of women in its first years. Sue Uniake

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joined the professor Lachlan Chipman at the beginning, when there were just two members of the department. She was joined by Barbara Davidson, and after Davidson retired Sue Dodds joined the department. Dodds was to become head and professor, before leaving to be dean of arts at the University of Tasmania. The sixties was a time when women were beginning to be painfully aware of their exclusion from philosophy, and consciously attempted to oppose it. Dorothy Mitchell said of Mary McCloskey that she was a mentor for all the young women who were attempting to break into philosophy. Sue Uniake, who studied at La Trobe during the 1970s and took a subject with McCloskey during her honours year, attests to the importance of her influence. Mary experienced the full effect of the period during which women were let known, by subtle and not so subtle means, that they did not have the right kind of minds for philosophy. Ethics, which at the time was somewhat despised in Anglo-departments, was considered within their grasp, but logic, it was suggested, was beyond them. Dorothy Mitchell commented of the times: ‘Those were the days when Philosophy was thought to be a man’s business. History and English and that sort of sloppy stuff was ok for women, but Philosophy was hard.’ Few men actually put these opinions in writing. A notable exception was David Stove (1993), who not long before he died, published a paper which argued that the empirical evidence confirms women’s intellectual inferiority and that John Stuart Mill was misguided to have denied it. (For a response, see Teichman 2001.) Despite the active sexism of some of its members, or perhaps because of it, at Sydney during the 1960s a new breed was being nurtured of active women philosophers, who would go on to have influential careers. Val Plumwood (née Routley) began her first year of philosophy in 1956, the last year of John Anderson’s period as professor. In her response to my call for personal histories, she commented: ‘Philosophy then carried an air of radical freedom and daring, which it is hard to discern now.’ Forced to give up her studies because of an unplanned pregnancy, she returned as an undergraduate in 1962, but it would be many years before she established herself as one of Australia’s foremost eco-feminists. Genevieve Lloyd also studied at Sydney during the 1960s. In 1967 she secured an appointment in the faculties at ANU (Australian National University), where she was the sole woman for many years. Liz Grosz (then Gross) and Jean Curthoys both joined the general philosophy department in the late sixties, but their experience leads into a new phase. THE UPSURGE OF FEMINISM: 1970–1990 There can be no doubt that Australian women’s participation in philosophy was profoundly influenced by the events in Sydney, which led to the split of the Sydney philosophy department and the rise of a distinctive style of Australian feminist philosophy. Dorothy Mitchell, who was briefly in Sydney after returning from the UK, arrived during the first stage of the split, which was sparked by the attempted appointment of Frank Knopfelmacher to the

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Sydney department. Even at this stage, she suggested, the department was deeply divided, and she was told to decide which side she was on. Disputes continued over the issue of courses on Marxism, and soon included controversy over a unit called ‘The politics of sexual oppression,’ which was proposed to be taught by Jean Curthoys and Liz Jacka. Under its first title the unit was rejected by the professorial board, but as a result of strike action by staff and students, the board backed down and ‘Philosophical aspects of feminist thought’ became, so far as I can determine, the first subject in feminism taught in an Australian university. As a result of the victory of the radical majority, the philosophy department split into two. In the virtually all male traditional and modern department, a few loyal women (Bobby Gledhill, Anne Dix, and later Elizabeth Prior Jonson) tutored. Meanwhile, in the radical general philosophy department, Denise Russell and Jean Curthoys were joined by Liz Grosz and in the mid-1980s by Moira Gatens. From this period the situation of women in Australian Philosophy became entangled with the issue of feminism, liberation theory, and increasingly the conflict between postmodern and analytic styles of doing philosophy. French feminist writers such as Luce Irigaray, Julia Kristeva and Michelle LeDoeuff became influential, but so too were the ideas of male philosophers, Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Lacan, and Jacques Derrida. The common room of the traditional and modern department saw itself as a bastion of realism and common sense, where David Stove, in particular, often railed against the feminists. In 1978 I was a PhD student studying the philosophy of language with Michael Devitt. He had been part of the push which created general philosophy, but had recanted and returned to Armstrong’s group. When I have more recently raised Stove’s sexism with him, he has laughed and said that Stove was not so bad, and was quite supportive of the women who actually came his way. But this is false if ‘the women who actually came his way’ is taken to include the women from general philosophy. When Liz Grosz and Denise Russell were appointed to lectureships in general philosophy in 1984, Stove published an intemperate article in Quadrant, claiming, mistakenly, that there was a ‘policy of “reverse discrimination against men”’ in place throughout the faculty of arts (Stove 1984). He would, even before this, take any opportunity that he could to blow off steam about the stupidity of the general philosophy women, and he published an invective ‘A Farewell to Arts’ in Quadrant in which he asserted: ‘If one looked just at “the women’s movement” itself, who could resist the conclusion that women are intellectually inferior to men? The feminists have yet to produce a single piece of writing, devoted to their cause, which any rational creature could attach importance to’ (Stove 1986a: 9). This made the atmosphere for a woman in the department very awkward. For while one was not privy to the deprecating comments made about oneself, induction suggested that one was not likely to be spared. Despite this ranting, from a man representing that half of the species, which shows a boundless conviction regarding its own philosophical merits, Stove may not have been the most pernicious influence at Sydney. It was David Armstrong, who allegedly asserted outright that women simply did not have the philosophical gene. I remember him saying of Denise Gamble, for

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all and sundry to hear, that she showed some talent, but was too old to really get anywhere. It has always pleased me that Denise proved him wrong and secured a continuing position at the University of Adelaide. Perhaps, however, the charged atmosphere was bracing. During the late 1980s a group of female honours students in the traditional and modern department, who might have been expected to have been discouraged from going on in philosophy, were urged by Michael Devitt and Stephen Stich to apply for graduate study in the United States. These former students, Rae Langton, Fiona Cowie, and Natalie Stoljar, returned for short periods to Australia but now work in the Americas, at MIT, Caltech, and McGill, respectively. 3 Karen Neander, who has done influential work on teleosemantics and taught in General Philosophy during the 1980s, also left for a career in the United States at the University of California, Davis. 4 Simone de Beauvoir’s existentialist feminism was influential early on, and Barbara Roxon, who taught existentialism and phenomenology at UNSW, taught Moira Gatens and influenced Liz Grosz. However, Beauvoir was soon rejected by most Australian feminists for having accepted the ideals of equality and transcendence, notions that were deemed unacceptably masculine (Grosz 1990b). Impelled by the search for a radical critique of male-stream philosophy, many women moved in the direction of Continental theory and deconstructive styles of philosophizing. The battle for women’s inclusion within philosophy thus became messily mixed with conflicts over philosophical method. A number of Australia’s most influential women philosophers took this path. By far the most important of these was Genevieve Lloyd, who established a strong reputation at Australia National University (ANU). Her original expertise was in early modern philosophy, but she became critical of philosophy’s emphasis on mind and reason. Utilizing Derrida’s critique of philosophy’s claim to be a pure rational discourse, which excludes metaphor, Lloyd examined the metaphorical masculinity of reason, which she found to be dominant in the history of philosophy. 5 She argued that the metaphorical masculinity of philosophy, and in particular mind/body dualism, posed a problem for women’s engagement with philosophy. There is no doubt that her book, The Man of Reason, which appeared in 1984, has been among the most influential philosophy books to have come out of Australia. As Catriona Mackenzie outlines in her contribution to this collection, Moira Gatens and others such as Ros Diprose, who teaches at UNSW, were influenced by Lloyd’s analysis and developed her ideas, criticizing the sex-gender distinction in order to develop a ‘philosophy of the body.’ 6 Michelle Walker’s Philosophy and the Maternal Body (1998a), which explores the theme of males’ co-option of pregnancy, can also be seen as influenced by this trend. Liz Grosz, who has also made a significant impact worldwide, was more directly influenced, in her early work, by Luce Irigaray and Julia Kristeva. Her first book, Sexual Subversions (1989), was an exposition of these and other contemporary French feminists. More recently, she has developed her own philosophy of embodied temporality in a series of influential books. 7 She now hardly feels that she belongs in philosophy, having for a long time been professor in departments of literature and women’s studies. Robyn Ferrell is another philosopher who has drifted towards literature, and now has a

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position in culture and communication at the University of Melbourne. 8 Similarly Alison Ross, who studied philosophy in Sydney, teaches in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash. I had always had reservations about the validity and usefulness of Lloyd’s critique of philosophy. Like Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that woman is other, which undoubtedly influenced Lloyd (despite her critique of Beauvoir), the account seemed to accept a metaphorical fixity, belied by the fluidity of metaphor, and relied on a male-centred account of the history of philosophy. In emphasising the maleness of reason it capitulates to the exclusion of women from philosophy. Furthermore, if embodiment is central to being, then the voices of historical women philosophers must already express their sexual difference. This was an idea I explored in The Woman of Reason (Green 1995). 9 I have always been disappointed that Genevieve Lloyd did not respond to this book, but Penelope Deutscher did do so in Yielding Gender (1997), in which she suggested that I was making excuses for men, by emphasizing the complexity of metaphor. Nothing was further from my mind. My point was that by rejecting historical women who had pursued philosophy under the rubric of reason one was robbing women of the history of their involvement with philosophy. And since philosophy is its history, I am now more than ever convinced that it is only by rewriting the history of philosophy in such a way that women’s contribution to the philosophical conversation is included, that women will come to comfortably take up the role of philosopher. I was initially intending to call the book which became The Woman of Reason, Feminism as Humanism but Pauline Johnson (who began her career in general philosophy but moved to a lectureship in sociology at Macquarie University) told me that she was working on a book with that title, which was in fact published as Feminism as Radical Humanism (1994). Conflicts subsequently arose over the legacy of these times. In 1997 Jean Curthoys published Feminist Amnesia, in which she lamented that a movement that had begun as one devoted to social change and the liberation of the oppressed had become theory driven, academic, and dominated by struggles for prestige and theoretical dominance. But this is a rather naive critique, if women want to be recognised as philosophers. It is nevertheless one that is symptomatic of the paradoxes that face a group whose identity is bound up with an oppression, which, if dissolved, will result in their losing the status of the oppressed. Given the unfriendly attitude in many Australian philosophy departments towards feminism and poststructuralism, many of the women from this period either moved out of philosophy, or found more success overseas. Rosi Braidotti, for instance, who was taught by Genevieve Lloyd as an undergraduate at ANU, has had a successful career in women’s studies at Utrecht, where she has held a chair since 1987. 10 In the mid-1990s, Liz Grosz also left Australia after having spent a period in what is now the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash. Younger women such as Penelope Deutscher and Claire Colebrook, who had studied Continental philosophy in Sydney and Melbourne respectively, also found more success outside Australia. 11 Given the women trained in analytic philosophy who

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have also left, one could say that Australia has suffered a massive feminine brain drain. In other philosophy departments, the growing influence of radicalism and feminism did not have quite the acrimonious consequences as in Sydney, though reverberations of the conflict were felt elsewhere. Some places, such as the University of Tasmania, remained female-free zones until the mid1980s. Tasmania had been rocked by the Orr case in 1956, and appointments in philosophy were frozen from 1960 to 1968. Originally represented by many male philosophers as a case of unjust dismissal, this case is revised in Cassandra Pybus’s (1993) account as the rather more just punishment of a hypocrite, who preached free love and seduced Suzanne Kemp, but who was not prepared to publicly acknowledge his amatory behaviour. Once positions were unfrozen and filled in the early 1970s, the department remained all male until 1983, when I took up a one-year tutorship. In 1987 when I returned to Tasmania, following my husband’s career, I was less lucky. On two occasions the department had the opportunity to employ me, but chose older men who did not, in my opinion, have track records which were as strong, relative to opportunity, as mine. From my perspective these were occasions which clearly contradicted David Stove’s bold assertion that there were no cases of discrimination against women in Australia. Despite an almost complete change of personnel during the 1990s, the University of Tasmania seemed to be reverting to its traditional attitudes when Margie La Caze was not reappointed in the 1990s, an event which resulted in her moving to the University of Queensland. 12 At Melbourne, women’s situation continued on much as it had in the 1960s. From 1974 Lynda Burns, whose main research was in the philosophy of language (specifically on vagueness), began a long stint as a tutor, and it was not until 1984 that she secured a lectureship. She was to remain in contract positions at Melbourne until she was appointed to a lectureship at Flinders University. From 1977 Brenda Judge joined the department as a lecturer, but she sadly died of cancer in the mid-1980s (Judge 1983, 1985; Judge and Goddard 1982). Soon after, Marion Tapper joined the department to teach Continental philosophy, and she continued teaching there for twenty years (Tapper 1986a, 1986b, 1986c). Perhaps because some women were present in the Melbourne department for almost all of the 1950s and 1960s, and were working in mainstream areas, there was in Melbourne less of a perceived need for revolution than in Sydney. Nevertheless, many women in the Melbourne area resented the way in which women were accepted in tutoring positions but not promoted. These women were active in setting up the ‘Women in Philosophy’ (WIP) group. During the 1980s women members of the Australasian Association of Philosophy (AAP) formed WIP with the aim of promoting women within the profession. Over a decade the organisation ran conferences associated with the main AAP, which attempted to provide a forum for women and feminism (see Gatens 2010). By the mid-1990s it seemed that women no longer felt the need for a separate forum, and the WIP gradually died. Nevertheless, a supplementary volume of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy was edited by Janna Thompson in 1986 as a result of the urging of this group, and it gave

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many women who subsequently went on to careers in philosophy an important start. As well as having developed feminist philosophy, and having written many books and articles influenced by various streams of Continental thought, there are other important areas of philosophy in which Australian women have had an impact. From the beginning women were strong in ethics, applied ethics, and moral psychology. Dorothy Mitchell published a number of papers in ethics. 13 Sue Uniacke, Susan Dodds, Linda Barclay, and Karen Jones have published important papers and books in applied ethics and moral psychology. 14 Jeanette Kennett, who studied at Monash University during the 1990s, now occupies a research chair at Macquarie University and has made significant contributions to moral psychology (Kennett 1991, Kennett and Smith 1996, 1997). An area of considerable strength is environmental ethics and ecofeminism. The late Val Plumwood published early works in environmental philosophy under her married name, Val Routley, and is best known for her book Feminism and the Mastery of Nature (Plumwood 1993, 2002). Freya Mathews has also made significant contributions to the field of environmental ethics. Her first book The Ecological Self (1991) develops a sophisticated Spinozist eco-centrism (see also Mathews 1988, 1989), and more recently she has continued to develop her original environmental philosophy (1998). Janna Thompson, who also made significant contributions in environmental ethics, began to work in the fields of global justice and on restitution for the dispossessed many years before these topics had achieved the popularity that they now have. Her publications include Justice and World Order: A Philosophical Inquiry (1992), and more recently Taking Responsibility for the Past: Repatriation and Historical Injustice (2002). 15 Women have also published important work in logic, philosophy of language, and, increasingly, cognitive science. Val Plumwood, who has already been mentioned as an ecofeminist of note, also published in relevance logic under her married name of Routley. 16 I have already mentioned Karen Neander’s work on teleosemantics. Others who have been publishing in the mainstream areas of metaphysics and the philosophy of language and mind are Deborah Brown (1993, 1996a, 1996b, 1999), Lynda Burns (1986, 1991, 1995), Denise Gamble (2003), and myself (Green 1985, 1986, 1991, 1992, 1998, 1999). WHERE ARE WE NOW? 1990–2010 By the 1990s universities around Australia had adopted the policy of equal opportunity, and most men would have been embarrassed to assert, as Stove had, that women’s lack of representation within philosophy departments was caused by their intellectual inferiority. But progress has been slow, at least until quite recently. The popularity of feminism during the 1980s meant that some universities advertised positions in the area of feminism, women’s studies and Continental philosophy. Since the self-perception of many of the leading male philosophers in Australia is that the core of philosophy lies with

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mind, logic, language, and metaphysics, dealt with in an Anglo and analytic style, women have often found themselves on the margins of departments. But those who have attempted to occupy the main ground also face problems establishing their credentials. The usual career path for an aspiring young man is to be identified by an individual or group as worthy of promotion in order to be groomed, advised, and mentored. A young woman, even when singled out for this kind of attention, has extra obstacles to face when negotiating the process. She may well assume that the attention has nothing to do with her philosophical capacity, and reject it. She may get entranced, let the relationship get sexual, and then suffer the suspicion, both from herself and others, that her success was illegitimately won. For women, both rejecting and accepting the proffered friendship of male mentors is fraught with danger. Of course, there is female mentoring, but this was not, in the past, a way into the mainstream. It is perhaps not surprising that a significant proportion of successful women in the profession are either married to someone in the profession or else lesbian. On top of these problems there are the same tensions between motherhood and career which beset other professions. The academy is slowly becoming conscious of these problems, and recent research indicates that the proportion of women in philosophy in Australian departments is increasing. Disturbingly, however, the growth in the proportion of women is happening against a decline in the total employment of philosophers (Goddard 2008). Nevertheless, there are many women who joined the profession just before or since the turn of the century, and they are not mentioned in this account. An optimistic sign is that publications by Australian women appear to have taken off since the year 2000. Indeed, this essay severely under-reports the publications by many of the women mentioned, and completely ignores an up-and-coming generation, who are more confident and prolific than those born before 1970. In order not to swamp the bibliography, and since this is a historical overview, I decided to only rarely mention works published by Australian women after the end of the twentieth century. The large quantity of books and articles published by Australian women philosophers during the first decade of the twentieth century is, perhaps, a sign that times are changing. Only the future will tell whether this genuinely heralds an age when the exclusion of women from philosophy will be history. NOTES 1. See the list of works by Walker in the Bibliography. 2. See the list of works by Teichman in the Bibliography. 3. See the works by Cowie and by Langton listed in the Bibliography. 4. See the works by Neander listed in the Bibliography. 5. Lloyd (1979, 1983, 1984a, 1984b, 1986, 1993a, 1993b, 2001, 2002). 6. Gatens (1986, 1991, 1995, 1996); Diprose (1989, 1991, 1994, 2010); Mackenzie (1992, 1993); Jenkins (1998, 2001). 7. Grosz (1989, 1990a, 1991, 1993, 1994, 1999), Grosz and Pateman (1986). 8. Ferrell (1991, 1993, 1995, 1996, 1999, 2000). 9. Green (1995); see also Green (1993, 1996).

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10. See the works by Braidotti listed in the Bibliography. 11. See the works by Deutscher and by Colebrook listed in the Bibliography. 12. Soon afterwards, La Caze published a number of works (2001, 2002a, 2002b, 2002c). 13. Mitchell (1963a, 1963b, 1968, 1970a, 1970b, 1972, 1978, 1982). 14. Dodds (1998), Dodds et al. (1988), Uniacke (1994, 1997a, 1997b, 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c), Barclay (1999a, 1999b), Jones (1996, 1999). 15. See also Thompson (1990a, 1990b, 1993a, 1993b, 1995, 1998, 1999, 2000a, 2000b, 2000c, 2000d). 16. Routley and Routley (1969a, 1969b, 1972, 1973a, 1973b, 1979).

Chapter Eight

In the Name of the Father: Understanding Monotheism and Fundamentalism Russell Grigg and Matthew Sharpe

The German philosopher Walter Benjamin famously declared that every rise of fascism bears witness to a failed revolution. Slavoj Zizek adapts this saying of Benjamin’s to declare that every rise of religion bears witness to the failure of secularism. But wouldn’t saying this just be begging the question? Or even, isn’t it precisely the reverse that is true? Doesn’t the rise of secularism bear witness to the failure of religion? This seems historically more accurate—or so it seems to us—given that our history has been more religious than it has been secular. This has led us to develop an approach according to which the rise of secularism bears witness not to the failure but to the repression of religion. ‘Repression’ is here to be taken in the slightly technical Freudian sense of the term: an idea, a thought, a desire maybe, is expelled from conscious life because it has become too objectionable for the subject to sustain. However, as repressed, it does not disappear from mental life altogether but remains in the unconscious from where it returns in disguised and distorted forms—in the form, for instance, of a symptom. Applying ‘repression’ to a social phenomenon like religion is of course a metaphorical extension, but we think it might still allow us to conceptualise an important development. Our view includes the following three broad theses: 1. The progressive secularisation of society since the Enlightenment has not led to the disappearance of monotheistic religion but rather has led to its effective ‘repression.’ 2. Thus, what we are seeing now, with the persistence of and growth in religion, particularly monotheistic religion, is its subsequent return in different and sometimes disguised forms. 81

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3. Fundamentalism represents one especially virulent form of the return of repressed religious expression. An implication of our view is that, while contemporary fundamentalism shares features with some earlier forms of religious practices, its emergence in our secular age gives it some very specific features, including its renewed, powerful appeal. The idea of the ‘secularisation of society’ is a complex notion. A good starting point for thinking about secular society is the three senses recently elaborated by Charles Taylor (2007): 1. Public spaces have become emptied of God. The church is separate from political structures; religion or belief is a private matter; political society is made up of believers and non-believers alike, and is compatible with the majority being believers, as in the case of Communist Poland. 2. Religious practice and belief have fallen away. People have turned away from God. They no longer go to church, or the synagogue, or the temple. Most of Western Europe fits into this category. 3. We can speak of the ‘conditions of religious belief.’ This is intended to capture the sense of a move from a society in which belief in God is unchallenged and unproblematic to one in which belief in God is understood to be just one option among others, and moreover not always the easiest or most comfortable to embrace. The move in question, then, is from a society in which it is virtually impossible not to believe in God, where this belief is the background against which I live my life, to a society in which faith is just one human possibility among many, in which belief in God is no longer axiomatic, a society where, no matter how profound my own belief, I come up against the fact that there are others who have no faith and live their lives with no religious belief. We consider fundamentalism, which is just one of the contemporary forms of religion, even if it is its most extreme form, as a reaction to secularisation in this third sense. Many studies by sociologists, political scientists, social commentators, and others have explored the various material conditions and political structures that have allowed a frequently aggressive and destructive fundamentalism to take root and grow. However, these analyses only tell part of the story—in our opinion, at least. We first need to acknowledge the hold and power that religion, particularly monotheism, is capable of having over the psyche, and we need to uncover the deep reasons why it continues to have such a hold. Once we understand this, we will then be in a position to begin to explain the psychological forces behind the contemporary, parallel rise of fundamentalism, on the one hand, and new forms of spiritualism, on the other. Our working hypothesis is that they are only possible in a secularised age—or at least, they have special features in a secular age. Our focus is on monotheism, which explains why we’ve called this article ‘In the Name of the Father.’ All three monotheisms are father-religions just as they are also religions of the book, and it is they that have the closest links

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to fundamentalism. It therefore seems to us natural for the term ‘fundamentalist’ to have developed from its original meaning of subscribing to certain ‘fundamental’ doctrines of the Bible to a broader, and mostly pejorative, meaning that refers not to a specific set of beliefs but to: The aggressive insistence by religious traditionalists upon the sacredness of particular encoded beliefs and practices which they seek to impose upon others as well as themselves, even though these beliefs and practices stand in opposition to contemporary social trends. (But see Stump 2000: 4–5 for a different definition.) There are many authors who because they attack religion as deeply irrational fail to understand its return and its insistence. Moreover, their work is evidence for thinking that ours is an age of secularisation in this third sense. You might pick out the work by the French philosopher Michel Onfray, Atheist Manifesto: The Case Against Christianity, Judaism, and Islam (2007); there is the philosopher Daniel Dennett’s Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (2006); then we have Richard Dawkins’s The God Delusion (2006); and also Christopher Hitchens’s God Is Not Great (2007). You might want to add a fifth book to this list which in our opinion is the most interesting of all, for while it is in some ways similar to these four in its anti-religious polemics, it not only sustains a more rigorous argument but also strives to understand the specific psychological appeal of religion. The book is Against Religion (2007), written by the Australian philosopher Tamas Pataki. The appearance of these books by prominent public figures is an indication of the level of concern amongst atheists over not just the turnaround in the fortunes of religion but in fundamentalists’ aggressive intervention in public life and the readiness—this is one of the characteristic features of fundamentalism—to impose conservative (actually, retrograde) views and values on the broader community. And, as we know, this fundamentalist movement has arisen against the background of the expectation that religion was undergoing a gradual but inevitable decline in significance. It was thought that there would always be places in the world where religion is vigorous and central to the lives of the people. But in Western nations the best interpretation of the evidence had until recently emphasised the increasing irrelevance of religion in general, and of the religions of the book in particular: Judaism, Christianity, Islam. (Yes, even Islam.) 1 As we now know, this prediction of the decline of religion turns out to be false, both inside and outside postmodern Western societies. The four aforementioned authors all share the view that religion is a threat to, an assault on, even an insult to, reason and science. Daniel Dennett asserts, somewhat facetiously, that possibly apart from alcohol, or television, or addictive video games, religion is the greatest threat to rationality and scientific progress; though, he adds, religion has the added feature of not just disabling rational thought but actually honouring the disability (see Dennett and Winston 2008). Then there’s what we dub the ‘righteous rationalism’ of Christopher Hitchens who writes, with characteristic bombast: ‘We do not rely solely upon science and reason . . . but we distrust anything that contradicts science or outrages reason. . . . What we respect is free inquiry, openmindedness, and the pursuit of ideas for their own sake’ (2007: 5).

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Although we don’t want particularly to defend religion, we are driven to take exception to the confusions and inaccuracies reflected in claims such as these. The claim that religion disables rational thought just seems empirically false. Some of the best teachers we have had in philosophy were believers, and moreover the most significant developments in the history of Western philosophy have been made by Christian, or Jewish, or indeed Muslim (e.g., Ibn Sina, Ibn Rushd), believers—and, moreover, these philosophical contributions were made as a contribution to their religious convictions. In fact, we would almost be inclined to say the opposite—that is, religion, rather than disabling reason, actually provokes it and stimulates it. If you look at the discussions of religion in scholastic philosophy, for instance, reason doesn’t suffer from euthanasia; if anything, it suffers from hyperventilation. We should perhaps regard such statements by the new atheists as indicative of the extent to which Western society has become secularised—once it was virtually impossible not to believe in God, and now the conditions that make belief in God rationally possible no longer exist. This point is supported by the fact that such attacks as these on religion on the grounds that it is an assault on reason are ultimately making an ethical or moral accusation. It is not simply the case, for Hitchens, that a religious person is committing an error of reason, or simply making a logical mistake. Rather, they suffer from some moral defect or imperfection of character; they are blinding themselves to reason so as to seek comfort in their illusions. It is Hitchens who expresses this attitude of moral reprobation most clearly, or perhaps we should say most transparently, but the message is the same throughout: beware religion; like smoking, it’ll stunt your growth—maybe not your physical growth but definitely your emotional and intellectual development. Of course, there used to be, and maybe still is, a perfectly reasonable counter-claim handy, which is that a life without religion is itself a life impoverished of its spiritual dimension. The secularisation of society did not happen just by itself. A great deal of intellectual and conceptual effort was required in order to prepare the ground for its emergence. Dawkins and the like emphasise the role that science has played in this development—in Dawkins’s case, for understandable reasons, he emphasises the science of Darwin. However, we should not underestimate the contribution by thinkers of a more philosophical or conceptual kind—this is after all the sort of contribution that in their modest way Hitchens and others are aspiring to make. And, of course, their line of criticism that religious belief is illusory is not new: it was given forceful expression by no less a figure than Karl Marx. But there is a difference, and what the new atheists say lacks the conceptual penetration of Marx. What Marx says is that the turn towards religion is at one and the same time the expression of the distress of people’s real existence and a protest against that distress. Religion, Marx says in a wonderful expression, is ‘the sigh of the oppressed creature,’ it is ‘the heart of a heartless world,’ the ‘spirit of a spiritless situation’ (1990). Religion, he says in his most famous phrase, is ‘the opium of the people.’ Marx thought, then, that the suppression, or at least the disappearance, of religion, the illusory happiness of the people, is a necessary step for their true happiness. Only within a truly secular society is true happiness attainable. But he also thought that the root cause of religious belief was the projection

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onto the scale of the cosmos of both the reality and a complaint about that reality of the situation in which the oppressed classes found themselves. Hitchens, with typical modesty, aligns himself with Marx and Freud. There is, however, a significant difference. In Marx the critique of religion comes with some political analysis, while in Freud it comes with psychological insight. The anticlericalism of Hitchens is a bowdlerised version which, because it fails to operate in the name of justice and social critique, flips over into a form of smug superiority. This is because the battle for secularisation has already been waged and won. And so what in Marx was seen as a natural response by the people to their suffering and distress here on earth, becomes in Hitchens and company an indication of the failure of moral and intellect resoluteness in lesser mortals than they. The point is that Marx offers an explanation of why it is that people actually cling so strongly to something that, as Hitchens would agree, is so implausible as religion. Marx’s explanation is that people adopt religion because of the misery of their material existence, and the content of religion—the actual beliefs in an almighty God, an afterlife, divine justice, and so forth—is to be understood as the displaced expression (Marx called it ‘alienation’) of their desires and aspirations. What we have in Marx, then, is an explanation of the origins and persistence of religious belief. How good an explanation is it? Ultimately, not very good at all, as a matter of fact. It might have seemed like a plausible account at a time when religious belief could be regarded as a form of superstition that provided solace to the poor, uneducated, and, more generally, the disenfranchised classes in our society. It will not do today, however, where there is at least as much interest in religion among those whose material happiness is secure as amongst those who live in misery; at least as much interest among those who are educated as amongst those who are ignorant. As we have indicated, Marx says that because religion offers people illusory happiness, its abolition or disappearance is required for their real happiness. Perhaps we could say, today, that people are turning to religion because without religion their real happiness turns out to be illusory and leaves them wanting and dissatisfied. Thus, Marx’s explanation of the origins of religious belief in terms of alienation fails because it cannot account for either the persistence of religion or its social distribution in times of prosperity and high levels of education. Let us turn now to an alternative explanation of the sources of religious belief, one that we find in Sigmund Freud. We turn to Freud in the hope that he can throw light on the psychological forces underlying the appeal and persistence of religion, and if we can understand these forces then perhaps we will be able to uncover connections with the recent revival of religion in new, contemporary forms. Freud offers a naturalistic explanation for the unconscious origins of key religious beliefs. For instance, the belief in a supreme and all-powerful being is seen as originating in the child’s early dependency on its parents, and as the expression of an infantile longing for an all-protecting paternal figure. Freud thus contributes something lacking in Marx, as Freud’s account explains the attraction of religion and the reasons for its psychological hold. It is an illusion, though a comforting one, to think that we are not alone in this

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miserable existence but are watched over and protected by a benevolent and all-powerful figure. However, while Freud gives us an account of the persistence of religious belief, the limitation of the Freudian explanation is that it has no historical dimension. Sure, Freud’s analysis of the unconscious origins of religious belief is part of the account, but it doesn’t tell us what makes for the renewal of interest in religion in our time. Moreover, Freud was a major warrior in the battle for secularisation. He contributed to its triumph. And hence he doesn’t fully understand or foresee the implications for religious belief in a secular age. There is nevertheless a historical dimension to Freud’s thinking that we can draw on. It begins with his contention that the God of monotheism, along with his patriarchal representatives from Abraham onwards, were mythical representations of the father of our infancy. This was the basis on which Freud emphasised the qualitative gap between on the one hand the Abrahamic religions of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, and on the other pagan, polytheistic religions, and considered that the Abrahamic religions speak most deeply and directly to the human need for a father-figure who is both protecting and vengeful at the same time. This much is clear. Freud’s work in Totem and Taboo and Moses and Monotheism adds a further dimension to this when he identifies this ‘God the father’ with the initial establishment of all social law. At the heart of this social law is the prohibition of incest and the renunciation of murder. But this social law clearly goes beyond these two dimensions of prohibiting incest and murder, and in actual fact it shapes all human desire. Human sexual relations, which seem to be natural and seem to have a biological even evolutionary basis, are everywhere mediated and regulated by complex social laws that, moreover, human subjects do not merely comply with but, more fundamentally and significantly, identify with. The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan refers to this identification as an identification with ‘the Name-of-the-Father’ to emphasise its religious affiliations in Western society. And because this identification is actually constitutive of human desire and human relations, the decline or absence of stable social—and religious—authority does not simply ‘liberate’ this desire, as if in some fulfilment of Dostoyevsky’s oft-quoted remark that ‘if God is dead, everything is permitted.’ This decline is more likely to produce an unconscious desire to reinstitute and reinvigorate forms of social authority and law. This decline will also engender greater anxiety and malaise concerning sexuality and sexual identity, including the meaning and social place of masculinity and femininity. This is why Lacan, taking his cue from Freud, famously reversed Dostoyevsky’s dictum, saying ‘if God is dead, nothing is permitted.’ These ideas suggest the following thesis concerning the present emergence and growth of monotheistic fundamentalism: Fundamentalism has arisen as a compensatory attempt to reinstate the order of paternal symbolic law which has been challenged in the secularised West and, as a consequence, around the world.

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This thesis explains why the breakdown or liberalisation of symbolic norms does not lead solely to anomie, the breakdown of groups, and the alienation of individuals. Typically, the collapse of the law does not simply lead to the passive acceptance of an unregulated social order, but to an active and concerted attempt to reinstate that law. This collapse is rarely so total as to prevent the reaction of reinstating the law as a response to its breakdown. Extreme fundamentalism, involving terrorism, seems to us to fit this pattern very well. The external assault on one’s internal law is experienced as humiliation when the internalised law remains in place. Psychologically, the terrorist response involves a perception of humiliation and degradation of the law, rather than the complete destruction of the law. The terrorist act is an act perpetrated in the name of the law, in the name of the father, however misguided. This is also why, in places where terrorist acts are considered legitimate, the support for terrorism is strong among the educated intellectual class, where the degradation of the law is experienced particularly acutely. This thesis also explains why monotheistic religions, based around the central figure of the law-giving father-God, underlie the new forms of fundamentalism and today’s return to religiosity. We speculate that the return of religion appears in the form of a splitting of religion into two dimensions that in monotheistic religion have previously been joined together. These are, firstly, the new forms of fundamentalism that emphasise doctrinal approaches and that seek to regulate social and sexual behaviour by the literal application of prohibitions deriving from textual sources. Secondly, there is the new spirituality which strives to avoid any reference to codified practices and strives for pure religious experience. Fundamentalism represents the return of a dimension of religiosity that has been effectively repressed in the modern developed world. Thus fundamentalism has emerged alongside the growth of new forms of ‘spirituality’ within the religious orbit, and the wider liberalisation of sexual and social norms. Is there possibly a slight asynchrony here? While nondenominational, New Age, or Eastern ‘spirituality’ was growing, God-the-father had been suffering a relative eclipse, in the form of repression or foreclosure from public discourse. More recently, with the rise of fundamentalism, the figure of the law-making father-God has returned with a vengeance. NOTE 1. We should remember that the pan-Arab liberation movements of the 1960s were antireligious.

Chapter Nine

The Nature of Love Jeanette Kennett

It may be that we can love things which are not persons. We might love our pets, our paintings, our country. But my focus here is on the love we can have for each other as particular embodied individuals. How do contemporary philosophers characterise or analyse this love? I’m afraid that some philosophers have not done well by the subject—to wit (my favourite example) which I discovered recently: If x loves y then x wants to benefit and be with y etc., and he has these wants (or at least some of them) because he believes y has some determinate characteristics ψ in virtue of which he thinks it worth while to benefit and be with y. He regards satisfaction of these wants as an end and not as a means to some other end. (Taylor 1976: 157)

Be still my beating heart! One can only imagine y’s deep delight at a lover’s declaration couched in such terms: surely the philosophical equivalent of Mr. Collins’s proposal to Elizabeth Bennet in Pride and Prejudice. It’s enough to send one rushing back to Barbara Cartland for advice on love. Who wouldn’t prefer her silent, square-jawed, passionate heroes to this dry, cautious, and distinctly unromantic approach. Such views, rather more attractively expressed, are common in philosophy, however. The idea is that love has reasons (as well as providing reasons)—that we can explain and justify our loves by pointing to the qualities of the other which elicit love and which it is claimed warrant love. Love then involves (in part) a positive evaluation of those qualities. This is not so surprising as it seems at first blush. After all, we are not usually stuck for an answer when asked what we love about our partners, children, or friends. And the answers we give usually involve pointing to their superior virtues, or cute or appealing properties. ‘The tilt of her head, her warmth, her adventurous spirit, his subversive sense of humour, gentleness, and brilliant intellect.’ Such answers serve not merely to explain but in some sense justify our loves. 89

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They suggest that the beloved deserves to be loved—on the basis of those very properties or characteristics. But views like these are subject to an obvious objection. Shakespeare said it first: Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, (Or bends with the remover to remove O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken It is the star to every wandering bark Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken) Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle’s compass come: Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me proved, I never writ, nor no man ever loved. (Sonnet 116)

In philosophy, too, we find a view akin to Shakespeare’s, known somewhat prosaically as ‘the trading up’ objection. If the qualities view of love is correct, then it would seem that if I love you for your yellow hair then when your hair ceases to be yellow, my love too may justifiably cease. If I love Tim for his loopy sense of humour and his musical talent then, surely, under pain of inconsistency, I cannot withhold my love from Tom who has an even loopier sense of humour and a finer musical talent than Tim. Indeed, if time or propriety prevent me from loving both Tim and Tom, I should rationally dump Tom for the superior, more lovable Tim. 1 You may have met people who actually engage in trading up. Certainly you will have encountered them in popular culture—think of the tycoon or movie star who regularly updates his wife. But I suspect that you, along with Shakespeare, would doubt that they truly love the objects of their passing attention. It is part of our very concept of love that it is non-fungible—it is not a commodity to be traded. The beloved is simply irreplaceable. That is why lost or past loves may be regretted and remembered in ways that past televisions are not. It seems we always fall short of the mark when we try to explain or justify love in terms of a list of qualities that the beloved contingently possesses. Worse still, those who go looking for love armed with a checklist of essential qualities of the kind to be found in personal advertisements (‘35–40 yo, C of E, non-smoking professional, sporty, good sense of humour, must like cats, art house movies, and Szechuan cuisine’) seem unlikely to find it.

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The reason is that love is essentially open-ended: in loving someone we embark on a journey whose path and destination is largely unknown. Love takes us hostage to fortune; it binds us to the weal and woe of the beloved in ways we could not have anticipated and cannot reject. To be genuinely open to being someone’s close friend or lover is precisely to admit to yourself that you are not entirely sure where this journey will take you. And this truism about love is one that the qualities view has a hard time accounting for. This point becomes even clearer when we shift the focus from romantic love to love of one’s children. While we can exhaustively enumerate their lovable qualities, we don’t seriously suppose that our love for our children depends upon their continued possession of those very qualities. If that were the case parental love would never survive the onset of adolescence and the loss of childish charms. Of course, defenders of the view will urge that their view of love is not nearly so crude nor so rigid as the trading up objection supposes. We need not think that a person must be able to articulate all the qualities of the beloved which serve as reasons for love; just that those qualities do indeed justify the love that one has for them. Moreover, it is quite unlikely that the very particular constellation of qualities possessed by the beloved will be instantiated in just that way by another individual. Nevertheless, qualities matter for love and some qualities may matter more than others. Simon Keller (2000) suggests that there are some properties which play a central (but not exclusive) role in ideal romantic love. These are the properties that make us good romantic partners—properties like being a good listener, being caring and sensitive, and being generous. He notes that some of these properties will be relational properties. For example, one reason why someone might find you attractive as a romantic partner is that you know exactly how to treat him when he is in a bad mood. ‘Just which properties make us good romantic partners depends upon what we and our partners are like, so there’s no list of the properties for which every romantic partner should be loved. When we speak of romantic love for properties, we mean especially (but not only) the properties that make someone a good romantic partner, in the context of the particular relationship’ (Keller 2000: 166). Once we allow relational properties into the picture, trading up doesn’t make much sense. A new person may share or exceed certain of the qualities we love in our existing friends and partners—a winning smile or musical talent—but cannot share their relational and historical properties. They cannot, for example, be the person with whom I saw Elvis Costello, or played Scrabble till dawn, or celebrated my graduation, or mourned my father’s death. Keller also reminds us that romantic love (and perhaps other loves too), ideally, involves a mutual responsiveness, so when romantic lovers change they do not change alone. In embracing love we embrace the prospect of being changed by and through the love relationship. Shakespeare’s claim that love endures through change can come true after all on this account, since the properties or qualities for which we love someone and which justify our love are properties that co-evolve through the course of a relationship. As Dirk Baltzly and I have argued, in both friendship and romantic love my identity is partly shaped by my beloved’s interpretations of me, and in the context of our relationship I have reasons to do things I haven’t done before. 2

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So my taste for opera develops under your influence; I become more confident in cracking jokes; you become less focused on saving the world; and we discover a new passion for rock climbing. If over time you become in part my creation and I yours, then in ending this relationship to take on another I lose something of myself as well as losing you and that counters any reasons we might otherwise have for trading up. This gets much closer to the mark, I think, but still you might want to resist reasons-talk in the context of love. For love is surely not confined to rational consenting adults. All this talk about reasons and qualities risks missing love’s most striking feature. Love is, after all, an emotion. Love picks us up and sweeps us away. It moves us against reason. Where, then, is the recognition in philosophy of the essential phenomenology of love? A full account of the phenomenology of love is perhaps best left to poetry and literature rather than to philosophy. But there are philosophers who hold that love has causes but not reasons. Nick Zangwill (unpublished) argues that love is not at all a matter of judgment or evaluation. It is a primitive, raw, and untamed response which bypasses our cognitive and rational selves—as evidenced by the fact that children, the mad, and the demented may love as fully and passionately as anyone. Moreover, life and literature abound with examples of loves that are inappropriate and ‘gloriously amoral’ from Romeo and Juliet to Bonnie and Clyde. We value love precisely because it is not conditional on our possession of any valuable qualities and may even be a response to or caused by qualities which the lover deplores. Love, this view insists, is not a matter of desert. It is a gift bestowed upon us or a small miracle that we are loved when we are. 3 Zangwill (unpublished) puts it well: ‘Views of love are often criticized for being over-romantic; but I reply that moral philosophers could stand to be more rather than less romantic about this subject, which is, after all, love. We should embrace an unapologetically romantic view. . . . If we cannot have a romantic conception of love, what can we have a romantic conception of?!’ Part of me wants to stand and cheer at this point. Moral philosophers do have an unfortunate tendency to want to tidy up and sanitise love. They claim it for morality by cheerily dismissing any passions that might lead us astray as not being genuine instances of love. And this colonised version of love seems distinctly unromantic, boring, and unfaithful to the phenomenon. Nonetheless there is a problem with the kind of view expressed by Zangwill, and not or not simply because it claims that love is fundamentally amoral, or because it allows that love may lead us into moral danger. If love not only has no reasons but is not concerned with the valuable at all, if it is just untamed raw emotion, then there is no distinction to be drawn between genuine love and various forms of infatuation or obsession. And it is not at all clear that this is what we want from those who claim to love us any more than we want to be loved for instantiating the other’s shopping list of desirable characteristics. We don’t—those of us who are grown up at any rate— want to be loved blindly, without any regard for who we actually are. As Robert Nozick says, ‘it must be we ourselves who are loved, not a whitewashed version of ourselves, not just a portion’ (1995: 233). One of the pleasures of being loved, then, lies in being seen as we really are, in being psychologically visible to the lover. Indeed, Nathaniel Branden

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argues that ‘an intense experience of mutual psychological visibility . . . is at the very center of romantic love’ (1993: 65). I contend that love, whether in romantic relations, familial relations, or friendship, involves attentiveness to the beloved—it involves really seeing them. Perceptualist accounts of love thus seem to me capable of capturing both the phenomenological aspects of love and the intuition that love is a response to the value of a particular other. So I want to look at a recent account which I think gets tantalizingly close to the truth about love and then pinpoint where I think it goes wrong. 4 The philosopher David Velleman says this: In my view, appreciation for someone’s value as a person is not incidental to loving him: it is the evaluative core of love. I do not mean that love is a value judgment to the effect that the beloved has final value. . . . Love is rather an appreciative response to the perception of that value. And I mean ‘perception’ literally: the people we love are the ones whom we succeed in perceiving as persons, within some of the human organisms milling about us. Only sometimes in this throng do we vividly see a face or hear a voice or feel a touch as animated by the inner presence of a self-aware, autonomous other—a person who is self to himself, like us. (2008: 199)

Love, for Velleman, is a response to a value that is universal in persons but that we do not and probably cannot universally and vividly perceive. It is revealed to us via the contingent and particular features of the beloved that capture our attention: the crooked smile, the turn of the head, the spontaneous enthusiasm for learning. We make a mistake, however, if we think that these qualities are what we love in the other. Rather, what they allow us to see is the inner presence of another self—and that is what love responds to. Velleman argues further that love is not to be identified with a particular constellation of feelings. Love is not sympathy, empathy, attraction, or affection. Nor is it delight in the presence of the beloved and misery in their absence. Love comes apart from desires to be near or to benefit the beloved. It is clear, he thinks, that we can love relatives or ex-spouses whom we do not much like and avoid when we can. This seems right. One can, for example, imagine adult siblings who love each other but can’t be in the same room without fighting and so choose not to spend time together. While love is most often characterised in terms of warmer feelings, any full account of love must also acknowledge that it leaves us vulnerable to darker emotions such as anger, resentment, and hate. What unites all the instances of love of a person in Velleman’s account is the powerful perception of the other as a person ‘like ourselves.’ This perception ‘arrests our emotional defences against him, leaving us emotionally vulnerable to him.’ ‘The heart,’ Velleman says, ‘responds to another, seen as having a heart.’ That is why love deserves to be called a moral emotion. It is in fact the core moral emotion—the emotion, according to Velleman, by which moral sensibilities are first implanted in children and the emotion by which the moral sensibilities of adults are enlivened and revived.

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I want to hold on to Velleman’s central idea that love involves the vivid and disarming perception of the other as a self like us. However, I think there are two points on which he goes awry. First, Velleman claims love as a moral emotion because it is revelatory of the special value of persons as selves. And since this is a value we all possess, he argues that there could be no conflict in spirit between love and morality. Love is not essentially partial in the way many accounts have claimed. Does this mean that love could not lead us into moral danger? I think he is right to warn us as he does against identifying love with some limited range of emotions, feelings, and desires that are commonly associated with it, or with particular types of relationships, including romantic ones, which may be ideally, but are not necessarily, attended by love. Co-dependency or obsession or possessiveness should be distinguished from love. We can also be led into moral danger by features of the love relationships that are not centrally to do with love at all, such as loyalty, obligation, habit, or embarrassment. And so even if romantic or familial ties can lead us morally astray, by providing us with reasons and motives to action which conflict with morality, this does not show that it is love that leads us astray. It is harder, however, to draw a moral line between love, and the emotions and motives that arise when love, in Velleman’s words, arrests our emotional defences to the other (1999: 347–48). On Velleman’s account, it is an essential part of love that it arrests those defences; our emotional responses are, he says, indicative of our having really seen the other. If so, it is somewhat misleading of him to characterise the emotions that follow as ‘independent responses that love merely unleashes.’ Love cannot wash its hands entirely of what it motivates the lover to do. Love can give rise to hate and anger and resentment, and surely we sometimes act wrongly out of that very hate and anger and resentment. Even the favourable emotions that love gives rise to—including empathy, fascination, and attraction—may motivate us in ways which conflict with moral requirements. Does this mean that there is a conflict in spirit between love and morality? Perhaps not. But neither is there a merely practical conflict. If love is indeed the emotion by which human moral sensibilities are implanted and maintained, then our very susceptibility to moral demands is yoked to our moral frailty. They are two sides of the same coin. Second, while I think that Velleman provides a powerful and accurate account of the phenomenology of love, his conception of the value to which we respond in others is surely too narrow, if not outright false. What he thinks we see and respond to in love is ‘a self-aware autonomous other.’ But what, then, of what many take to be a central and unambiguous case of love: the love we have for our infant children? If one’s theory of love excludes this case, we have reason to question it. According to Velleman, parental love is better characterised as benevolent affection. But ‘benevolent affection’ does not do justice to the phenomenology of parental love, which in my experience is fierce, disarming, and utterly revelatory of the value of all children. Is it based on a wing and a prayer—focused on what will be, rather than what is? Must it involve either an illusion of the infant’s personhood or a misunderstanding of the true value of persons? And what of an infant’s love for

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its parents, or of the love which may be expressed by the elderly demented? I side with Zangwill at this point. The capacities and responses which Velleman thinks are critical to love— attention to the other, appreciation of their value as another self, and the resulting emotional disarmament—do not arrive fully formed in adults. We find them present albeit in simpler form in infants. Infants attend actively to their parents, initiating and coordinating interactions between them. Growing awareness and attentiveness to the other as ‘like me,’ allied with delight in their presence and sensitivity to their emotions, which we see in very young children, deserves to be called love. It does involve perceiving the other as like oneself, and treating them as a partner in mutual emotional disarmament, even where it does not and cannot involve conceiving of them as such. It thus seems to me that that the two compelling components of Velleman’s account, the arresting perception of a value distinctive of persons and the resulting emotional disarmament and vulnerability, can be substantially satisfied in our relations with those whose rational autonomy is undeveloped or diminished. And so to some personal moments of arresting awareness: It’s a summer night. My son is two. I wake up to footsteps running through the house and then the slam of the back door. I leap out of bed and follow. In the backyard he is dancing and whirling under the stars, arms reaching up to them. He looks at me, ecstatic. ‘I can see stars. I can see the moon,’ he cries. Fast forward: My son is nine. We’ve just received news that his uncle in England has died. We haven’t seen Derek for six years. My husband, whose brother it is, doesn’t know how to feel. They were not close. The rest of us are awkwardly silent. I pick my son up from his friend’s place and deliver the news. When we arrive home he flings himself into his father’s arms and weeps. He gives his father permission to grieve. Fast forward: My son is in his late teens and in a dark and uncommunicative phase. I phone him to tell him that the mother of his oldest friend has cancer. He is silent and then says simply: ‘Tell her she has been another mother to me. Tell her.’ And in those few words I can see him again. What is it precisely that I saw on these three occasions, to which love is a proper response? On Velleman’s account, I was forcibly alerted to the presence of an inner life alongside my own, an arresting awareness of personhood. True enough. But was it, at bottom, a vivid awareness of my young son’s rational autonomy, contingently made available to me on these occasions, not via a crooked smile or a tilt of his head, but via his perfectly tuned emotional responses? I don’t believe that the qualities I saw and responded to on these occasions were signs and symbols of his rational will. What I saw so vividly in the most general sense was my son as loving, as a valuer. Emotional and aesthetic responsiveness are not, I submit, merely emblematic of a person’s value in the way that a crooked smile might be. It is a true aspect of their value, such that they would be diminished without it. The rational capacities that we dearly wish for our children, out of love, and that we may view with wonder and awe as we trace their development, are not the full

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story of their value as persons here and now or in the future. I do not think we make a mistake or fall under an illusion when we love our children or anyone else in the full recognition that these capacities are not present. A life may be distinctively the life of a person, of a self to himself like us, where autonomy and even sanity are lacking. I’ll close with a couple of extracts from Anne Deveson’s moving account in Tell Me I’m Here (1998) of life with her son Jonathan, who suffered from severe schizophrenia and died at age twenty-four from a drug overdose. Jonathan’s mental and physical decline and Deveson’s response starkly reveal the poverty of the qualities view of love and the limits of any appeal to autonomy as a basis for it. Love for Jonathan exposes Deveson to the full gamut of emotions, many of them violent and negative. She describes terrible rage, resentment, frustration, grief, and pity. She did not merely look on tempests (to use Shakespeare’s phrase), she was engulfed by them; her life, not to mention her house on occasion, was turned upside down. After one outburst where Jonathan upturns a table at a café and throws a milkshake in her face, she describes feeling ‘so angry that I felt like thumping anyone and everyone, so angry that I had to belt my rage out on some cushions, and even then I could not assuage it because I felt so powerless’ (Deveson 1998: 82). But Jonathan’s sufferings were worse: early in his illness he would hear voices commanding him to hurt his mother. Deveson writes: ‘His internal conflicts must have been terrible. He had written on the blotched and mouldy walls of his squat a large message in black text: Don’t harm Anne’ (1998: 83). Towards the end of his life Anne finds him collapsed, sobbing in her living room: [H]e shuddered out disconnected statements like, ‘I can’t go on . . . the pain in my head . . . terrible, terrible . . . look at me . . . look at what I’ve fucking become. . . . Oh God!’ . . . I cradled him close and rocked him, singing to him as if he were a small child . . . and willing, with all my heart, with all my mind and with all my strength that I would keep him safe from harm. But deep inside I already knew that I had failed. (Deveson 1998: 255–56)

Jonathan’s capacity for rational self-government was terribly impaired. His life was one of pain, not of flourishing, not the life anyone would wish for their child. If autonomy were the sole source of our value as persons, if it were at the heart of our very capacity to value others, then it is clear Jonathan did not possess the value to which love is an appreciative response. Yet, he, Jonathan, was surely valuable and his mother made no mistake in loving him. Jonathan was, in Velleman’s terms, a self to himself, like us. Jonathan talked for a long time and I listened. Then there was silence, even though the music was still frolicking and the crowds chattering. Jonathan’s phrasing may have been eccentric but if you spent time with him, and felt your way into what he was saying, it was almost always possible to understand him. . . . I looked up. Jonathan was grinning, with his head on one side. He looked quite old and wise. ‘It was a good try wasn’t it? Thank you for listening. That was very brave of you. . . .

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People have to learn that underlying business, the message of everything is love. Which is why society sticks together. You and I have love.’ (Deveson 1998: 234)

NOTES 1. Simon Keller (2000) makes this point in developing a more sophisticated version of the properties view. 2. Baltzly and Kennett (unpublished); see also Dean Cocking and Jeanette Kennett (1998), where what we called the ‘drawing view of friendship’ is first articulated. 3. Irving Singer suggests that our subjective appraisal of another—deciding the value of another for me—creates a new kind of value which he dubs bestowal. Love bestows value ‘by the very act of responding favorably, giving an object emotional and pervasive importance’ (1995: 218). 4. The following discussion of Velleman’s view appears (and is developed more fully) in Kennett (2008).

Chapter Ten

Free Will and the Sciences of the Mind Neil Levy

Free will matters. It matters because agents are morally responsible only for actions they perform freely. It also matters because our self-conception as autonomous agents rests, in part, on our view of ourselves as free to make important decisions and to shape our own lives. It might therefore come as a shock to us to discover that very many scientists, in a variety of fields, hold that human beings are not free. They hold, variously, that science shows that our actions are necessitated, and therefore unfree, or that there is no self who could be free, or that we do not initiate actions consciously, and therefore freely. These claims are widespread, and are made by some of the most eminent contemporary scientists. Consider the following representative samples: You, your joys and your sorrows, your memories and your ambitions, your sense of personal identity and free will, are in fact no more than the behaviour of a vast assembly of nerve cells and their associated molecules. Who you are is nothing but a pack of neurons. (Crick 1994: 3) We don’t have free will . . . it’s all due to these funny little cells firing in our heads. (Baars, in Blackmore 2005: 19) We can’t rule out free will, but I think it’s very implausible. The question is, can we still decide against the decision our brain has made? (Haynes, in Ostrov 2008) Physical penetration into the depths of the self on this scale allows no free will— neurons are affected only by other neurons, not by will or effort. (Bridgeman 2003)

There are different concerns expressed by different scientists in these quotations. The aim of this chapter is to assess these alleged threats. The news I aim to convey is good: there are no significant threats to our free will or our moral responsibility stemming from the discoveries made in the sciences of the mind. 99

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THREATS TO FREE WILL FROM NEUROSCIENCE: DETERMINISM The most commonly mentioned alleged threat to free will from neuroscience is the alleged threat from causal determinism. Causal determinism is true of a mechanism or process if that mechanism or process is governed by causal laws that are exceptionless and in principle absolutely predictable, such that given a certain state of the mechanism, there can only be one subsequent state at each succeeding moment. The threat from causal determinism, as it is conceived by some neuroscientists, might be set out in the following manner: Neuroscience demonstrates that voluntary behaviour (that is, behaviour that is goal directed and not reflexive or automatic) is caused by brain mechanisms that are deterministic (such that, given the circumstances and the internal state of the brain just prior to the action, it had to occur in the way it did). If our actions are causally determined, we had to act as we did. But we have free will only if we are able to choose from among at least two genuinely possible courses of actions. Therefore, there is no such thing as free will. There are several problems with this argument. First, it is contestable that neuroscience has shown us that the mechanisms underlying voluntary action are deterministic (Balaguer 2010). Neuroscience textbooks routinely describe some very basic neural processes, such as the firing of a particular neuron, as stochastic; to say something is stochastic is to say that it cannot be predicted. Whether neural firings are stochastic because neural systems are too complex for us to predict (given our current knowledge) or because they are genuinely undetermined remains an open question. Neuroscientists who argue that because the brain is deterministic we are not free might implicitly be relying upon the thought that physics is deterministic; since the brain is a physical system, it too must be deterministic. In fact, though, most physicists deny that physics is deterministic. On the dominant interpretation of quantum mechanics, some quantum-level events are indeterministic (that is, the laws of nature do not necessitate how these events unfold; rather, they leave some of the details open to chance). It is therefore possible that some neural processes are indeterministic (though some account would need to be offered as to why quantum-level indeterminacy isn’t washed out at the level of the relatively massive brain; see Kane 1996 for an attempt at such an account). Premise (1) of the argument is therefore false; neuroscience has not shown that the brain is deterministic, and neither has physics. The main problems with the argument from determinism lie elsewhere, however. First, the argument relies on a premise that (apparently unbeknownst to the scientists who advance it) is commonly rejected by philosophers, and, second, neuroscience has nothing special to contribute on this question. The premise in question is (3): that free will requires metaphysically open possibilities (that is, possibilities that are not foreclosed by the laws of physics). Why do the scientists who advance this view think that premise (3) is

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true? They do not argue for it. Presumably, they regard it as simply obvious. But it is not so obvious to other people. Since the seventeenth century, there has been a lively debate among philosophers about this claim. Starting with Hobbes, many philosophers have held (roughly) that a free action is an uncoerced action that is voluntarily performed by a sane and rational agent. More recently, philosophers have developed capacitarian accounts of free will, to fix some problems identified with the Hobbesian account; on a capacitarian account, an agent has free will (roughly) if their action is caused by mechanisms that underlie capacities for reasons-responsive action (e.g., Fischer and Ravizza 1998). These accounts of free will do not require that causal determinism be false (or, for that matter, true); instead, they are compatible with all plausible accounts of the prevailing causal laws. Philosophers who hold that free will is compatible with causal determinism are called compatibilists. Though a significant minority of philosophers are incompatibilists, a majority are compatibilists. The debate is ongoing, and of course compatibilists might be wrong. Perhaps, then, the neuroscientists who advance this argument have something like the following thought in mind: though some philosophers hold that free will is compatible with determinism, that’s just obviously wrong—only someone who is in the grip of a theory, or self-deceived (perhaps under the pressure of the awful truth that free will doesn’t exist) could believe anything so wild. I once asked a very prominent neuroscientist (no names, to protect the confused) after a lecture at which he expressed the view that neuroscience shows that free will is an illusion whether he was aware of the compatibilist view. ‘Oh I know philosophers sometimes say things like that,’ he said, ‘but they don’t really believe it.’ Are compatibilists in the grip of a theory so implausible that it would take special training to think it is true? Apparently not: there is a growing body of experimental evidence which seems to show that ordinary people are compatibilists, or at least that they do not find compatibilism obviously confused. One fairly robust finding in the experimental literature is that ordinary people’s attitudes depend in part upon how questions about free will are asked. In response to questions such as if determinism is true, are people responsible for their actions?, a majority of ordinary people say no, just as the neuroscientists might have predicted. But when the question is posed in more concrete form, asking whether a particular person is responsible for a particular crime in a determinist universe, a majority say yes (Nichols and Knobe 2007). In recent work, Monroe and Malle (forthcoming) asked subjects to describe free actions. The majority described them as chosen actions, actions in accordance with the person’s desires, or unconstrained actions—the very properties cited in the Hobbesian account. Very few spontaneously mentioned causation or determinism at all. Free will might yet turn out to be incompatible with causal determinism. But however things turn out on this front, it is clear that neuroscience has nothing—for the moment—to contribute to it. The debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists is a philosophical debate, not a scientific one. The question whether causal determinism is true is a scientific question, but it is a question within the domain of basic physics, not neuroscience. There may come a day when neuroscientists can test whether neural processes are

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deterministic—they may be, even if physical determinism is false, since many physicists believe that indeterminacy is usually confined only to the subatomic level—but that day seems very far off. For the moment, neuroscience is irrelevant to the debate. THREATS TO FREE WILL FROM NEUROSCIENCE: THE EXISTENCE OF THE SELF A different threat is illustrated by the quotation from the very eminent scientist and Nobel Prize winner, Francis Crick. Crick’s claim is that free will doesn’t exist because selves don’t exist: there are only mental processes. We might set out the argument in the following manner: We are free only if there is a unified self to control our actions. The unified self is an illusion. Therefore we are not free. This is an interesting argument; moreover, unlike the argument from causal determinism, it is an argument to which neuroscience is actually relevant. We know, from many different branches of the cognitive sciences, that mental processes can and do run quite independently of one another. The mind is made up a multiplicity of processes, many running simultaneously in parallel with one another. Moreover, some of these processes—how many is controversial—are modular, which is to say (among other things) that they do not share information with one another. Some are informationally encapsulated, as cognitive scientists say, in that some information from elsewhere can’t penetrate them (thus, for instance, the fact that visual illusions don’t go away, even when we know how they work). Some are encapsulated in a different way, in that how they process information is inaccessible to the person. Now, if these processes were sufficiently isolated from one another, then Crick would be right: there would be nothing but processes, and persons would be an illusion. Is that how things actually are? Of course it is not. The fact that people are relatively predictable, and that their actions are coordinated—and coordinated across time—shows that the degree of harmony between the various modules is great. In fact, a little reflection reveals that the degree of disunity cannot be too great. After all, all the modules which together constitute my mind/brain are all in the same boat: except in very rare circumstances, modules cannot behave in ways that benefit themselves, from an evolutionary point of view, without also benefiting the whole ensemble of modules. Defection from a cooperative strategy will be punished, almost always, by a lack of success at passing on the genes which promote such defection. Accordingly, we should expect the modules to work together. Indeed, the brain itself has a number of mechanisms to ensure that discrete modules work together. There are identifiable sites within the brain where information and representations from diverse sources are integrated. For instance, very basic bodily information, from various sources, is integrat-

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ed in the brain stem, providing the basis for what Damasio (1999) calls ‘the proto self’ (Churchland 2003). There is also evidence that emotions play a neurobiological integrating role by coordinating brain plasticity (Ledoux 2003). Neuroscientists have made progress in recent years identifying mechanisms which contribute to solving the so-called binding problem, in which information from different sources—about the shape, the colour, and the position of objects, for instance—is integrated into a single complex perception. Temporal synchrony seems to play a role in binding representations together (Engel et al. 1999). Such representations enter, or are poised to enter, consciousness, and therefore can play a role in guiding behaviour that is an intelligent response to information from many sources. These mechanisms integrate information and ensure that our behaviour is responsive to this information. They enable our beliefs to have global effects on our actions. Thanks to them, we can pursue plans and projects, including plans and projects that stretch across time. Thanks to them, our values influence our behaviour globally; our lives and choices typically reflect those values. There is some actual disunity—greater for some agents than others, but never entirely absent—and this disunity means that sometimes, under unusual circumstances in particular, our autonomy might be threatened, but it is very clear that there is no global threat here. THREATS TO FREE WILL FROM NEUROSCIENCE: EPIPHENOMENALISM The final threat from neuroscience I want to discuss, the threat upon which I want to spend the most time, is the threat from epiphenomenalism. On the basis of a number of pieces of experimental evidence, some researchers have concluded that consciousness doesn’t cause behaviour—that it is epiphenomenal—and that free will therefore doesn’t exist. Some of this evidence comes from psychology, some from neuroscience. To say that something is epiphenomenal is to say it has no causal role. The classic example is the smoke expelled from the smokestack of a steam train: the smoke is a by-product of burning the coal, which heats the water and thereby provides the steam that drives the wheels. The smoke is epiphenomenal in that it does no work in driving the train; the train would run just as well if the burning coal failed to emit smoke. To say that consciousness is epiphenomenal is to say that it, like the smoke coming from the smokestack, does no work in causing behaviour. Let’s turn, now, to the evidence that is alleged to show that consciousness is epiphenomenal, starting with the evidence from psychology. In a series of experiments, Daniel Wegner (2002) has shown that the experience of willing an action can dissociate from actually acting. In fact, Wegner demonstrated a double dissociation, a dissociation in both directions. In one of Wegner’s experiments (the ‘I-spy’ study), subjects and a confederate moved a pointer around a computer screen using a mouse, while the subjects listened to a voice naming icons on the screen. Wegner found that if the voiced named an

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icon just prior to the pointer landing on it, subjects rated the movement intentional even when the confederate had moved the pointer to the icon. Thus, under the right conditions, we can have the experience of acting intentionally without actually acting at all. The opposite dissociation, acting intentionally without the experience of acting, occurs in and explains certain kinds of ‘psychic’ phenomena, such as the Victorian pastime of table turning. In table turning, a number of people would sit around a small table, laying their hands palm down on the table surface. After a while, the table would begin to spin, revolving more and more rapidly. Though participants in this kind of activity may often sincerely deny that they cause the spinning, and may attribute it to paranormal forces, it isn’t difficult to show that they are causing the movement. The movement of each is small enough to escape detection by them. Thus the double dissociation: we can act while believing that we are not acting (as in table turning), and fail to act while believing that we are (as in the I-spy study). From the fact of this double dissociation, Wegner moves to a dramatic conclusion: conscious will is an illusion. Wegner explicitly argues that this entails that agents don’t have what philosophers understand by free will; he believes that because consciousness is epiphenomenal we are not free. Reconstructing Wegner’s argument, it runs like this: (1) Free will requires that agents consciously cause their actions. (2) We do not consciously cause our actions. Therefore there is no free will. The argument is valid: if the premises are true, then the conclusion must be true too. But are the premises true? In fact, neither premise (1) nor (2) seems very strong. Let’s begin with (2), the premise that Wegner takes to be established by his experimental data. How, precisely, does Wegner think his evidence supports (2)? His thought seems to be the following: the best explanation for the observed dissociation between the experience of willing an action and actually acting is that the first does not cause the second. If the experience of willing caused action, then whenever we act we would have the experience; moreover, whenever we had the experience we would actually act. But neither of these things occurs exceptionlessly, so the first cannot be the cause of the second. Wegner concludes that rather than the experience of willing causing our actions, both our actions and our experiences of acting must be caused by unconscious mechanisms. Unfortunately, the inference from the double dissociation between the experience of acting and actually acting to the conclusion that the first cannot be the cause of the second is fallacious. Consider the parallel deduction with regard to visual perception. We naïvely think that our visual experiences are extremely reliable guides to actually seeing things, that the second is the cause of the first. But in fact there is a double dissociation between having a visual experience and actually seeing an external object. Sometimes people fail to see the objects in front of them (for instance when it is dark, their eyes are closed, or when they are experiencing temporary blindness) and sometimes people think they are seeing something that isn’t actually there (when they are hallucinating or subject to a visual illusion of some sort). Should we

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conclude that our experience of seeing things is not caused by our actually seeing things? Of course not: two things can be very reliably linked, and indeed causally linked, without being exceptionlessly linked. We might think that if one thing causes another, then those two things must be exceptionlessly linked, but this would be a mistake: causes typically require that circumstances are appropriate before they operate (matches cause fires, but only when the wood is dry, there is enough air, and so on). The experience of willing might not be a reliable guide to actually acting, but Wegner’s evidence doesn’t establish that it isn’t (Nahmias 2002, Metzinger 2004). Premise (1) is taken for granted by Wegner. I won’t discuss it yet; instead, I shall first discuss the evidence for epiphenomenalism from neuroscience. As we shall see, the argument from neuroscience rests on the same premise. The neuroscientific evidence for epiphenomenalism stems from a famous experiment conducted by Benjamin Libet (Libet 1985, 1999). Libet used an ingenious experimental apparatus to measure the precise timing of subject’s awareness of volition; of their intention to perform a voluntary action. Libet had subjects watch a specially constructed clock around which a dot sped, at around 25 times the speed of a normal second hand. Subjects were instructed to move their hand at will, and to note the position of the dot on the clock face at the precise moment at which they became aware of their urge to move. At the same time, he recorded two pieces of data: the moment at which muscle flexing occurred, and the onset of an electrical discharge in the brain called the readiness potential, which is known to precede voluntary action. Correcting his data for timing errors, Libet found that onset of readiness potential preceded the subject’s awareness of their urge to move by an average 400 milliseconds. Libet interprets this data as showing that the brain initiates an action before the subject becomes aware of it. This suggests, he argues, that our experience of consciously causing our actions is a confabulation. In fact, it might support a model something like Wegner’s, on which the action generation system causes the feeling of doing, at the same time that it actually causes the action. Libet believes that this result threatens free will because if we become aware of our intention to move only after we begin moving, we don’t consciously choose to act at all. Consciousness of the decision to act or of the volition comes too late to be causally effective and is therefore epiphenomenal. Consciousness is informed of the decision; it does not make it. But the agent, the target of ascriptions of praise and blame, is, if not identical to consciousness, at least more properly identified with consciousness than with the subpersonal mechanisms that are, as a matter of fact, causally effective in action. It turns out that we do not make our decisions; they are made for us. But if we cannot control what we decide to do, then we cannot be responsible for our decisions. However, like Wegner’s argument for the non-existence of free will, Libet’s argument is both philosophically and empirically questionable. Once again, I shall point out some of the empirical problems first. As we saw, Libet collected three sets of timing data: data about the initiation of the action, about the readiness potential, and about the subject’s report of action initiation. He interprets this last set of data as a veridical report of when the agent became aware of their intention to act. However, as

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Mele (2007) has shown, Libet’s instructions to his subjects were ambiguous. They may have interpreted him as asking when they experienced the urge or desire to act rather than the intention to move. Indeed, there are reasons to doubt whether our intentions to act really are things we can reasonably be expected to identify reliably; perhaps we deliberately initiate our acts, but there is no special introspectible feeling associated with doing so. Second, even if Libet has shown that we become aware of our intention to move only after we actually begin to move, why should we think that this result generalises to important actions? Moving one’s hand in an experiment is a low-stakes action, on which nothing much rides, and there are no particular reasons to think that it matters exactly when we comply with the instruction. In these, routine and low-stakes contexts, we might delegate our decision to move to unconscious mechanisms. We might make the ‘big picture’ decisions—including the decision to participate in the experiment—consciously, then leave the routine implementation to the mechanisms Libet revealed (Flanagan 1996). Third, we might doubt that we are capable of very fine-grained and reliable judgments of precisely when various mental events occur. Dennett (2003) has argued that given that neural processes are distributed across the brain, the difference in timing that Libet reveals cannot be taken as showing that the neural event really preceded subjective awareness. Messages get shunted around the brain, and this processing takes time. Given this fact, very precise subjective timing judgments are suspect. Indeed, the very notion that we can make these kinds of judgments relies upon the neuroscientifically suspect idea of what Dennett calls ‘the Cartesian theatre’: a single place in the brain where everything comes together, and from which reliable judgments regarding timing could be made. There is no Cartesian theatre in the brain, and therefore no reason to put any weight on these timing reports. Dennett’s objection might seem irrelevant, given more recent experimental work. He claims that agents cannot reliably make very precise judgments about the timing of their mental states, but a recent Libet-like study seems to demonstrate an enormous gap between the initiation of the neuropsychological processes which actually cause our actions and our awareness of our intention to move. In this study (Soon et al. 2008), subjects chose which of two buttons to press. The researchers found that patterns of activation in parietal and prefrontal cortex predicted the choice, with around 60 percent accuracy, an average of seven whole seconds prior to the action. The researchers took this to be evidence that the ‘subjective experience of freedom is no more than an illusion’ (Soon et al. 2008: 543). However, the result is neither surprising nor threatening to free will. Surely it is not surprising that we have dispositions toward particular actions, dispositions that precede our actions by some time? Only if we had some reason to believe that neural activity was the correlate of a decision would the results threaten our free will, even prima facie. But we have no reason to believe that this activity in parietal and prefrontal regions is the person’s (or the brain’s) making of a choice. The free will of the subjects in this experiment is no more threatened by the fact that neural activity is a somewhat above-chance predictor of their choice than my free will in choosing to wear a hat would be threatened by the

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discovery that my breakfast choices are an above-chance predictor of my decision to wear a hat. All the arguments for the claim that we lack free will because consciousness is epiphenomenal rest on a philosophical premise as well as on empirical claims; the premise (called [1] previously) that free will requires that agents consciously initiate their actions. Let us turn, finally, to assessing this premise. Why should the fact (if it is indeed a fact) that consciousness is epiphenomenal threaten our free will? The thought, as we have seen, is that if we do not consciously decide, then we don’t decide at all. Instead, our unconscious decides. Now, the problem with this thought is that it seems to be a mistake to identify me with my consciousness. Dennett called the mistake of thinking that there is a place in the brain where all processes converge the fallacy of the Cartesian theatre, after René Descartes, the great seventeenth century philosopher who argued that the self was pure mind. Dennett thinks that contemporary neuroscientists sometimes fall victim to a subtle version of the mistake that Descartes made, in identifying the self with a thinking substance (a mistake which, by the way, was forgivable on Descartes’ part, given the state of scientific knowledge in his day). In fact, I think there is a strong case for holding that some neuroscientists are making not the subtle error Dennett identifies, but the crass error of identifying the self with consciousness: Cartesianism in its pure form. Over the past century, cognitive psychology, social psychology, and neuroscience have produced an enormous amount of evidence incompatible with Cartesianism. A very great deal—perhaps the overwhelming majority— of our behaviour is produced by unconscious mechanisms, with little oversight from consciousness (Bargh and Chartrand 1999). Even when we are engaged in conscious deliberation, unconscious processes play an indispensable role. Obviously, unconscious processes play important roles in speaking and thinking (we just talk, without worrying about grammar at all; these linguistic processes are all handled by processes below the level of awareness). But thinking and speaking themselves are deeply shaped by unconscious processes. The unconscious orients us toward certain options and away from others, rendering some features of a situation salient for us; without it we would face a paralysing problem of combinatorial explosion. The unconscious does much of the work even when we evaluate our options consciously, taking care of much of the sense as I write, as well as the grammar (‘how do I know what I think till I see what I say?,’ as E. M. Forster is supposed to have asked). None of this is usually seen as a threat to our free will, nor should it be. It would be threatening if the unconscious processes deeply involved in shaping our thought, directing our attention and sometimes even in directly driving our behaviour were the processes postulated by Freud; if their content was at odds with the contents we reflectively endorse. But though our implicit attitudes do sometimes diverge from our explicit attitudes, with regard to the overwhelming majority of our unconscious processes, nothing like this is true. Instead, these processes are either too low-level to be described as having a content at all, or they have contents we endorse.

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Free will might be threatened in cases in which we find ourselves acting on our implicit attitudes because we do not have the conscious resources to inhibit them, and those implicit attitudes diverge from our consciously endorsed values (see Gendler 2009 for discussion). But cases like this, though not rare, are far from the norm. Most of the time we act in ways that accord with and express our genuine values: we act as we do because that action is the best thing for us to do, given what we believe and what we value. Whether the decision to act is one we take consciously (whatever that actually means; see Levy 2005 for discussion) just doesn’t seem relevant to whether it is our decision. Nothing in the experimental work conducted by Wegner, Libet, or those who have built on their results suggests that we don’t routinely make decisions in accordance with our plans, policies, and values. Moreover, nothing in these results shows that our deliberation is not causally efficacious: we decide as we do because we have thought about it and come to a conclusion. The precise timing of the ensuing act, in relation to our awareness of action initiation, seems simply to be irrelevant. One way to bring out the force of this point is to ask what difference it would make were our conscious feeling of intending simultaneous with, rather than slightly lagging behind, the neural events that cause our actions. How would this make any difference at all? What extra control would it give us? Every day, we learn a little more about the neural and psychological processes involved in deliberation and action. Some of this new knowledge—like the knowledge of the ways in which we sometimes act on attitudes of which we fail to be even aware—might reasonably be taken as showing that free will is a little rarer than we thought. But the threats we find are not global; they do not threaten free will in its entirety. They show, at most, only that we lack it on specific occasions. We should welcome this new knowledge, because it can enable us to expand the sphere in which we act freely. We can do so without worrying that it risks stripping us of freedom altogether.

Chapter Eleven

Feminist Philosophy in Australasia Catriona Mackenzie

In comparison with other disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, philosophy internationally is still very much male dominated, comparable more to physics than to English or anthropology. This is also true of Australasian philosophy. 1 In Australia in 2008, for example, there were only two female philosophy professors in the country, while women held less than 25 percent of continuing academic philosophy positions, and only 13 percent of senior positions. 2 The figures for New Zealand are comparable. Given this significant underrepresentation—or perhaps because of it—the contribution made by women philosophers in Australasia to the development of feminist philosophy internationally is quite remarkable. My aim in this chapter is to provide a brief conceptual history of the development of Australasian feminist philosophy and to highlight its contribution to the field internationally. This contribution is diverse. Australasian feminist philosophers have made significant contributions in history of philosophy, political philosophy, Continental philosophy, ethical theory, moral psychology, bioethics, and even logic. It is not possible fully to do justice to this diversity in one chapter. What I intend to do, therefore, is to concentrate on three main themes and to bring out some of the conceptual connections between them. First, I want to motivate the project of feminist critique of the history of philosophy, including the history of political philosophy. Understanding this critical project of textual reinterpretation is crucial for understanding later developments in Australasian feminist philosophy. Second, Australian feminist philosophers have been particularly interested in questions arising from the representation of female embodiment in philosophy and psychoanalysis. I hope to explain the reasons for this interest, its connection with debates about biological essentialism and the relation between sex and gender, and its connection with a more general theoretical concern with understanding the significance of embodiment for subjectivity and agency. Third, feminist philosophers from Australasia have made significant contributions to debates about justice in political philosophy and to recent developments in feminist 109

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ethics and bioethics. I will discuss some of these contributions, and explain their conceptual connections to aspects of the first two themes. Before I start it is worth mentioning that in Australia the development of feminist philosophy was quite closely linked to psychoanalysis and Continental philosophy. French philosophy and French feminism, in particular, had a major conceptual influence on the work of Australian feminists, particularly during the 1980s and 1990s. Elizabeth Grosz, who was for many years associated with Sydney University before taking up positions at Monash and then in the United States, was a key figure in translating these currents of French thought into an Australian context. In this chapter I will have to assume, rather than being able to discuss in any detail, this intellectual background, the way it was translated into an Australian context, and its continuing influence even in the work of feminists who work more within the analytical tradition of Anglo-American philosophy. FEMINISM AND THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY The male-dominated nature of the philosophy profession has a history as long as that of philosophy itself. This is not to deny that there have been important women philosophers scattered throughout its varied history. But their role has often been that of ancillaries to their male mentors and their contributions to the discipline have often been marginalised. These contributions are now being recognised by feminist reinterpretative histories. Within Australia, Karen Green and Jacqueline Broad, both at Monash University, have done important work bringing to light the contributions of previous generations of women philosophers (Green 1995; Broad 2002; Broad and Green 2007, 2009). However the masculinism of philosophy is not just a matter of the marginalisation of women philosophers. It is also profoundly enmeshed in the intellectual history of the discipline—in the way in which crucial concepts and distinctions have been understood and in the associations between these concepts and distinctions, on the one hand, and on the other, metaphors and ideals of masculinity and femininity. The work of Australian feminist philosophers has been central to the feminist philosophical project of deconstructing the operation of these metaphors and ideals in philosophical thought. Two prominent early contributions to this project, those of Genevieve Lloyd and Carole Pateman, had a substantial impact on subsequent work in feminist philosophy, both in Australia and internationally. 3 When she was appointed to the chair of philosophy at UNSW (University of New South Wales) in 1987, Genevieve Lloyd was the first woman ever appointed as a professor of philosophy in Australia. She is currently emeritus professor of philosophy at UNSW. The significance of Lloyd’s work and her influence on the development of feminist philosophy in Australia and internationally cannot be underestimated. Many of her former female PhD students, myself included, now hold senior positions in philosophy both in Australia and overseas, and we in turn have supervised students who, through us, have been indirectly influenced by her philosophical method.

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Lloyd is somewhat uncomfortable identifying herself as a feminist philosopher. She has published in a wide range of areas in philosophy, but in particular the history of philosophy with a special focus on the work of the seventeenth-century philosopher Benedict de Spinoza (Lloyd 1994, 1996, 2001; Gatens and Lloyd 1999). Since her D.Phil. at Oxford on themes of time and tense, she has also been interested in understanding the temporal dimensions of human experience. In her book Being in Time (1993a), these different philosophical preoccupations converge in an insightful reading of philosophical and literary conceptions of temporal selfhood from Augustine to Proust and Virginia Woolf. Nevertheless, Lloyd is perhaps most widely known for her book The Man of Reason, which was first published in 1984, a few years prior to her appointment as professor of philosophy at UNSW, when she was senior lecturer at the Australian National University. The aim of The Man of Reason is to undertake what Michel Foucault has called ‘a history of the present’; that is, to show how we have come by certain of our philosophical ideals of reason. Lloyd’s central argument is that although the ideal of a universal, sex-neutral conception of reason has been central to philosophy since its inception, the history of philosophy shows that philosophy has not in fact achieved this ideal. Rather, philosophical conceptions of reason have been articulated, both implicitly and explicitly, in relation to conceptions of masculinity and femininity. More specifically, reason has been defined in association with ideals of masculinity and in opposition to ideals of femininity. It is important to stress that Lloyd’s argument is not a thesis about women’s historical marginalisation from philosophy. While this marginalisation may explain the philosophical association between ideals of reason and ideals of masculinity, there is no straightforward correlation between women and metaphors of the feminine and men and metaphors of the masculine. Nor is her thesis a psychological thesis to the effect that women reason differently from men. It is a metaphilosophical thesis about the structure of philosophical concepts. 4 Lloyd argues that the articulation of ideals of reason in terms of ideals of masculinity is not merely a descriptive device, nor does it operate within philosophical texts at a merely metaphorical level. Rather the distinction between masculinity and femininity functions within many texts in the history of philosophy within a wider network of distinctions—such as reason and nature, mind and body, reason and emotion, culture and nature, public and private. These distinctions are not neutral. Rather, one term within the dichotomy is valorised, so that, for example, reason, mind, masculinity, and culture are defined in opposition to emotion, the body, femininity, and nature. Lloyd does not claim that these distinctions and associations operate in the same way throughout the history of philosophy. She is careful to show how, in the work of Plato and Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, Descartes, Hume, Rousseau, Kant, and Hegel these distinctions and associations are articulated differently. Nevertheless, she does argue that insofar as ideals of ‘reason’ designate what is taken to be commendable, the commendable has historically been defined in opposition to whatever is associated with the ‘feminine.’ But why should present-day philosophers be concerned with the way ideals of reason have been articulated in the history of philosophy? Because,

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Lloyd argues, philosophy is continuous with its history. Lloyd is not claiming that the concerns and problems of contemporary philosophy are identical with those that concerned earlier philosophers, nor that the conceptual resources of philosophy have not expanded over the centuries. However she does think that the way contemporary philosophical problems are framed is shaped by the way in which past philosophers conceptualised those problems. Her concern then is with how present ideals of reason have been shaped by the historical association between masculinity and reason. If Lloyd’s thesis is correct, what is the appropriate response? Lloyd argues that we cannot simply appropriate existing ideals of reason for women—because these ideals have been structured around conceptions of masculinity and articulated in relation to a series of problematic dualisms in which whatever is associated with femininity has been devalued. Nor should we simply reverse old hierarchies of value and affirm the value of femininity and its associations with nature and emotion—for conceptions of femininity have also been shaped by these very hierarchies. Rather, the feminist critique of historical ideals of reason points to the need for a fundamental conceptual revision of traditional philosophical concepts and oppositions, such as those between reason and emotion, nature and culture, masculine and feminine, mind and body, and public and private. In Lloyd’s view this conceptual revision is required not just on feminist grounds. What is valuable about feminist critique is that by reconsidering traditional philosophical problems from a new perspective, it is able to show why such conceptual revision is needed. But the aim of feminist philosophy should not be to develop a new, distinctively woman-centred philosophy. Its aim should rather be the broad project of developing philosophical frameworks that yield better understandings of our concepts. I am very sympathetic to Lloyd’s conception of feminist philosophy as a project of conceptual revision and later in the chapter I will discuss some of the ways that contemporary Australasian feminist philosophers are engaged in this kind of project. The focus of Carole Pateman’s work is the history of classical liberal political philosophy, in particular the social contract tradition. Like Lloyd, Pateman’s view is that analysing the history of our concepts is essential for understanding the role they play in our present theoretical frameworks and hence for the task of conceptual and political revision. Pateman would not identify herself as an Australasian feminist philosopher. She was born and raised in the United Kingdom, received her doctorate from Oxford, and since 1990 has been a professor of political science at UCLA, where she is currently distinguished professor. However, during the 1980s she was reader in government at the University of Sydney, and it was during this time that she published her book The Sexual Contract (1988), which has not only been highly influential internationally, but also played a crucial role in the development of Australasian feminist philosophy. Successive variants of social contract theory have been central to Western political thought since Hobbes. Their basic premise is that the exercise of political authority is only legitimate if it is based on the consent, actual or implied, of the governed. In the social contract tradition, such consent is represented through the model of a contractual exchange, in which individuals agree to forfeit their natural liberty in exchange for civil freedom. While

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civil freedom entails restrictions on individual liberty and obligations to the body politic, the forfeit of natural liberty is rational according to social contract theorists because civil society provides protections against the insecurities of the state of nature. Pateman argues, however, that there are deep tensions within social contract theory and liberalism more generally. These tensions emerge in social contract theorists’ analysis of the position of women in relation to civil society and in their views of the marriage contract. On the one hand, social contract theory is premised on the natural liberty and equality of all individuals. On the other hand, social contract theorists have traditionally attempted to justify as natural both women’s subjection to men within the private sphere of the family and their exclusion from civil society. On Pateman’s reading, the contract among individuals that founds civil society turns out to be a fraternal contract among men that legitimates not only political authority but also the domination of women. The universal freedom and equality of contractual liberal civil society is thus a political fiction: ‘Sexual difference is political difference; sexual difference is the difference between freedom and subjection’ (1988: 6). The marriage contract perpetuates this fiction, insofar as it represents women’s subjection to men’s authority within the family as voluntary. In fact, traditional marriage presupposes male sex-right, a right initially acquired in her analysis not by contract but by force. 5 Pateman’s boldest claim is that women’s exclusion from the social contract reveals a deeper problem with the contractarian approach to social relations: that it functions by creating social and political relationships of domination and subordination. While the social relations made possible by contractual exchange are represented as equal and mutually beneficial, what they actually establish are relations of obedience (in exchange for protection) and inequality. For when we look at the actual contracts involving persons (rather than say material goods) which are supposed to exemplify civil freedom, contracts such as the employment contract and the marriage contract, it is clear that in such contracts a person forfeits her liberty to dispose of her person as she chooses. Pateman argues that contract theory is able to present such subjection as freedom because it assumes a certain (fictitious) view of personhood. In particular it presumes that a person can be separated from her bodily attributes and capacities; that persons own what Pateman, following Locke, calls ‘the property in their persons’ and that civil personhood is constituted by such ownership. Freedom is the ability to dispose of that property, by contracting it out for use as one chooses. On the basis of this fiction it looks as though the employer, for instance, is simply contracting with the worker for purchase of his or her labour power. In fact, however, the employer is purchasing the right of disposal of the worker’s body and person—from which his capacities cannot be separated, suggesting that the distinction between the employment contract and wage slavery is not as hard and fast as it first appears. According to Pateman, a similar mystification is implicit in contemporary defences of the prostitution and surrogacy contracts. Where once contract theory declared that women, by virtue of their natural subjection to men, did not own the property in their persons, contemporary versions of contract theory occlude the specificity of women’s embodiment by representing pros-

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titution and surrogacy as contractual exchanges between supposedly sexneutral persons for the use of ‘services’ rather than for the use of women’s bodies. Thus prostitution is represented as the exchange of ‘sexual services’ for payment, while surrogacy is represented as a contract for use of ‘bodily services,’ as though these services are quite separate from the bodies and persons of those who provide them. Despite the representation of such contracts as equal exchanges, the fact that these services are not separable from the bodies of the women who provide them highlights the extent to which, within contemporary contractarian thought, sexual difference still marks out relations of domination and subordination. Pateman’s reading of the social contract tradition is bold and controversial. One issue raised by this reading is the relationship between classical stories of the social contract and contemporary institutions. Even if we accept that social contract theories functioned historically to exclude women from citizenship, does this show that contractarian thought and contemporary institutions founded on notions of contractual obligations among citizens are intrinsically inimical to women’s interests? Pateman herself does not address this issue, although it has been addressed in recent work by Martha Nussbaum (2006). Nussbaum argues that the social contract tradition is ill suited to tackling a range of contemporary problems of justice, in particular our obligations towards the disabled, non-citizens (for example international obligations of justice towards the global poor), and nonhuman animals. Other feminist theorists, such as U.S. philosophers Elizabeth Anderson (1993), Virginia Held (1993), and Eva Kittay (1997), have also argued that it is a distortion to represent all social relations within civil society as contractual. Relations of friendship, love, dependency, and familial ties, in particular, cannot properly be construed as contractual. Lloyd’s re-reading of the history of philosophy and Pateman’s critique of the social contract tradition point to two themes that have been taken up in the work of other Australasian feminist philosophers. The first is that equality cannot be achieved by simply incorporating women or notions of femininity into conceptual and institutional structures from which historically they have been excluded. The second is that a central task of feminist theorising is to challenge prevailing cultural representations of women’s embodiment. These two themes are interwoven in debates from the late 1980s into the 1990s about embodiment, equality and difference, the sex/gender distinction, and essentialism. Central to these debates is the notion of ‘sexual difference.’ CRITIQUES OF EQUALITY OF SAMENESS AND THE SEX/ GENDER DISTINCTION The notion of ‘sexual difference’ is often articulated in contrast to an equality of ‘sameness,’ which is usually associated with the liberal feminist tradition. Liberal feminists have typically argued that women have the same rational and moral capacities as men and so should have access to the same opportu-

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nities for participation in social and political life. A central focus of their concerns has been to redress the barriers to women’s equal participation in social and political life, such as lack of provisions for childcare and workplace structures that make it difficult for women to balance family responsibilities with work. An important and influential argument along these lines is Susan Moller Okin’s book, Justice, Gender, and the Family, published in 1989. Like Pateman, Moller Okin might not have considered herself an Australasian feminist philosopher since for most of her academic career she lived in the United States. She was born and raised in New Zealand, completed her undergraduate degree at the University of Auckland, then took a B.Phil. at Oxford, and completed a PhD at Harvard. She held academic positions at Auckland University, Vassar College, Brandeis University, Harvard, and Stanford. Moller Okin died at the age of fifty-seven in 2004. Throughout her career, her central focus was on the relationships among conceptions of citizenship, justice, equality, and gender. In Justice, Gender, and the Family (1989), she engaged in a detailed examination of the work of influential contemporary theorists of justice, such as Michael Walzer, Robert Nozick, and John Rawls. She argued that, with the exception of Walzer, most contemporary theorists of justice either failed to raise the question of justice between the genders or within the family, or simply assumed that the institution of the family is just. Okin’s argument is that this myopia is problematic for three main reasons. First, any satisfactory theory of justice must include women and the family. Second, gender-based inequality within the sphere of the family is bound up with inequality in the broader sphere of civil society. Women will never achieve genuine equality of opportunity within the workplace, in political life, or in the legal and economic spheres so long as family structures are unjust—that is, so long as women bear most of the responsibility for labour within the household and for the raising of children. Third, to be a good citizen requires having a sense of justice and being able to take into account the perspectives of others. But these capacities are learnt within families, which play a crucial role in the socialisation and moral development of children. However, if family structures are themselves unjust, she asks, how are children going to develop the capacities necessary for citizenship? Okin develops from her critique of contemporary theories of justice wide-ranging recommendations at the level of social policy to redress gender-based injustices. These recommendations are aimed at redressing women’s economic and social vulnerability within marriage and post-divorce, and focus on shared parenting, custody arrangements, and family-friendly work structures to enable both sexes to care for children, the ill and the elderly, and a raft of other measures. Despite her criticisms of the liberal tradition, Okin’s work nevertheless owes a great deal to this tradition and in particular to John Rawls’s reinterpretation of the social contract tradition. 6 Theorists of sexual difference are more sceptical about the liberal tradition. For example, in 1986 Marion Tapper, who worked at Macquarie University, University of Queensland, and the University of Melbourne, published an influential article in the Australasian Journal of Philosophy entitled ‘Can a Feminist Be a Liberal?’ (1986a). Tapper answers this question in the negative, arguing that the insistence of liberal feminism on abstract ‘formal’

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equality obscures the specific needs of women arising from their different embodiment, making the denial of women’s specificity a condition of their entry into the public sphere. It is only as abstract, autonomous individuals that women can be accommodated within civil society, which is why pregnancy, childcare, or care of the sick or elderly create real problems for women entering into the workforce. Tapper concedes that feminist arguments for paid maternity and parental leave, work-based childcare, and so on have often appealed to liberal ideals of equality. However, she claims that such arguments are in many ways inconsistent with the main assumptions of liberalism. Strictly speaking, she thinks, liberals should see the having of children, for example, as a ‘private,’ ‘individual’ choice for which women, rather than the state, should take responsibility. Tapper also questions whether the public/private distinction has really shifted. She points out that women’s entry into the public sphere has often meant not only that women do a double shift, but also that much of the work that women do in the public sphere—nursing, childcare, service jobs, menial factory work—simply mirrors their roles in the private sphere. Saying this is not to denigrate this kind of work. But the problem is that work of this kind is given a secondary status within societies organised in terms of a sharp public/private split and in which the conception of the public sphere is extrapolated from certain ideals of manliness and from certain assumptions about the roles of men. The result is firstly that the work of women within the public sphere which does not fit in easily with those ideals of manliness is given secondary status both in terms of financial renumeration and social importance, and secondly that women who work in so-called ‘masculine’ occupations are expected to do so as men. Tapper’s argument, then, is that rather than insisting on women’s ‘sameness,’ what is required is a genuine recognition of sexual difference. Tapper’s claim is that liberalism is unable to provide the basis for such recognition: ‘By insisting on the non-differences between the sexes it deprives women of the very basis from which they could speak effectively in the public world. What is required is a recognition of the different social position and different experience from which women speak, and development of a political language which takes account of this’ (Tapper 1986a: 46). I would argue that liberal theory can and does accommodate a greater diversity of views than Tapper allows. Nevertheless the question she raises, of how to move, both theoretically and practically, beyond the impasse of thinking that women are either equal and the same as men, or different and unequal, is still a central question for feminist philosophy. In the 1980s and 1990s this question was bound up with debates about sex, gender, and essentialism, centring on the issue of women’s lived experience of their embodiment and the way women’s embodiment is culturally represented. Some versions of liberal feminism are premised on an ideal of androgyny, or the presumption that the ultimate aim of feminist social and political reform should be to blur the distinction between the sexes. One version of this ideal targets women’s reproductive capacities as an obstacle to the achievement of equality and emphasises the importance for women of extending control over the reproductive process. Another version is the social constructionist view that bodily differences between the sexes at the level of

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primary and secondary biological characteristics are less important than the social and cultural meanings and psychological characteristics ascribed to those differences. On this view, although there will always be certain physiological differences between the sexes, the aim of feminism should be to erase the vast psychological differences between ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ characteristics and to dislodge the connection between men and ‘masculinity’ and women and ‘femininity,’ making ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ characteristics freely available to ‘gender-neutral’ persons of either sex. In a highly influential article titled ‘A Critique of the Sex/Gender Distinction,’ originally published in 1983 and republished in 1996 in her book Imaginary Bodies, Moira Gatens, who is now professor of philosophy at Sydney University, criticised such degendering proposals as misguided. In her view such proposals are based on the false assumption that masculinity and femininity as characteristics have social value in abstraction from the types of bodies with which they are associated. However, Gatens argues, ‘It is not masculinity per se that is valorised in our culture, but the masculine male’ (1996: 15). Gatens’s more general critique is that feminist theorists who argue that gender is more important than sex just reverse the view of biological reductionists who regard biological characteristics as causally over-determining. Both set up a false opposition between culture and biology, and both share a common and problematic view of human beings as passively shaped by forces external to us—either biological or social. In deemphasising the significance of the body to identity, gender theory is premised on a conception of the human subject as essentially a consciousness who is only accidentally embodied. Even when gender theorists discuss the role of feminine socialisation practices that shape the body, the body is still represented as a kind of passive surface on which social meanings are inscribed. Furthermore, gender theory represents the relation between sex and gender as arbitrary and in doing so erases the significance of sexual difference. In 1989,Val Plumwood, who held positions at Macquarie University and the Australian National University, published a response to Gatens’s article (Plumwood 1989). Before her sudden death in 2008, Plumwood had become highly influential internationally for her work in ecofeminist philosophy (see e.g. Plumwood 1993, 2002). In her response to Gatens, she argues that Gatens’s criticisms do not provide sufficient reasons for rejecting the sex/gender distinction itself, only some versions of it. Plumwood argues that the distinction is more useful for feminists than the notion of ‘sexual difference,’ not only because it points to the variability, among members of a sex, of certain characteristics or functions traditionally associated with that sex but also because it provides the basis for criticising stereotypical or ideological representations of masculinity and femininity and for dissociating such representations from biological maleness and femaleness. The distinction thus provides a platform for responding to biologically determinist conceptions of masculine and feminine characteristics. Plumwood argues, however, that gender theorists need not think that the body plays no role in shaping our subjectivities. In Plumwood’s view, the appropriate way of understanding the relation between sex and gender is to see the body or sex as the foundation or basis upon which gender is constructed. Gender is a social construction, an interpretation or elaboration of the meaning of masculinity and femininity on the

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basis of, or from, sex. So gender is about sex. This view enables a distinction to be drawn between sex and gender, while acknowledging that they interact causally, in both directions: gender is about sex, but conceptions of gender also shape our interpretations of sex or the biological data. I tend to agree with Plumwood that Gatens’s objections to the sex/gender distinction are not decisive and that the distinction has some important conceptual and political uses. However, Plumwood’s critique misses an important dimension of Gatens’s work on embodiment, which is to emphasise the connections among the sexed body, the social meanings of gender identity, and the qualitative distinctiveness of the way in which men and women live or experience their sexual identities. For example, Gatens argues that while a male transexual or a ‘feminine’ male may identify with cultural conceptions of femininity, or certain aspects of them, and may have experiences that are socially inscribed as ‘feminine,’ he will experience his ‘femininity’ in a way that is qualitatively different from the way in which a woman, that is, a biological and social female, experiences her femininity. The same behaviours or characteristics have different personal and social significances when acted out by male and female subjects. Think of the difference between Michael Jackson’s ‘femininity’ and Madonna’s ‘femininity.’ The suggestion is, then, that while our sex/gender identities may to some extent be performative, that is, a matter of acting out certain behaviours, gestures, styles, and so on that are socially or culturally coded as masculine or feminine, our identities are not entirely a matter of performance. 7 Central to Gatens’s approach to sexual difference and embodiment is the notion of the ‘imaginary body.’ In her earlier work on embodiment, Gatens’s understanding of the ‘imaginary body’ draws heavily on the psychoanalytic notion of the body image, as a psychic representation of one’s own body. In the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan and the phenomenology of MerleauPonty, for example, the formation of a unified body image is a precondition for the formation of subjectivity, and both the body image and subjectivity are constituted by social relations (see especially Lacan 1977 and MerleauPonty 1962). Gatens’s argument is that our lived experience of our bodies is structured by these psychic images or imaginary representations of our bodies. Further, because our subjectivities are necessarily formed in the context of social relations, our own body images will inevitably incorporate social and cultural representations of the meaning of bodily differences, including differences between the sexes. This does not mean, of course, that the body images of all women or all men will be the same. Because each person has a different psychic history, each individual actively constructs his or her own distinctive psychic representation of his or her body. Nevertheless these individual representations are constructed in relation to the culturally available interpretations of the significance of bodily differences and in relation to cultural practices and institutions. So in a culture in which, for example, ideals of femininity are bound up with body shape or breast size, these ideals are likely to be incorporated, in different ways, into women’s psychic representations of their bodies. The notion of the imaginary body thus undercuts any clear-cut distinction between biology and culture. The body and the individual psyche are mutually constituted through the complex interrelation of biological, social, cultural, and historical determinants. Our lived experi-

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ence of embodied subjectivity is the experience of this complex interrelation, as mediated by our own psychic representations. REPRESENTATIONS OF WOMEN’S EMBODIMENT A central theme in the work of a number of Australasian feminist philosophers, Gatens included, is that cultural representations of femininity—whether in the history of philosophy, psychoanalysis, literature, or in popular culture—have taken man as the human norm and defined woman in relation to that norm. Sometimes the relation is understood as one of complementarity, sometimes as whatever masculinity is not. There is considerable disagreement, however, about how feminist philosophers should respond to such representations. Lloyd, as I have already indicated, while arguing for the need for conceptual revision, eschews the project of developing a womancentred philosophy, as does Gatens who argues that insofar as our relations to our embodiment are always socially mediated, the notion that female sexuality could be represented somehow separately from masculinity is mistaken (Gatens 1996: ch. 3). In contrast, Elizabeth Grosz tends to interpret the notion of ‘sexual difference’ in terms of a fundamental difference between the sexes and to see the project of feminist philosophy as the articulation of autonomous representations of female embodiment and sexuality. I want to discuss briefly two strands of Grosz’s work, focusing mainly on her books published in the late 1980s to mid 1990s (Grosz 1989, 1994, 1995). One strand is her work on a philosophy of the body. The other strand, which owes much to the work of French feminist Luce Irigaray, is the project of articulating an autonomous representation of femininity. In Grosz’s reading of the history of philosophy, two conceptual oppositions are pivotal: mind/body and masculine/feminine. She argues that the body has almost always been represented in opposition to reason, the mind, or the soul, as mere matter, and as the source of disruptive desires that threaten the calm operations of the rational mind. In Descartes’ dualism, for example, mind and body are posited as two distinct, although interacting substances, with mind represented as the active seat of the soul, of consciousness and the understanding. The significance of psychoanalysis, in Grosz’s view, is that it challenged the Cartesian conception of consciousness as transparent to itself, rational and knowable, and emphasised the importance of corporeality in the constitution of subjectivity. Nevertheless, in Grosz’s view, the legacy of Cartesianism is still with us, not only in philosophy but also in many approaches to scientific knowledge, which represent the body as a complex organic biological system that can be understood purely objectively, or as a mechanism, instrument, or tool to be used to achieve our purposes (Grosz 1994: ch. 1). In contrast to the primacy of mind and consciousness in philosophy, one aim of Grosz’s philosophical project is to develop a philosophy of the body, building on psychoanalysis, the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty and Michel Foucault’s analysis of the body as the site of disciplinary power. In

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Grosz’s view, a philosophy of the body aims to explain how a corporeal being can also be a conscious agent, with a distinctive point of view and a psychic interiority. She is interested in showing, as she puts it, ‘how the subject’s exterior is psychically constructed; and conversely, how the processes of social inscription of the body’s surface construct a psychical interior’ (Grosz 1995: 104). There are clear affinities between this aspect of Grosz’s work and Gatens’s work on the imaginary body. Further, although articulated in very different terms, there are resonances between both projects and recent work in cognitive science on the embodied nature of mental capacities and the role of social and cultural practices in shaping these capacities. These resonances are no doubt due to the common influence of Merleau-Ponty. The second strand of Grosz’s work focuses on the alignment of the mind/ body distinction with the masculine/feminine opposition and is very much shaped as a response to the various representations of female sexuality in psychoanalysis—as a complement to male sexuality, as castration or lack, as the essentially mysterious and unknowable, as passive, as fluid, as disorderly, and so on. Following Irigaray, Grosz argues that these cultural representations inform women’s lived experience of their embodiment, their sexuality, and their subjectivity. Challenging such representations and articulating alternative representations of female sexuality are thus critical to changing women’s lived experience. Controversially, however, Irigaray and Grosz think that the only way of doing so is for women to appropriate, or mimic, patriarchal representations as their own. 8 The argument for this claim is that there is no space outside of patriarchal social relations from which to undertake such a challenge. I think Grosz’s strategy is problematic for a couple of reasons. First, it assumes a very homogeneous, static conception of social relations, whereas I would argue that social relations are dynamic and changing, and representations of femininity are not singular but multiple, contested, and often in conflict. An alternative strategy is to make use of these multiple and contested representations of femininity in order to point to tensions and contradictions in cultural values and to develop counterrepresentations. Second, this strategy risks reinforcing negative or stereotypical representations of femininity and collapsing back into some form of essentialism, repositing fundamental differences between men and women based on anatomical and/or psychological differences. Grosz describes her position as ‘strategic essentialism.’ As she puts it, the aim is not to speak the final truth about femininity or female sexuality but to reclaim such representations as possible starting points for an articulation—from women’s own perspectives—of their embodiment and sexuality (Grosz 1989: ch. 4, 1994: ch. 8). I remain unconvinced that appropriating in order to criticise from within cultural representations of femininity that have historically functioned to justify women’s social and political subordination is the best starting point for such a project.

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RECENT DEVELOPMENTS: ETHICS, APPLIED ETHICS, AND BIOETHICS Grosz, following Irigaray, often represents her project as developing an ‘ethics of sexual difference.’ In her work, however, this project remains somewhat programmatic, abstract, and utopian—looking to a future in which relations between the sexes might be different. In the work of other Australasian feminists, however, the project of feminist ethics is understood rather more concretely. There are two different, if overlapping strands, of feminist work in ethics. One strand lies more within the Continental tradition, the other within the analytical tradition. Within the Continental tradition Rosalyn Diprose, who is now professor of philosophy at the UNSW, has done interesting work that aims to anchor feminist ethics in a philosophy of the body and in an alternative understanding of social relations than the contractarian tradition (Diprose 1994). Diprose defines her approach to ethics in contrast to the emphasis in much moral philosophy on the articulation of universal principles valid for all people. Taking up the original Greek meaning of ‘ethos’ as habitat, or those habits and ways of life that shape our characters, she argues that ethics must be grounded in an understanding of the way our identities are shaped by our place in the world. This explains Diprose’s dual focus on the significance of embodiment and social relationships in shaping our identities. Diprose’s approach to embodiment draws on two main sources. One is Foucault’s analysis of the way social norms and practices—which Foucault equates with the operations of power—shape our subjectivity not only through shaping our beliefs and desires but also by marking and shaping the body—for example, through the inculcation of bodily habits. Another source is the phenomenological tradition and in particular Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the lived body as the locus of our engagement with the world and the expression of our subjectivity. Within this tradition, she also draws on the work of feminist phenomenologists, such as Iris Marion Young (1990: chs. 8–9), who have tried to articulate the ways in which women’s bodily engagement with the world differs from men’s by virtue of both women’s different embodiment and by the structure of social relations between the sexes. Diprose’s analysis of social relations draws on feminist work in ethics and moral psychology, which understands the self as relational—that is, as constituted in and by our relations with others—and on the Hegelian tradition, which similarly understands subjectivity as constituted by intersubjectivity. 9 One aspect of her appropriation of the Hegelian tradition that is particularly interesting is her proposed alternative to the contractarian model of social relations. This alternative draws on the work of Marcel Mauss (1989) to argue that social bonds are constituted not so much by exchange, but by the gift. In a genuine gift relation, rather than in commodified versions of it—for example in giving birth or in giving oneself to another in a sexual encounter—the giver gives part of him- or herself to the recipient and in doing so establishes a specific relationship, involving mutual obligations, between them. Diprose argues that rethinking social relations around the gift rather than contract sheds new light on debates in bioethics, such as the

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surrogacy debates. She suggests that what is wrong with surrogacy contracts is not surrogate motherhood per se, but surrogacy contracts, which transform a gift relationship into a relationship of contractual exchange. 10 For Diprose, then, an ethics of sexual difference is an ethics that, because it recognises the relational and embodied nature of the self, is attentive to the ethical import of differences between people, including sexual difference. Many feminist ethicists working in the analytical philosophical tradition share Diprose’s view of the self as both embodied and relational, even if they might draw, at least to some extent, on a different conceptual framework in arguing for such a view. Where more analytically inclined feminist ethicists are likely to disagree with Diprose is with her conclusion that feminist ethics should not try to develop an account of the good life or engage in the normative project of articulating moral principles. In her view any such project is inevitably exclusionary and denigrates some people and modes of life. However, I would argue that while we must be ever alert to the dangers of exclusionary ethical views, feminism by its very nature involves taking a stand on certain issues, even if there will inevitably be disagreement on what this stand should be. And I think Diprose herself takes such a stand in her analysis of surrogacy. There are three main areas in ethics where the work of Australasian feminist philosophers situated more within the analytical tradition has had an international impact. One is in the area of applied philosophy and bioethics. Since the 1980s Australasian feminists have made important contributions to debates in applied philosophy on topics such as affirmative action and discrimination, free speech and pornography, abortion, surrogate motherhood, and reproductive technologies, including stem cell research and cloning. To mention just two prominent examples, Rae Langton who worked at Monash, the Australia National University (ANU), Sheffield and Edinburgh, before taking up her current position at MIT, has had a substantial impact on philosophical debates concerning free speech and pornography (Langton 1990, 1993b; Langton and West 1999). Langton has also made important contributions to the history of philosophy and ethical theory, particularly in the area of Kant scholarship (Langton 1998). Susan Dodds, formerly Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wollongong and currently dean of the faculty of arts at the University of Tasmania, was one of the founders of the International Association for Feminist Approaches to Bioethics. Her work lies at the intersection of bioethics, feminist theory, and political philosophy and she has also made substantial contributions to Australian health care ethics at both the theoretical and public policy levels (Tong, Donchin, and Dodds 2004). The second area is in debates about justice at the intersection of ethics and political philosophy. Janna Thompson, who is professor of philosophy at La Trobe, is highly regarded internationally for her work on justice, including her contributions to debates about justice and indigenous peoples as well as debates about cosmopolitan and international justice (Thompson 1992, 2002). Gillian Brock, professor of philosophy at the University of Auckland, is also well known internationally for her work on cosmopolitanism and global justice and for her work on needs (Brock 1998; Brock and Meollendorf 2005; Brock and Brighouse 2005).

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The third area is in normative ethics and moral psychology. Some of the current feminist work in this area has been influenced by the work of Annette Baier, who is originally from New Zealand and who worked briefly at the University of Sydney in the 1960s before spending most of her career in the United States. Before Baier started writing about trust in the 1980s and 1990s (see Baier 1994: chs. 6–9), moral philosophers had not thought much about the nature of trust and the role of trust in moral interaction. Karen Jones, who is senior lecturer in philosophy at Melbourne University, has in some ways taken up Baier’s mantle and made important contributions to the literature on trust, as well as to theoretical work on the emotions (Jones 1996, 2004a, 2004b). Jeanette Kennett, who has held appointments at Monash and the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at ANU, and is currently professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, may not identify her work specifically as feminist philosophy, but it is nevertheless informed by a feminist sensibility. Kennett works on moral responsibility and more recently on mental illness and the self (Kennett 2001, 2007). My own work on autonomy, selfhood, and moral reflection tries to revise some of the ways in which these concepts are understood in the mainstream philosophical literature, building on theories of the relational and embodied self in both the Continental and analytical traditions (Mackenzie and Stoljar 2000). Inevitably my own interpretation of the history of feminist philosophy in Australasia has been partial. However, it seems to me that there has been a shift in Australasian feminist philosophy since the 1980s that might best be described as a coming of age. The pioneering work of feminist philosophers during the 1980s was, of necessity, mainly focused on critique. It aimed to bring to light the way in which femininity had been represented in philosophical and cultural discourses more generally and the way in which important philosophical concepts and ideals had been articulated in part through the exclusion of the feminine. In response to this kind of critique, many feminist philosophers developed an attitude of suspicion towards philosophy and took the view that feminist philosophy had to remain in some ways on the margins of the discipline, ever wary of the inherent masculinism of philosophical concepts. Some still hold this view and have found more comfortable intellectual homes outside philosophy. For others, however, the challenge lies in the process of conceptual revision. In undertaking this task, we draw on a range of different intellectual sources both inside and outside the discipline, including the writings of earlier generations of women thinkers who have hitherto been neglected. And we aim to show how philosophy shaped by a feminist sensibility not only brings fresh perspectives to old problems but can also help sharpen our focus on contemporary problems. NOTES 1. In this chapter the term ‘Australasia’ should be understood as referring to Australia and New Zealand. Thus references to ‘Australasian feminist philosophy’ are inclusive of New Zealand, as distinct from references to ‘Australia’ or ‘Australian feminist philosophy.’

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2. For a detailed analysis of women’s participation in philosophy in Australia, see Goddard (2008). By 2010, the number of female full professors had increased to seven. 3. Other important contributions to the feminist critique of history of philosophy by Australian feminist philosophers include Gatens (1991) and Deutscher (1997). 4. For more discussion of this issue, see Lloyd’s preface to the second edition of The Man of Reason (1993c). 5. For a critical analysis of this claim and of Pateman’s view that a fraternal sexual contract is the founding origin of contemporary social and political institutions, see Gatens (1996: ch. 6). 6. For a recent critical analysis by an Australian feminist philosopher of Rawls’s version of social contract theory and of Okin’s feminist appropriation of Rawls, see La Caze (2002b: ch. 4). 7. It should be noted that Gatens’s article was originally published before Judith Butler’s influential analysis of gender as performative (Butler 1990, 1993). In her analysis of the concept of ‘woman’ as a cluster concept (Stoljar 1995), Australian feminist philosopher Natalie Stoljar agrees with Gatens that gender cannot be understood as a purely social category and that the relationship between sex and gender is nonarbitrary: sex is a necessary component of gender. However she argues that female sex is not necessary for an individual to count as a woman, so long as the individual satisfies other elements of the concept ‘woman.’ 8. Irigaray’s strategy of mimicry has been the subject of extensive debate amongst feminist theorists. Among Australian feminist philosophers, both Lloyd (1993b) and Gatens (1996) have criticised this strategy, while Deutscher (2002) develops a qualified defence of Irigaray in response to such criticisms. 9. For work by Australasian feminist philosophers on the relational dimensions of selfhood see Bowden (1996) and Mackenzie and Stoljar (2000). 10. Diprose’s critique of surrogacy contracts and of contractarian thinking more generally is indebted to Pateman’s analysis of the sexual contract.

Chapter Twelve

Philosophy and Its Masters: The Transformations of Philosophy in Queensland Gary Malinas

Philosophies reflect the interests of masters to whom philosophers are beholden. Rarely have societies, their governments, and their institutions allowed philosophers the unfettered pursuit and publication of their researches. Sometimes the instruments of control are brutal: imprisonment, banishment, and execution have all made their mark on twentieth-century philosophy and on the history of philosophy. More commonly the instruments of control are indirect. Institutions decide whether to employ philosophers and in what numbers, and they define the institutional aims that they are expected to promote. These exercises of discretion are usually more effective than brutal methods in silencing philosophical views and practices that conflict with or are tangential to their employers’ projects. Moreover, they have the added advantage of leaving no martyrs in their wake. At their best, philosophers identify the fundamental presuppositions and assumptions of the societies and institutions to which they belong. They explore their consequences, test them for consistency, and compare them with alternatives. At their best, the only master that philosophers serve is reason itself, while recognising that norms of good reasoning carry their own presuppositions and assumptions that are not exempt from scrutiny. The reluctance of philosophers to shackle their examinations of social and institutional norms and the practices based upon them can put them in conflict with the aims and projects of the institutions that employ them. These conflicts become poignant when institutions are committed to parochial aims that define boundaries philosophers are prone to ignore. Philosophy in Queensland was beholden to Christian institutions during most of the first five decades of the University of Queensland. Special appointments were made to service the training of clergy. By the beginning of the 1960s, five of the seven staff listed in the Department of Philosophy were 125

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reverend gentlemen. This was a period of isolation for philosophy in Queensland. The subdepartments of theology and scholastic philosophy dominated the curriculum while the revolutions in philosophy that occurred during the first half of the twentieth century were largely ignored. The philosophical culture at the university changed during the 1960s with the appointments of new staff. They quickly shed the subdepartments and introduced a curriculum that reflected contemporary philosophical issues and methods. These embodied and encouraged a culture of critical analysis not only in dealing with issues within academic philosophy, but also in dealing with wider matters: the organisation of the university, the roles of the university in Queensland society, racism, Australia’s role in the Vietnam war, and others. Philosophy in Queensland entered a forty-year period of engagement with the wider philosophical community in Australasia and with Anglophone philosophers internationally. The culture of rational criticism and engagement persisted while staff came and went and while new programs were introduced (e.g., environmental philosophy and continental philosophy). Philosophers enjoyed one of those rare periods where they could pursue their professional projects unfettered by institutional constraints. The 1990s was a period of transformation for the university. It was transformed from a guild of academics who ran its affairs (with oversight from the university senate) to a corporate model where appointed executives ran its affairs. Academic concerns were made subservient to corporate goals and policies introduced by governments of the day. These new executives set priorities that were alien to a culture of critical analysis. The period of engagement that emerged in the 1960s came to an abrupt halt on 1 January 2001. The university declared the Department of Philosophy to be defunct, along with all the other departments in the university. The department’s members were distributed through a school of history, philosophy, religion, and classics. The eclipse of disciplinary identities that philosophers had chiseled for themselves has already begun to impact on philosophers and their work as they acquiesce to the demands of their new masters. What was advertised as a New Enlightenment in which artificial disciplinary boundaries are discarded disguised a rationale for culling the humanities. That cull has placed the philosophers that remain at the university in a state of limbo. They are frequently reminded that they are expected to meet the changing goals of their corporate bosses and just how insecure their own positions are. In the following I distinguish three epochs in philosophy in Queensland: a period of isolation from 1911 to 1961, a period of engagement that lasted until 2001, and a period of limbo that persists today. I will conclude with some comments on philosophy’s past in Queensland and the prospects for its future. THE FIRST FIFTY YEARS: 1911–1961 Philosophy was introduced into the curriculum of the Faculty of Arts when the university first offered courses in 1911. Elton Mayo, then a recent gradu-

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ate of Adelaide University who had studied under William Mitchell, was appointed to lecture the subject, and in 1919 he was made the inaugural chair of the new Department of Mental and Moral Philosophy. Like his mentor, his interests extended beyond philosophy to the emerging field of psychology, with particular interests in social and industrial psychology. Mayo resigned in 1923 to take up positions in North America where, from his position at the Harvard School of Business, he became a seminal contributor to issues in industrial psychology. His published contributions to philosophy consisted of a brief note in the journal Mind (1915) and a book, Democracy and Freedom (1919). In the latter, Mayo laments the failures of democratically elected governments to base policies on the ‘social will’ with the consequence that they ignore the complex civic structures through which the ‘social will’ is expressed. Democracy is ill served, he argues, when governments take control of institutions and shape opinions along politically partisan lines. Michael Scott Fletcher, a Methodist theologian, replaced Mayo. He did not publish any philosophy before or after his appointment. He remained in the chair until his retirement in 1938 from whence his influence extended beyond his tenure. It was under his guidance and influence that philosophy became subservient to Christian institutions that dominated its appointments and programs until 1961. When Scott Fletcher retired in 1938, the chair in philosophy was advertised internationally. The advertisement attracted applications from Karl Popper and Friedrich Weissman amongst others. Neither Popper nor Weissman made the short list. The successful applicant was Marquis Kyle. Kyle had been appointed as a lecturer in 1923, and over the next few years he published two articles on eighteenth-century British moral philosophy. In support of his application, the University of Queensland Senate Select Committee (1938) noted that, ‘he is known to be free from those embarrassing fads which have in some other universities afflicted professors of philosophy and caused trouble to the governing bodies.’ The same year that Kyle was elevated to the chair, Douglas Gasking was appointed to a lectureship for an initial five-year term. Gasking was a recent graduate of Cambridge where he studied with Ludwig Wittgenstein and John Wisdom. In the year following his appointment he published a widely discussed paper titled ‘Mathematics and the World’ (1940). In that essay, he seeks to explain the incorrigibility of mathematical propositions by taking them to be consequences of normative rules that govern the use of notations. He notes that this explanation of the incorrigibility of mathematics faces the following question: while mathematical propositions are consistent with the course of all future experiences, aren’t rules that govern the manipulation of symbols arbitrary, and couldn’t alternative systems of rules lead to consequences that were inconsistent with the formulae of arithmetic? It is built into the nature of rules that there are alternatives to them. Otherwise they are best described not as rules, but laws. This observation led Gasking to conclude that the explanation of the incorrigibility of arithmetical propositions by reference to rules for the manipulation of symbols was literally false, but nonetheless it was informative and suggestive. What it failed to account for was the normative or prescriptive force of the rules that constrain the theorems of arithmetic. Gasking responds to this

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problem by simply agreeing that there are alternative systems of rules that endorse theorems that are inconsistent with arithmetic, e.g., 4 × 2 = 12. He further argues that such alternative systems of arithmetic could be applied in the world, or at least in worlds that are similar to our own, but whose inhabitants employ different practices of measuring or counting than our own practices. Yet, in the scenarios that Gasking describes, they conduct their practical affairs as efficiently as we do using ordinary arithmetic in the guidance of our practical affairs. Gasking’s examples help to explain the normative and prescriptive force of mathematical propositions by showing them to be an essential part of our practices of counting and evaluating when counts have erred, our systems of measurement, and the laws of nature that govern our world. Gasking was not recommended for tenure at the end of his probationary five-year contract. C. F. Preseley, Kyle’s successor in the chair, reported that Kyle had expressed concerns about Gasking’s philosophical competence. Following an exchange of letters with philosophers at Cambridge who were familiar with Gasking’s work, the university senate decided to offer Gasking a further five-year contract in lieu of tenure. Gasking declined the senate’s offer. He moved to Canberra, and later to Melbourne where he was appointed to the chair of philosophy at Melbourne University. A collection of his essays under the title Language, Logic and Causation: Philosophical Writings of Douglas Gasking was published by Melbourne University Press in 1996. ENGAGEMENT: 1962–2000 C. F. Presley was appointed to the chair of philosophy following Kyle’s retirement in 1961. After shedding the subdepartments of theology and scholastic philosophy, Preseley oversaw the appointments of recent graduates of philosophy programs from universities in Australasia, Great Britain, and North America. They introduced a contemporary curriculum that gave prominence to formal logic, philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and philosophy of science. Queensland’s emergence from its philosophical isolation took place in 1964 when the Annual Congress of the Australasian Association of Philosophy was held at the University of Queensland for the first time. At Don Mannison’s suggestion, a stream of papers given at the 1964 congress was dedicated to discussing the identity theory of mind that Jack Smart of Adelaide University had formulated and defended in his essay ‘Sensations and Brain Processes’ (1959). Presley collected the papers that were delivered at the congress, wrote an introduction to them, and had them published by the University of Queensland Press in 1967 under the title The Identity Theory of Mind. The book was a state-of-the-art examination of the problems and prospects of a materialist view of experience, thought, and behaviour. It was widely read and became a point of departure for further discussions of materialist theories of mind. By far the longest essay in the collection is Brian Medlin’s ‘Ryle and the Mechanical Hypothesis.’ Medlin mounts a defence of Central State Materialism, this being a physicalist and causal theory of the mind, from a host of objections, including those that had

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been brought against it since the publication of Smart’s formulation and defence of the theory. Mannison and Medlin were among the then-recent appointees to Queensland. The curriculum that the new department set up brought the philosophy program in Queensland into step with programs in leading universities in the Anglophone world. Its honours graduates successfully moved into postgraduate research and teaching positions in Great Britain, North America, and Australia. Its staff were regular contributors to journals, and books authored or edited by them made significant contributions to the topics that they discussed. As staff resigned to take up positions elsewhere, their replacements were appointed on the basis of academic merit only. The curriculum evolved to meet the interests of new staff and the needs and interests of students, and to reflect the changing agendas of philosophy itself. While philosophy in Queensland became continuous with philosophy in the wider Australasian philosophical community, the department reflected the changing and sometimes conflicting currents within that community. Change and conflict are the fuels that drive philosophical debates. Those debates were played out in jointly taught courses, weekly research seminars, and the daily banter that occurred over coffees, lunches, and in each other’s offices. While the number of staff in philosophy was small by comparison to departments in other states, the basket of subjects on offer and the publications of its staff signaled a vibrant culture of discussion, collaboration, and engagement with the wider philosophical community. Two areas that have left an imprint on philosophy in Queensland and further afield are logic and environmental philosophy. Of course, emphasis on these areas does not exhaust what was being done, and it overlooks other areas that have left imprints. A more comprehensive survey than this one would look at work done in the area of metaphysics, such as André Gallois’s book Occasions of Identity (1998), work by Roger Lamb and Deborah Brown on moral psychology in Lamb’s edited collection Love Analyzed (1997), work in the philosophy of art by Presley, Michelle Walker, and Gary Malinas, and work in the philosophy of science that includes Ian Hinckfuss’s book The Existence of Space and Time (1975). Given these provisos, what, then, was distinctive about the programs in logic and environmental philosophy in Queensland? ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY In 1979 Don Mannison organised a weekend conference in Queensland dedicated to topics on environmental philosophy. Despite the enormity of the issues that environmental problems posed for humanity, it had only been in the previous decade that philosophers turned their attention to them. Australasian philosophers John Passmore (ANU), Richard Routley (ANU), and Peter Singer (Monash) led the way. Passmore’s then-recent book Man’s Responsibility for Nature (1974) and Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) argued that Western traditions in ethics were committed to value theories that were too narrow in scope. Passmore took the value of nature to be grounded in its ability to promote human flourishing in current and future populations. He

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argued that while values are grounded in human experience, Western traditions had been myopic in their understanding of the symbiotic relations between humans and the natural systems on which human flourishing is dependent. That Western ethical theories were anthropocentric was not itself a fault. He argued that the appropriate attitude that needs to be taken in humankind’s relation to nature is one of stewardship over natural systems so that they served the needs of both present and future generations of people. Singer objected to the anthropocentric bias of Western ethical traditions. He argued that animals other than humans were loci of intrinsic value insofar as they experienced pleasure and pain, had preferences, and were capable of flourishing or failing to flourish. Ethical theories that failed to recognise such facts draw the circle around what is morally considerable too narrowly. He argued that utilitarian ethical theories do better than their rivals in providing resources for accommodating the intrinsic values of nonhumans once these are recognised and plugged into evaluations of the consequences of acts and policies. Richard Routley opposed the anthropocentric bias in Passmore’s conservation ethics, and in Western theories of value generally. In support of his anti-anthropocentrism, he constructed a series of examples to show that anthropocentric theories of value and the ethical theories based upon them gave intuitively wrong evaluations of possible actions. Here is a scenario where an agent faces a decision: Suppose that a pandemic has killed all humans except for one survivor. There are no people after the last survivor dies, and she knows that she’s the last surviving member of her species. She has in her possession a vial of toxin that if released in the oceans will kill all of the whales, and she has at her disposal a mechanism that will release the toxin shortly after her heart and brain functions cease. Does she have any reason not to release the toxin? If anthropocentric theories of value were correct, since there are no people and will be none, it is a morally neutral matter whether she kills all the whales or refrains. Intuitively, a world with whales (even if there are no humans) has greater value than a world where whales have gone extinct due to human intervention. The pattern of argument that Routley developed can be generalised by enlarging the target of the last human’s destructive capacity: for instance, as well as whales, all other sentient creatures; as well as all sentient creatures, all plant life leaving a scorched earth. The intuition that some humanless worlds are better than others conflicts with anthropocentric and sentience-based theories of value. The papers that were given at the conference were published as a collection under the title Environmental Philosophy (edited by D. S. Mannison, M. A. McRobbie, and R. Routley, 1980). The university had partially funded the conference, and the following year it funded a three-year program to promote research and teaching in the area of environmental philosophy. Philosophers from the Queensland Department who contributed to the volume edited by Mannison et al. included Mannison, Roger Lamb, Robert Elliot, William Grey (né Godfrey-Smith), and Gary Malinas. Aron Gare was brought into the program, and he and Elliot edited a collection of new essays by an international cast of authors (Environmental Philosophy: A Collection of Readings, 1983). Courses in the area were introduced and continue to be taught.

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A sample of titles of essays by contributors to the collection edited by Mannison et al. (1980) suggests their scope. ‘Why Preserve Species?’ by Elliot, ‘The Rights of Non-Humans and Intrinsic Values’ by Grey, ‘On Ecological Ethics and Its Justification’ by Lamb, ‘Just Why Is it Bad to Live in a “Concrete Jungle”?’ by Mannison, and ‘Coercion, Justifications and Excuses’ by Malinas. The essays address biodiversity, the treatment of animals, the values of urban life, ethical issues concerning birth control methods to regulate the size of human populations, and more generally whether there is a need for a new environmental ethic that recognises intrinsic values in animals and ecosystems. Issues that figure prominently in popular media and mainstream politics today were rarely mentioned before philosophers and concerned scientists brought them to the public’s attention. LOGIC Brian Medlin and Ian Hinckfuss initiated the teaching of modern logic at the university. When Medlin resigned to take the chair at Flinders University, Malcom Rennie was appointed to replace him. Rod Girle, who was a student of Rennie’s, joined the department following Rennie’s resignation, and when Girle moved on, Graham Priest and Dominic Hyde joined Hinckfuss to take up the baton for teaching and research in logic. The logic program also hosted postdoctoral research fellows and visitors for extended stays. They included Risto Hilpinnin, John Slaney, Brian Skyrms, Roy Sorenson, Tad Tzubka, and Crispin Wright. A suite of courses was developed that took students from a basic course in formal logic in first year to advanced topics in second and third year that were at the vanguard of research in logic. Graduates of the program who went on to distinguished academic careers in logic include Chris Mortenson, Errol Martin, Daniel Nolan, Michael McRobbie, and Greg Restall. To see what was distinctive about the logic program at the University of Queensland it will help to first briefly describe the philosophical views about logic that were orthodoxy at the time Queensland was developing its program. The Harvard philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine published his book Word and Object in 1960. There he codified and defended a view that neither the sciences nor mathematics had any use for logics over and above the resources provided by quantification theory and set theory. He argued that modal propositional logics concerned with possibilities and necessities were based upon a confusion between mentioning sentences and using them to make statements. In the quantified extensions of modal propositional logics, they were wedded to an indefensible Aristotelian essentialism. By taking the natural sciences and the resources of mathematics required for the formulation of scientific theories to be the arbiters of what there is, modal logics lacked a subject matter that could be anchored to the natural world. Jack Smart and many other Australian philosophers who endorsed a materialistic view of the world shared Quine’s austere views about the scope and content of logics.

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Malcolm Rennie demurred. Possibilities and necessities, the subject matter of modal logics, were topics that figured in everyday thought and talk and about which people intuitively reasoned. The job of modal logics was to formalise and to systematise reasoning about these and the concepts that are definable by reference to them. Modal logics needed no further philosophical justification than the systematic organisation that they impose on the domains to which they are applicable. In his publications Rennie provided completeness and consistency proofs for many of the modal logics then on offer, and he systematically formulated the relations between different systems of modal logic. The same motivation and justification was applicable to other areas of thought and talk about which people reasoned. Logics for reasoning about temporal relations, about knowledge and belief, and reasoning with conditional sentences all exhibited structures that were identical with or based upon the structures and consequence relations found in modal logics. Rennie incorporated the study of these into his courses. An ambitious research project that he began during his tenure at Queensland was to provide a formalisation of the roles of predicate modifiers in natural languages, and to apply the formal methods therein developed to a general framework for the representation of intensional logics, including modal logics and their variants and extensions. Some of the fruits of this project were published in his monograph, Some Uses of Type Theory in the Analysis of Language (1974). Hinckfuss was more reticent in his philosophical acceptance of extensions of quantification theory and the intelligibility of rivals to it. In this respect he was under the orthodox Quinean’s umbrella. However, unlike Quine’s condemnation of modal and allied logics as born in equivocation and wedded to bad metaphysics, Hinckfuss sought mappings of them into quantification theory, its semantics, and set theory. He believed that many of the extensions of quantification theory, when supplemented by a theory of abstraction, were conservative in the sense that they made no further ontological commitments than those required by quantification theory and set theory themselves. The program that Hinckfuss endorsed recognised the structural virtues of modal extensions of quantification theory, and it sought ways to preserve those structures within a less-profligate metaphysics than that usually associated with their semantics. The hard work was to be done by a theory of abstraction. Although his work on this project was not completed, aspects of it did appear from time to time. In his essay ‘Necessary Existential Dependence’ (1976) he showed how many apparent modal connections between individuals arose from nonmodal relations between them and semantic connections between the terms that are used to describe those relations. The following simple example illustrates the strategy of analysis that he proposed. While it is impossible for Jack to be John’s nephew unless John is a sibling of a parent of Jack, does the nephew’s existence logically depend upon his uncle’s existence? Yes, in a sense, but actually no! The logical dependence here is not in re, that is, a modal connection between Jack, his parents, and John. The necessary connection between them is nominal only. It is a consequence of the meaning of the word ‘nephew.’ Rod Girle’s work on modal, epistemic, and dynamic logics continued and extended work he had begun as a student of Rennie and Hinckfuss. Follow-

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ing his return from Scotland where he had taken a PhD from St. Andrews, he and Rennie collaborated on a user-friendly text for introductory logic that used tableaux methods as well as systems of natural deduction. Under Girle’s guidance, enrollments in Introductory Logic grew from a healthy hundred or so per semester to over four-hundred in some semesters. This ensured that the advanced subjects in logic were well patronised. Girle also introduced a course on critical reasoning that, while eschewing formal methods, provided a set of standards for evaluating arguments and identifying fallacies in reasoning. Part of the popularity of the introductory subjects was due to the unique program of teaching logic in secondary schools in Queensland. Girle trained teachers and developed teaching materials that they could use for introducing students to deductive and inductive reasoning. By the time they entered university, students had already digested more logic than was taught in some introductory courses at other universities. Graham Priest joined the department in 1988, the year following the publication of his book In Contradiction (1987). He argued that it is an untoward feature of classical logics that arguments that contain inconsistent premises logically imply any arbitrary proposition whatsoever. From A and not-A one can deduce B, regardless of whether B has any relevance to the premises from which it logically follows. And from the same premises, one can deduce not-B as well. Inconsistency makes classical logics trivial in the sense that every proposition, as well as each of their negations, logically follow from a contradiction. Observations such as these led to the development of ‘relevant logics’ that blocked the derivation of arbitrary propositions from premises that bore no relevance to them. A further motivation for the development of logics that could harbour inconsistencies was that there are nontrivial inconsistent theories in the natural sciences, and it is not the logician’s job to insist on a resolution of their inconsistent parts on pain of trivialisation. On a practical note, there is a market for inference engines that do not entail everything when dealing with data that contain inconsistencies. Those relevant logics that are tolerant of inconsistencies without reducing to triviality are known as ‘paraconsistent logics.’ Priest noted that there are paraconsistent logics that evaluated some contradictions as true (as well as false), and they could be formulated within the framework of relevant logics. Most philosophers who were familiar with these systems took this to be an embarrassment of riches that needed to be culled, or at best an odd curiosity that could be ignored without significant consequence. Priest disagreed. Not only are paraconsistent logics that evaluated some contradictions as true formulable within the relevant logic framework, but, he argued, one of them is a true and correct logic that should supercede classical logics. Coupled with a robust commitment to logical realism, Priest set an agenda for logic, semantics, and metaphysics that unhinged complacencies and marked out new territories for exploration. He pursues these in a series of papers and his 1995 book, Beyond the Limits of Thought. Dominic Hyde joined the department in the late 1990s. He developed applications of logics that evaluate some contradictions as true in his treatment of vagueness and the sorites paradoxes to which vague terms can give rise. Could vague predicates generate statements that are jointly true and false of objects that fall within the penumbra of vagueness of their exten-

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sions? An affirmative answer requires paraconsistent-based constraints on entailment which can short circuit sorites arguments that lead to intolerable inconsistencies. This tale of logical exploration and iconoclasm in logic has been a hallmark of logic research and teaching in Queensland. At first hearing, most philosophers rejected as absurd, unintelligible, or just plain silly some of the projects that Queensland logicians have advanced. However, critics have come to take seriously views that they initially dismissed once they saw the strength of the motivations that prompted their development and the technical elegance and precision with which they are stated and defended. Shibboleths of classical logics such as the Law of Non-Contradiction and the Law of Excluded Middle can no longer be taken for granted as cornerstones of rational thought. Logic and environmental philosophy are signature areas where collective efforts by philosophers in Queensland have left their mark. Individual’s achievements in other areas of philosophy are no less important. Still, the two areas mentioned came to be associated as particular strengths of the programs in Queensland and its graduates during its period of engagement. LIMBO: 2001 TO THE PRESENT By the late 1980s, the management model of the university began to shift from a guild of academics managing its affairs to a corporate model. Newly appointed executives took responsibility for the university’s financial, academic, and student affairs. In the inaugural lecture following his appointment to the chair in philosophy, Graham Priest rang an alarm bell. Concerning the actions of governments and their impact on the academy, he stated that they have aimed to dismantle the collegial structure of universities and to replace it with the divisive, hierarchical, and quite inappropriate corporate structure. . . . Universities have a responsibility that far outruns the parochial short-term interests of any particular national government. If we do not stand up for this, collectively and determinedly, the result will be the sale of our birthright for a mess of pottage. (Priest 1991: 11)

The philosophy department managed to survive the changes that were occurring within the Faculty of Arts and the wider university through the 1990s. It even managed to prosper. Targets for funding research, student numbers, publications, and postgraduate enrollments were met while teaching loads and staff-student ratios increased. That these targets were met or exceeded assured the replacement of staff as they took positions elsewhere or retired. However, the rules of the game shifted when the department was declared to be defunct and its members were absorbed into the newly formed School of History, Philosophy, Religion and Classics. Philosophers as a group were disempowered, and an appointed head of school was responsible for their affairs along with academics from other disciplines in the school. Philoso-

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phers were told what subjects to offer, what the requirements and contents of honours degrees would be, and whether tutorials would be provided or even counted as part of one’s teaching load. Even the website for philosophy was required to fit into the mould that the school provided. The then head of school, Philip Almond, explained that these constraints were ‘processive’ and not ‘substantive.’ Resignations and retirements left the philosophy program with five staff on ‘continuing appointments’ at the beginning of 2001. (The word ‘tenure’ had been decreed by the university to no longer apply to the terms of appointment for academic staff.) This was half their number of a decade ago. A brief period of rebuilding occurred following Mark Colyvan’s appointment to the chair of philosophy in 2002. Colyvan gained approval for a new appointment in the area of Philosophy of Science that was taken up by Phil Dowe, and the following year he attracted Paul Griffiths to the university. Griffiths brought with him a generously funded Federation Fellowship. Colyvan also oversaw the appointment of staff to fill a position in Continental philosophy. When the Leiter Report, a respected international survey of philosophy programs, was published in 2004, the program in Queensland was ranked fourth in Australia, behind ANU, Sydney, and Melbourne. The Report ranked the program in philosophy of science and decision theory as one of the leading programs in the world. For a brief period it appeared that philosophy not only survived the organisational changes that introduced the new century, but had emerged from the transition in a strong position. The reality behind the appearance was short lived. Executives who had made agreements with Colyvan and Griffiths reneged on their promises. In 2005 the school was instructed to conduct a ‘restructure’—a euphemism for downsizing. Rather than acquiesce in the sacking of staff in philosophy to meet financial demands that were unrelated to academic performance, Colyvan and Griffiths resigned their positions. The University of Sydney appointed them to chairs and made room for the postdoctoral fellows and postgraduates who followed them south. Meanwhile, the philosophy program in Queensland is maintained by five full-time staff on continuing appointments and three staff on half-time appointments. There are fewer staff available teaching four times the number of students than were enrolled in the 1970s. Priest had warned of the attack on collegiality and its replacement by divisive hierarchies. Prior to the formation of the school, philosophers had presented a united front in their dealings with university administrations. They met regularly and thrashed out disagreements between themselves that usually resulted in the formation of a consensus on the issues that came before them. If a consensus did not emerge, they conducted preferential ballots to settle issues. The bonds of respect for their colleagues and the respect for the decision processes they used did not alienate dissent from group decisions. Dissenters usually helped to shape the decisions that were ultimately taken, and no one felt their views had been ignored or silenced when they did not prevail. The first casualty of the formation of the school was the scope and depth of consultation on academic matters. A second change affected research funding and the balance between research and teaching. Annual research grants to departments ceased when

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departments were decreed to be defunct. Philosophers were enjoined to apply for research funding in competition with each other and with members of other disciplines. The time and care required to complete applications for research funds consumes weeks that otherwise would be devoted to the research itself. While philosophers did better than average in their applications for grants, over 80 percent of all applications for Australian Research Council (ARC) grants are not successful. Executives celebrated successful grant applicants, but remained curiously silent about the books and articles that are reliable indicators of research success. Unsuccessful grant applicants were encouraged to keep trying, and they were given the added incentives of increased teaching and administrative work. Prior to the transformation to a corporate model, academic staff were expected to divide their time equally between teaching and research, with administrative work taking not more than 15 percent of their time. Under the corporate model, good research often goes unfunded when people are able to make time to do it. Dividing time equally between teaching and research is a fond memory for those who enjoyed it while it lasted. In philosophy, the principal destination of funds supporting research is to recent graduates and postgraduates who take on the teaching responsibilities of grant holders. In the new system, staff conducting funded research ‘buy’ time by selling off their teaching responsibilities. This has created an underclass of teachers who work at causal rates or on fractional appointments. While individual Queensland philosophers remain engaged with their colleagues elsewhere, the close collaboration with each other that existed over the period of engagement lapsed. Today philosophers exist in a state of limbo. There is some collaboration between philosophers, but much less than in past years. It is rare for a member of staff to give a research seminar on work in progress. Attendance at seminars is spotty and the business of postgraduate confirmation seminars takes up many of the otherwise empty time slots. On top of the erosion of the academic environment in which they work, staff are reminded that each has reason to be concerned with his or her own security of employment. Priest’s grim image was prescient. Whether philosophy in Queensland will enter a period of isolation again now depends on decisions of its new masters. In the year following the exodus of Colyvan et al., the Leiter Report did not rank Queensland in its annual survey. While individual staff that remain seek to maintain their engagement with national and international debates in philosophy through the publication of books and articles, local discussions of issues have largely retreated behind the closed doors of individuals’ offices when they occur at all. PHILOSOPHY’S PAST AND ITS FUTURE PROSPECTS Rewriting the past in terms of ‘what ifs’ is glorious sport. In 1938 three of the pivotal exponents of the main currents of twentieth-century philosophy sought employment in Queensland: Weismann, a founder and exponent of the verification theory of meaning; Popper, champion of the role that falsifiability plays in the sciences and the severest critic of verificationism; and

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Gasking, an advocate of conceptual analysis that looked to human practices to explain the applicability of concepts and the relations between them. What would they have done as colleagues? We will never know of course. The opportunity passed without recognition. Philosophy’s future in Queensland is even more opaque than counterfactual conjectures about what its past might have been. The Llogic program has had to reduce the number of subjects it offers. Environmental philosophy hangs on, but just barely. Consultation is infrequent and selective. These are not circumstances conducive to local debate and collaboration. Possible sources of welcome change could arise from some of the reading groups that have formed with interested staff and students meeting informally to discuss texts of common interest. Might they evolve into reading and writing groups? Might such groups be recognised in the curriculum with a requisite commitment of resources? Little prospect of change exists under current models of administration and the roles that they define for academics. A challenge for philosophers is to speak publicly and as loudly as their audiences will bear on de facto methods that are no less successful at silencing them than de jure methods. Government policies promoted the imposition of a corporate model on the academy. It will not go away. The problem is to ‘restructure’ the priorities that managers have been hired to promote. Deconstructing them and restructuring them has a philosophical and a practical dimension. Philosophers might influence changes by their critiques, but the practical dimensions of change are largely out of their hands qua philosophers.

Chapter Thirteen

Philosophy in South Australia Chris Mortensen

My topic is philosophy in South Australia. It is my strong conviction that philosophy is natural. It is pretty much universal: everyone thinks about it. But I can hardly talk about everyone here. So I will be talking about people who have held down jobs as professional philosophers in philosophy departments in South Australian universities, and really only a subset of these, actually, the highlights of the period. I will be concentrating mostly on the University of Adelaide, but I will talk briefly about Flinders University and the University of South Australia at the end. In the beginning was Walter Watson Hughes, copper baron. He was instrumental in setting up the University of Adelaide, which began in 1874, the third university in Australia. He donated 20,000 pounds to set up a chair in English language and literature and mental and moral philosophy. Just in passing, in the late 1990s I discovered a university budget line called The Hughes Chair in Philosophy, containing $40,000, apparently forgotten. One wonders whether if the money had been invested properly in the 1870s, the Adelaide philosophy department would now be the owner of a substantial fraction of the Adelaide CBD. The first person to hold the chair was Rev. John Davidson, of the Church of Scotland. It seems he taught Aristotelian logic. The second was a classicist, Edward Vaughn Boulger, who was dismissed for intoxication. The third was the first real philosopher, William Mitchell, who arrived in 1895. Mitchell was Hughes Professor of Philosophy (1895–1922) and vice-chancellor (unpaid) (1916–1942). He turned the early institution into a modern university, recruiting the Braggs and many other figures who became famous, and started up the Teachers College. He was knighted for his services. He died in 1961, aged 101. Memo: if anyone, on hearing you are a philosopher, asks you what has philosophy contributed to the world, then among the many things that will occur to you, you could say: ‘Philosophers started the world’s first universities, Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum.’ Mitchell also built one. 139

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As a philosopher, Mitchell’s main work is Structure and Growth of the Mind (1907). This was well received in Britain, and does I think show that Mitchell was a considerable philosopher. It is, however, virtually unreadable: a model to young philosophers of how not to write. His writing contains a forbidding technical vocabulary, and is almost entirely innocent of logical signposting. Reading Mitchell is hard work. Still, when unpacked the book is interesting enough. In a recent book, Marty Davies (2003) makes out a good case that Mitchell was, contrary to some opinions, no idealist. Rather, he was an early philosophical psychologist, interested in mental categories, particularly from a developmental point of view. In this respect, he was anticipating the flowering in South Australia of the scientific side of philosophy, which flourished spectacularly later under Smart. Mitchell was succeeded by the first Australian, McKellar Stewart, Hughes Professor (1924–1950) and vice-chancellor (1945–1950). His philosophical interests were Continental: he wrote A Critical Exposition of Bergson’s Philosophy (1913), and later on Nietzsche. In 1950, a youthful (thirty-year-old) Scot, J. J. C. (Jack) Smart arrived to take the Hughes chair. Jack Smart represents Australia’s biggest contribution to world philosophy. He was substantially responsible for two major theories: (1) the Identity Theory of Mind, and (2) Scientific Realism. To explain these, I need to take some steps backward and describe the state of philosophy at the time. First, the Identity Theory of Mind. In 1950 there were two competing theories of mind. One was dualism. This is the view that the mind is a nonphysical element that transcends the physical body. If this should seem initially absurd to you, reflect that most people have been dualists, certainly those who believe that the personality transcends the physical death of the body. Moreover, dualism is independently supported by solid arguments. On the face of it, your mind, particularly your conscious mind, seems to be of an entirely different character from your body or your brain. The other going theory of the mind in the 1950s was behaviorism. Inspired by the positivist psychology of Watson and Skinner, and the philosophy of Wittgenstein and Ryle, the idea was that it was unscientific to speculate on (or, more strongly, meaningless to talk about) inner mental states, private to just a single individual, such as pains, thoughts, wishes, and so on are generally held to be. We do attribute mental states to other people, said the behaviorists, but in so doing we are simply describing their propensities for various behaviours. Language is inevitably social, argued Wittgenstein, and thus its subject matter is also public. Smart and his co-worker Ullin Place, from the new psychology department, could accept neither dualism nor behaviorism. They replaced them with the Identity Theory. This agreed with dualism that the mind has significantly inner aspects (your pain is yours alone), but disagreed with dualism that they were nonphysical. It agreed with behaviorism that the mind is material like the body, but disagreed with the idea that the mind is nothing but outer behaviour. Finally, Smart and Place aimed to defend this new view with a set of arguments that represented a sea change in philosophical methodology. The going conception of methodology was that philosophy is conducted by con-

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ceptual analysis. So, for example, questions like ‘What is the mind, or a belief, or a desire, or a pain?’ are to be answered by an investigation of the concept of mind, or more exactly, an investigation of the meaning of mental words in ordinary contexts, as in so-called ordinary language philosophy. Philosophy was seen as a second-order activity, arising from our confusion over the ordinary commonsense language that we all use. When we get ordinary language straight, philosophical puzzlement will drop away. Wittgenstein was prominent in this conception of philosophy as a kind of therapy. Both dualists and behaviorists relied on variants of this method to further their various conclusions. But Smart repudiated this understanding of method. Instead, he proposed that it might be a scientific discovery that mental states are states of the brain. His favourite analogies of how the proposed reduction of the mind was to take place were: the morning star is the evening star, clouds are collections of water droplets, genes are DNA. None of these were discovered by conceptual analysis alone, but by serious scientific work. This position on the language of philosophical theory was characteristic of Smart’s other revolution, scientific realism. Here Smart’s view has similarities with that of the American, W. V. O. Quine. Philosophy is seen as strongly continuous with science; language is not restricted to the common discourse, but is dynamic and driven by scientific discovery. To take one example, 105 years ago, before Einstein, the meaningfulness of beliefs about what is happening now in another place, was unquestioningly enshrined in ordinary commonsense language. ‘Even as we speak,’ we still say. But the success of Einstein’s theories make it clear that there is no absolute now except for here. Language must change with science. Furthermore, what there is, what exists, is to be discovered by science, or better by scientifically minded philosophers who are alert to refined ways of simplifying scientific theories, and the commitments these bring with them. Philosophers well-trained in science are often more alert to the broader implications of theories than the specialist scientists who originated those theories. In short, philosophy and science are hand-in-glove with one another, as indeed they have been since Aristotle, at least. Ordinary language conceptual analysis is at best a first step, useful for purposes of clarification, but hardly a straightjacket to constrain philosophical discovery. Needless to say, scientific realism also strongly favours the natural over the supernatural. Smart’s book Philosophy and Scientific Realism (1963) rapidly became a classic. Both the Identity Theory and scientific realism swept the world. The Identity Theory of Mind, in particular, spawned a thousand variants as the world’s philosophers worked through some of the more tricky and lessbelievable consequences of this position. But it must be said that these days textbooks on the philosophy of mind all contain an early section explaining Smart and Place’s arguments. The legacy of scientific realism is everywhere too, in the strong emphasis on the continuity with science that characterised much late twentieth-century philosophy. The relationship has not always been as smooth, of course. Smart also wrote a well-received monograph defending act-utilitarian ethics. Utilitarianism is another gift from philosophy, which gets a bad press from many humanities intellectuals, who regard it as sterile, unfeeling, and unjust. But we must not forget that it was responsible for much enlightened

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legislation in nineteenth-century England. It is, indeed, the perfect moral philosophy for legislators, I would say. Versions of it are very much alive and well today, as moral philosophers like Peter Singer and Garrett Cullity will agree. Smart’s little book, like all his writings, is brilliantly clear and deceptively simple. You might not agree, but you have to respect the force of the position. Smart had a small department in the 1950s, but a brilliant one, as Charlie Martin, a fearsome critic of Smart, was also present. Together they produced a shower of superb students who went off to Oxford, then back to Australia, eventually to chairs: Ellis, Nerlich, Medlin, and Deutscher. Staff such as Martin and Presley also got chairs elsewhere. Also influential were Bradley and Hinckfuss. Other staff present from the 1960s to the 1990s were Hughes, Chandler, and Gill. Smart left in 1972, to be succeeded in 1974 by his former student Graham Nerlich, who came from a chair at Sydney. Nerlich was much influenced by scientific realism. His main contribution has been to work through the various confusions about the Theory of Relativity made by famous scientists and others. Developing an argument of Kant’s, he argued in his book The Shape of Space (1976) that space is a real material thing, just as real as the objects in it. This has been a contentious issue since Newton and Leibniz disagreed over it in the seventeenth century, Liebniz holding against Newton that space is not an independent entity, but is rather no more than an order of relations between bodies. To give the flavour of this dispute, consider the question ‘What is between my hands now?’ (holding my hands apart). Well, you might say that there is air between my hands, so put them in a vacuum and ask the question again. If you are tempted to answer now that there is nothing between my hands, then what is the difference between having my hands apart, and having them together? Together is really having nothing between them. Apart, there is something between them, space, that is real space. This is the conclusion that Nerlich was arguing for. I don’t pretend that this is more than a first step in this debate, as there is much to be worked out carefully. If you want a model of how to write philosophy in such a way as to make its conclusions worthy of belief, read Nerlich’s book, and don’t bother with those books on pop physics written by famous overseas physicists who shall remain nameless here. Nerlich also wrote a book on ethics, arguing in characteristic scientific realist fashion that it should be naturalised by grounding it in the beliefs and desires of biological and social creatures such as ourselves. One thing not mentioned so far is logic. Philosophy has been hand-inglove with logic since Aristotle too. Scientific realism did not shirk from using modern symbolic logic (deriving from Frege). At this point, I want to briefly mention my own work. Australia is well-known internationally for its contributions to logic, particularly in the theory of inconsistency. Humans show a capacity to tolerate contradictions in their beliefs without having their reasoning collapse. This is not something that Aristotle or Frege took into account, but it is important. For example, there are logical puzzles such as the Liar paradox: ‘This sentence is false.’ Think about it: if it is true then it is false, and vice versa. So it is both true and false, a real live true contradiction. If this sounds like trivial logic-chopping to you, reflect that it isn’t easy to say

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how to fix this up, and it turns out to have profound consequences for our theories of logic and language. A few years ago I wrote Inconsistent Mathematics (Mortensen 1995), which proposed to start a new mathematics which tolerates contradictions, and thus demonstrates that rigorous rational structure does not collapse in their presence. I have lately been interested in the visual paradoxes such as those found in M. C. Escher, endeavouring to find mathematical representations for these using the tools of inconsistent mathematics. I remain a scientific realist and an identity theorist, but it seems to me that these can be reconciled with Buddhism properly understood. Analytical Buddhism is on the rise in this country too! Nerlich left in 1994. Over the next five years there were two concerted attempts to destroy the philosophy department. I should say that such attacks have occurred in other Australian universities in recent years, and are traceable to the Dawkins so-called reforms of higher education dating from the late 1980s. As departmental head, I returned from my summer holidays in 1995 to be called in by the dean with the message that a cadre of senior arts professors had recommended that philosophy be merged with the anthropology department, for ‘as philosophers retire, they shall be replaced by social theorists.’ I pointed out that the faculty had social theorists coming out of its ears, and that what they needed was a good dose of metaphysics as a counter, but the ears this fell upon were deaf. Philosophy was condemned in postmodern terms as a relic of the failed enlightenment project. This led to a very stressful six months. Several senior Australian philosophers wrote in support of the department to the vice-chancellor. In the end, the tactic that seemed to work was a simple refusal to collaborate. That’s an underused tactic, and it is to be recommended in appropriate circumstances, I suggest. The Hughes chair was vacant until 1998, when Mortensen was promoted. In 2000, another cadre of senior arts academics recommended a drastic cut in philosophy’s undergraduate offerings. You can see how this leads to a downward spiral in student numbers and hence staff. Another stressful year! This time the problem was resolved by means of an agreement for several senior staff near retirement to retire, and be replaced by tenured young philosophers. Memo to administrators: academics are typically motivated by the love of their discipline, not by fear and threats. This generational renewal was made possible by the generosity of spirit of the senior staff present at the time, and they are to be thanked for it. Ullin Place died in England in 2000. He bequeathed his brain to the Adelaide philosophy department, to be displayed with the caption, ‘Did This Brain Contain the Consciousness of U. T. Place?’ Reminiscent of Jeremy Bentham’s gift of his stuffed body to the University of London, this was an instructive piece of philosophy and a fine piece of dark humor: a worthy afterthought on his importance to Adelaide and Australian philosophy. It resides in the anatomy museum, and can be seen on the department’s website. (Have a look on the website, and while you are at it, look at the impossible pictures that people working on my own project have been drawing.) What is the new generation department like now? The short answer: mostly philosophy of mind and ethics. Mortensen retired in 2005. Garrett Cullity had published his book, The Moral Demands of Affluence (2004). The book sets up the Extreme Demand on the (relatively) affluent, roughly

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that one should give everything away to the poor and suffering until the sacrifice outweighs the good it does. Then, while acknowledging the strength of the case for the Extreme Demand (and the weakness of arguments against it), Cullity nonetheless argues that it ultimately undermines itself. Cullity was promoted to Hughes professor in 2006. Gerard O’Brien was also made professor in 2007. The current strengths of the renewed department are cognitive science and the philosophy of mind (O’Brien, Gerrans, Opie, Fernandez), ethics (Cullity, Gamble, Louise), and aesthetics (McMahon). Adelaide has been strong on the philosophy of mind ever since Smart (if not Mitchell), and the major presence of cognitive science can be regarded as the triumph of the naturalizing program started by Smart and Place so many years before. The strength in ethics also represents the continuation of an Adelaide tradition in which Smart and Nerlich made notable contributions. Finally, a word about philosophers at other South Australian universities. Flinders started in 1966, and Brian Medlin was its foundation professor of philosophy. Brian was one of my first teachers at the University of Queensland. I had two inspiring philosophy teachers, Brian and Don Mannison. They were as different as chalk and cheese: Medlin was tall, dark, and Mephistophelian, while Mannison was a short, bald, feisty American from the West Coast. They were good mates, but in seminars the sparks flew—a wonderful experience for an undergraduate. Medlin got the identity theory and scientific realism from Smart, and I got them from Medlin. Mannison made me read Wittgenstein, forwards, backwards, and sideways. It is a shame that students aren’t made to read Wittgenstein much any more, I think. Around that time, Medlin published several important papers defending the identity theory of mind from various objections. Both Medlin and Mannison took their students seriously, listening to what we had to say (before stomping on it!). I am grateful for the experience. Others prominent at Flinders have been O’Hair, Hunt, Allen, Couvalis, and Burns. Sadly, Flinders's administration has let the numbers of philosophy teachers drop, a great shame for a department that contained several first-rate thinkers and produced some excellent students. Finally, there is the University of South Australia. There was a period in the early 1990s when there were enough good philosophers there to form a critical mass. Unfortunately the administration at the time was not well-disposed toward philosophy, and numbers have dropped off. The main people working as philosophers have been Woolcock, Coleman, Knight, and Lavskis. So much for my story. I hope you have found it entertaining and instructive. South Australia’s contributions to world philosophy have been very significant indeed, and widely recognised as such.

Chapter Fourteen

Is Religion to Be Respected or Only Tolerated? Robert Nola

There is a growing, strident demand, made by many religious believers, that their religion be given respect and understanding. Tolerance, if it is mentioned at all, is only given third billing after respect and understanding. Why is respect to be given priority over tolerance? And is it deserved? In this paper I will argue that tolerance is a superior virtue to respect, and that the demand for respect exceeds what is required in a liberal democracy in which tolerance prevails permitting a plurality of views on religions, from belief to disbelief. 1 Religious believers are unclear about what they want when they demand respect. Are they asking for deference, honour, or esteem for themselves and their religion on the part of those who do not share their beliefs? Are they asking for special privileges for themselves that are not to be given to others, especially nonbelievers? (Those who have conscientious objections to military service on religious grounds are much more readily granted exemption than atheistic pacifists.) The demand for respect might be a roundabout way of demanding that the religious not be the victims of criminal activity, such as personal assault or the desecration of churches, mosques, graves, and the like. However there is nothing special about such a demand; both the religious and the nonreligious want protection by the law against criminal activity. Is the demand for respect a demand that others have positive thoughts, feelings, and attitudes towards believers in religion, or that they not criticise the religion’s beliefs and practices, or that they not satirise it? Or less strongly, is it the demand that others are to conform outwardly as if they do while inwardly they do not? Such demands are clearly excessive and unreasonable. Finally, do religious believers simply wish others to be tolerant towards them? But if this is what their demand for respect comes to, then, as will be argued later, tolerance is quite consistent with lack of respect. 145

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A stronger claim will be argued here: tolerance is much more important than respect and can go along with lack of respect, and even disrespect. This position is strikingly expressed by Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, founder of the secular Turkish Republic. He said: ‘I have no religion; and at times I wish all religions at the bottom of the sea. . . .’ To wish religion at the bottom of the sea is to show it no respect, or even positive disrespect. Atatürk continues: ‘Let [the people] worship as they will; every man can follow his own conscience, provided that it does not interfere with sane reason or bid him act against the liberty of his fellow man’ (cited in Mango 2002: 463). Note the different ‘objects’ of respect here. Having no respect for one kind of ‘object,’ religion, is quite consistent with having respect for a quite different sort of ‘object,’ viz., the rights or liberties of people to indulge in religion—or not as the case may be. Many have made this quite obvious and correct distinction before Atatürk; but for convenience I will call it ‘Atatürk’s thesis.’ Perhaps respect for their rights and liberties is all that the religious want when they demand respect. But then they express their demand in a confused way. The demand is not respect for religion; rather it is a demand for the respect of a quite different ‘object,’ namely, the right or freedom to believe whatever religion. But this is something we all want for what we believe, or disbelieve; it is not special to religious believers. The topics to be covered in this chapter can now be set out. Section 2 gives one consideration on the basis of which atheists owe religion no respect. In section 3 six different senses of respect are distinguished, along with some fallacious forms of inference involving these senses which are called ‘respect creep.’ In section 4, distinctions are drawn between six different categories of ‘object’ of respect, some of which have already been indicated; it also investigates some of the combinations of the different kinds of respect with the different ‘objects’ of respect. The final section ends with a brief account of how the points made about respect fit with a minimal notion of tolerance. THE INCOHERENCE OF RESPECTING THE NONEXISTENT Normally people who think that God exists accord God some respect. But it is possible that a person believes that God exists but accords him no respect. Perhaps because of a version of the argument from evil, they take God to be responsible for the world’s evils. If it is in God’s power to have lessened or prevented these evils, but he does not, then the theist might abandon his or her respect for God—while still maintaining that God exists. This is close to the position expressed by Elie Wiesel in his book Night (1981) which gives his account of his childhood spent in the concentration camps of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. 2 This is not the atheist’s position. In what follows it is not even necessary to assume the central thesis of atheism, namely, that God does not exist; all that is required is that a person believes that God does not exist.

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Can a person claim both of the following: ‘I respect the fairies; but I do not believe they exist’? No, this seems incoherent. Surely one would respond: ‘If you do not believe that fairies exist, you are behaving quite oddly and incoherently in according them respect, or even disrespect.’ Similarly, can a person claim both: ‘I respect the god, Zeus [or Baal or Wotan or any god of your choice], but I do not believe that Zeus exists’? This is incoherent in the same way. There is something distinctly odd about exercising all the trappings of respect for a god but at the same time also believing that that god does not exist. The atheist lack of respect for God turns on the following thesis: a presupposition of the claim that person A respects (or disrespects) some object X, is that A believes that X exists (where X can be some putative god). And this is logically just the same as: if A does not believe that X exists, then the presupposition fails and it makes no conceptual sense to respect, or disrespect, X. So, one atheist argument for why some owe religion no respect turns on the claim that it makes no conceptual sense to respect, or disrespect, what one also believes does not exist. 3 This thesis might be thought to be caught up in what is known within the philosophy of art as the ‘paradox of emotion and fiction.’ The paradox arises when the above thesis is combined with two other seemingly obvious claims, which are, (1) we do have rationally based emotional responses to characters in a fiction, and (2) we know these fictional characters do not exist. Thus in reading or watching Shakespeare’s King Lear a person can have respect for Cordelia but no respect for her sisters Goneril and Regan and very little respect for old Lear. So respect, or lack of it, can be directed towards characters in a fiction which are believed to be nonexistent, and there is nothing obviously incoherent about this. But the paradox arises when these two claims are added to the seemingly plausible thesis of the previous paragraph, namely, if one has a reasonably based emotion (such as respect—assuming this is akin to an emotion) towards some X then X is believed to exist. There is a considerable literature devoted to sorting out the paradox of emotion and fiction that I do not wish to discuss 4—largely because I think it can be side-stepped in the case where X is God. In general, talk of God is not supposed to be about a character in a fiction (despite the fact that atheists might think that the Bible is the greatest fiction ever told!). Rather the religious hold that God does exist and that God is not a fictional character. Atheists deny that God exists, but need not go on to say that God is a fictional character. In denying that God exists they can say that he has gone the way of many other alleged existents of other domains. These domains can be other religions (e.g., the gods Wotan, Zeus, and so on), or folk stories (those about Santa Claus or goblins), or sciences (in which it was once postulated that epicycles and deferents exist, that the electromagnetic ether exists, that phlogiston and caloric exist—but later it was discovered that they do not exist). What this suggests is that atheists should say that God was an entity postulated within certain frameworks of thought about the world, but these frameworks can be jettisoned along with the entities postulated in them. Looked at in this way, there are cases of nonexistents of various defunct frameworks which are not like fictional characters and which are not to be modelled along the lines of the characters in a fiction. Looked at in this light

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there is not a strict involvement of the above thesis with the ‘paradox of fiction.’ Not every nonexistent of whatever domain need be given a philosophical understanding along the same lines as that of fictional characters of plays and novels. This completes my argument that God is owed no respect—by at least nonbelievers. They cannot sensibly respect or disrespect what they also believe does not exist. And the grounds for this do not fall foul of the paradox of fiction since God, though believed to be nonexistent, is not to be taken as a fictional character. SIX KINDS OF RESPECT—AND ‘RESPECT CREEP’ Now we move to the question of what is meant by ‘respect.’ It turns out to be a slippery and highly ambiguous word. Many distinct uses are listed in most dictionaries, six of which are relevant to our purposes here. It is also important to distinguish the various grammatical objects of the word ‘respect’; this is discussed in the following section. Respect1: In this sense a person pays respect to some object X when they attend to X, pay attention to X, have regard to X, give careful consideration to X, or take into account some detail or aspect of X. Thus, a person can pay respect to, in the sense of pay attention to, or consider, just one feature of, say, their car, for example, its colour, or its make, but not pay respect, that is attention, to any other feature of the car, such as its fuel efficiency. In this sense a person can pay respect to the law in that they ensure that when they act they are not law breakers. Again, in this sense an atheist can pay respect to the Bible. Like Hobbes, Hume, Gibbon, and many others, they can pay careful attention to what the Bible says in their writings, but remain sceptical of, or disbelieve, its central claims. And in normal intercourse one can, in this sense, respect a person who believes, say, that Christ will return some day; but all this means is that one takes this belief into account when dealing with them (say, to avoid offending them, or to provide criticism of their beliefs). Similarly in the context of a society in which there are people of several different cultures each with their different beliefs, one may pay respect1 to the people of those cultures in the sense of taking into account their beliefs when one interacts with them, but this is consistent with being sceptical of, or even rejecting, their beliefs. This kind of respect is called ‘recognition respect’ by Stephen Darwall (1977). In its most general form it is recognition one gives to some X when one gives appropriate weight to X in one’s deliberations involving X. X can be any of a range of objects, such as the law, a person’s feelings or beliefs, the fact that one’s tennis opponent has a mean backhand, or that one’s philosophical opponent has a keen eye for distinctions one is inclined to overlook, and so on. A case can be made for the claim that recognition respect is the fundamental sort of respect that each of us owe to one another. That is, where X is a person, X is owed respect in the sense that for any other person Y engaging in any significant way with X, Y is to take into account the fact that X is a person in Y’s deliberations about what to do. Darwall also distin-

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guishes a different kind of respect, ‘appraisal respect,’ which applies largely to persons and involves having a strongly positive attitude towards X. I will come to this later, but it is clear that recognition respect is broader and need not always involve positive appraisal respect. Respect2: In this use of the term, a person does not interfere with the actions of another person, or they actively (not passively) let that person be to do their thing. Thus a person can respect, in the sense of not interfere with, another person’s betting on horses, or going to their chosen church, even though they think both bets are a waste of time. They do not interfere with the other’s gambling or going to church; they simply let others be to do their thing. Under this heading we can also consider giving respect2 to a person’s liberty or right to believe or act, in that we do not interfere with their so believing or acting. This is a quite fundamental kind of respect that takes a particular kind of ‘object,’ namely, the rights or liberties of a person. This is an important matter that has already arisen with the Atatürk thesis, and it will arise again later. A case could be made for viewing respect2 as a special case of respect1, but it is important to note that in respect2 recognition is given to a quite specific object of respect, that is, a right or a liberty. Respect3: In this sense a person is considerate, polite, civil, or courteous towards other people. This kind of respect is usually the case with most of our everyday interactions with others. So to those who proffer their religious beliefs one can simply say politely: ‘Thanks, but no thanks!’ But when one finds, say, evangelicals at the door who remain intrusively persistent, and so impolite, then pick your own way to tell them to ‘push off.’ Again a case can be made for claiming that this kind of respect is a special case of respect1, the kind of recognition respect we owe to one another through politeness and civility. Respect4: In this sense one person can have admiration for another, or their abilities. Thus one can respect another’s piano playing in the sense that they admire it. Here it is important to note the different ‘objects’ of respect4; one can respect4 a person’s skill, for example in cracking a safe, but it does not follow that one has respect4 for the person. At this point one must be aware of an important phenomenon that Simon Blackburn (2007) calls ‘respect creep.’ Respect4 generally goes along with respect3; admiration for a person commonly goes along with politeness towards them. But the converse is not generally true; one can have respect3 for a person in the sense of being polite to them but not have respect4 in the sense of admiring them, or what they believe. Thus one may be polite to the religiously bigoted but not admire them or their beliefs. It is fallacious to respect creep from the third kind of respect, politeness, to the fourth, admiration. Respect5: In this sense a person has deferential esteem for, or reverence for, or honours or venerates, some X; X is privileged in some quite extreme way. Here there is a move away from recognition respect to appraisal respect in which a strongly positive appraisal is made of X, where X is usually some person but can also be some divinity. For example, Zoroastrians have respect5 for their prophet Zoroaster, and their Zoroastrian God, Ahura Mazdah, in that they revere, esteem, honour, and venerate both. But do any of us pay respect to this prophet or God in the sense of revere either of them? In the

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case of the Zoroastrian God, apart from a very tiny minority, the rest of us do not accord it any respect (respect5) because we do not believe that it exists; most of us are atheists with respect to Ahura Mazdah. What of respect creep? Respect5 for a god or a prophet goes along with respect4, being an admirer, and respect3, being polite about them. But the converse is not true; admiration of, or politeness towards, X can occur without reverence for X. Respect creep from the third or fourth kinds of respect to the fifth is fallacious. This is underlined by the move from a kind of recognition respect, which does not involve any appraisal of X, to appraisal respect, which does involve making a strongly positive appraisal of X. Respect6: Respect5 involves an appraisal, an evaluation made by an individual or a group. Some person or group may, as a matter of fact, value or revere the Zoroastrian God, just as another individual or group may, as a matter of fact, value and revere the Christian God. Importantly, respect5 is not a normative matter in the sense of being binding on others. What respect6 adds to respect5 is such a normative dimension which goes beyond the individual character of respect5 in that it is deemed to be universally binding on all others—something all others ought to do. Respect6 does this in two ways typical of the demands associated with the sacred. First, those who respect5 (revere) X, demand that all others also ought to revere X (because X is deemed sacred). Or, secondly, the demand may be slightly weaker: those who revere X demand that others not criticise, insult, or denigrate X, or others at least conform outwardly to the demands of reverence. (Think of all the times atheists have been stuck at a table at which grace is being said.) The demand can also extend to prohibitions against lampooning, or poking fun at, or satirising X in any way (for example the Danish cartoons). Here the demand for reverence by others comes into conflict with, and attempts to restrict, free speech in ways which the other kinds of respect do not. Those who have faith in some revered deity may well demand that they not be offended by those who do not revere, or even reject, that deity. However, it is illegitimate to limit free speech because of the perceived offence. 5 Upon what grounds can those respectfully reverent towards X demand the same reverence of others? Logically there are none. Here the demands do not concern the kinds of recognition respect involved in paying attention to (respect1), or letting be (respect2), or being polite (respect3). These one can independently grant readily enough in most circumstances. Rather, one is obliged to admire (respect4) or revere (respect5) what others admire or revere, or at least outwardly conform. That is, there is a move from forms of recognition respect which involve no appraisal of X to forms of respect which do involve a positive appraisal of X. What is deeply problematic about respect6 is the fallacious manner in which respect5, reverence and esteem, is extended beyond the individual and is turned into a norm applicable to all. The fallacy arises in the following way. Suppose the following personal judgement is made, ‘I respect X,’ or some equivalent expressive of one’s position such as ‘X is worthy of respect.’ Such avowals entail nothing about what others ought to respect (and this applies not only to an inference to respect6 from respect5, but also the other kinds of respect as well). It remains entirely open whether anyone else

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makes, or does not make, the same judgement in their own case. The demand that others respect what the religious respect is without any force and is not binding on others in any way. This spells out one way to take the thesis of this chapter; even if some individual gives respect to religion, religion is owed no respect by anyone else. Commonly, in the case of religion, such a demand is illegitimately founded upon the sacredness with which religions are imbued and their associated taboos. It is also an extreme case of illegitimate respect creep in which an inference might be made from the third, fourth, and fifth kinds of respect to the unacceptable respect6, which is a demand for universal reverence. Such respect creep can also be pernicious; those who revere some X demand that everyone else also revere X on pain of some kind of sanction, punishment, or threat of intimidation or actual intimidation. The phenomenon of respect creep is well described by Salman Rushdie: ‘Respect’ is one of those ideas no one is against . . . everybody wants some of that . . . But what we used to mean by respect . . . a mixture of good-hearted consideration and serious attention [respect1] . . . has little to do with the new ideological usage of the word. . . . Religious extremists, these days, demand respect for their attitudes with growing stridency. Very few people would object to the idea that people’s rights to religious belief must be respected [respect2]. . . . But now we are asked to agree that to dissent from those beliefs—to hold that they are suspect, or antiquated or wrong, that in fact that they are arguable—is incompatible with the idea of respect [respect6]. When criticism is placed off limits as ‘disrespectful’ and therefore offensive, something strange is happening to the concept of ‘respect.’ (Rushdie 2003: 145–46)

Ominously, Rushdie goes on to describe an example of respect creep which culminates in the universal demand for reverential respect: ‘in recent times both the American National Endowment for the Arts and the very British BBC have announced that they will use this new version of “respect” as a touchstone for their funding decisions.’ Those who do not display this ‘new’ kind of respect are to be penalised in getting no funding. Considering the different kinds of respect, believers might pay religion respect in all six senses. But atheists need not pay the ‘object’ religion respect in any of the six senses (bearing in mind that respect2 takes a different ‘object’ in the examples cited). This will also include not even paying attention (respect1) to philosophy of religion or the history of religious doctrines—a stance adopted by both Richard Dawkins and Daniel Dennett. CATEGORIES OF ‘OBJECT’ OF RESPECT Not only are there different kinds of respect, but (as has already been noted) there are also different categories of ‘objects’ of respect that also add to the confusion over the use of the word ‘respect.’ By ‘object’ is meant the logical or grammatical sense of ‘object’ and not the physical or material sense. This

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can be grasped by considering the incomplete sentences, ‘Person A respects . . .’ or ‘A does not respect . . .’ and noting the different ways in which the blank can be meaningfully filled by different categories of ‘object.’ So far we have spoken broadly of respecting religion, but the term ‘religion’ can cover many different categories of ‘object.’ To be more explicit, here are six of them (and more could be considered, e.g., religious institutions): Divinities: God, the gods, spirits, angels, etc. Persons: prophets, saints, monks, popes, priests, imams, etc. Ordinary objects: holy books, icons, totems, sacred places and buildings (e.g., Lourdes), etc. Actions: performing the Eucharist, praying, specific rituals such as genuflexion, etc. Person’s rights and liberties to act, believe, disbelieve, poke fun, etc. Acts of believing and the contents of belief. The first four categories obviously yield possible ‘objects’ of respect, lack of respect, or disrespect. Consider God in the first category. The American satirist H. L. Mencken wrote a satirical piece called ‘Memorial Service’ (2002) which is a roll call of over 170 past gods that were revered by millions of people, but now no one reveres them at all: Zeus, Jupiter, Thor, Wotan, Baal, Mithra, the Zoroastrian God Ahura Mazdah (well, a few of the reverent are left), Huitzilopochtli (a Mexican God to whom thousands of the reverent were sacrificed), and so on. Even the religious who currently revere some god revere none of these other gods. So do we owe respect to any of these gods? None of us do—unless one argues for a syncretism in which all gods are one and the same! Atheists have good grounds for respecting none of them; it is incoherent to respect divinities which one believes are nonexistent. In the third category, ordinary physical objects can become ‘objects’ of reverential respect such as a Buddha tooth, the tree under which Buddha became enlightened, a hair of the beard of Muhammad, the Holy Grail (either real or supposed), the Turin Shroud, and so on. The fifth category is important and concerns rights and liberties of people as ‘objects’ of respect. The kind of respect involved here is hardly the reverence of respect5 (though some misleadingly put it this way). Rather it is akin to the more secularised respect1, in which each of us is to pay careful attention to the rights and liberties of others in our dealings with them; or it is respect2 in which each of us is to refrain from interfering in the (lawful) activities of others. Atatürk’s thesis illustrates these points. He has no respect for one kind of ‘object,’ religion, but he has respect for another kind of ‘object,’ namely, the right or liberty of people to believe in religion, or not as the case may be. The sixth category raises some important issues. The term ‘belief’ is ambiguous; philosophers distinguish between the content of a belief and a person’s act (or state) of believing that content. To illustrate the difference, suppose a person A believes that Christ will return one day. The proposition that Christ will return one day is the belief content; in contrast, the person’s act (or mental state) is A’s believing that Christ will return one day. A

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question now arises: which is a possible ‘object’ of respect, the content, or the act, or both of these or neither? The claim that will be advanced here is that it is incoherent, or meaningless, to respect belief contents. In contrast, since a person’s act of believing is an act of theirs, the mental act can be a possible object of respect or lack of respect. And these are different from a further possible object of respect or disrespect, the person who performs that act of believing. To illustrate the difference, consider an uncontroversial example of a belief content: that 2 + 2 = 4. Can person A coherently respect that 2 + 2 = 4? In the case of respect1, all this means is that A pays attention to the (correct) belief that 2 + 2 = 4 when A does mathematics, or performs addition. This is coherent, but other kinds of respect generate incoherence. People cannot sensibly let be, or interfere with, the belief content that 2 + 2 = 4, or admire it, or revere it. Some mathematical nerd might revere or admire that 2 + 2 = 4, but this means that they are a pathological case. Similarly the proposition that Christ will return some day might be accorded respect1, in that one has to pay attention to it when dealing with Christians. But as with the content that 2 + 2 = 4, it is incoherent to admire or revere the propositional content that Christ will return some day. This point can be extended to all the belief contents expressed in holy books or religious doctrines. Other than respect1, it is incoherent to accord respect to such belief contents. One might possibly respect, or show no respect, to different ‘objects’ such as the person the proposition is about, namely, Christ, or the Bible which tells us that he will return, but none of these ‘objects’ of possible respect are belief contents. What about moral rules or commands which are not simply propositional contents, for example, the commandment of God that we are to have no other gods but him? We can have recognition respect for commandments in the sense of always following them. That is, we can respect them in the sense of respect1; we pay careful attention to them in conducting our lives. Perhaps we might even admire or revere such commandments as we think that they are a great thing. Others, of course, can sensibly not show any respect for, or even disrespect, such commandments; they do not follow them and may even condemn them. So there is a coherence to respecting, not respecting, or even disrespecting moral precepts or commandments that do not apply to just propositional contents. Matters differ when it comes to acts (or states) 6 of belief of a person. Consider the mental act, A believes that Christ will return some day. One might respect1 A’s particular act of belief in that one pays attention to it and gives it consideration when one comes to deal with A (for example, one knows that A is a bit touchy about this belief). Also, one might respect2 A’s act of belief in letting A hold their belief; alternatively one might disrespect it in attempting to rid A of this state of belief. This becomes important when according respect to another ‘object,’ that is, A’s right or liberty to act in certain ways, because the acts one is free to perform include acts of believing that p. Further, it is possible to respect4 (admire) or respect5 (revere) A’s activity of so believing (believers do admire the strength of their acts of belief in religious matters). But equally as well these can be ‘objects’ of disrespect—and even dismay, especially in the case of the acts of believing

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performed by dogmatists. But at least it makes sense to respect, accord no respect or disrespect to, the mental acts of persons, in contrast to the belief contents of those acts. The previous turns upon the important and subtle difference between acts and contents of belief as ‘objects’ of respect. The ambiguity of the word ‘belief’ disguises this difference which in turn leads to a host of confusions. On the whole, it is meaningless to respect belief contents, but acts of believing or disbelieving (not to be confused with the persons who believe) can be coherently accorded respect or disrespect. This last point can be extended to cover many other kinds of mental acts such as protecting one’s beliefs from criticism, or refusing to evaluate them, or engaging in a critical evaluation. Consider fundamentalist religious believers. They might protect the proposition that Christ will return some day from critical examination, or resist examining it. But note that protecting that claim from criticism, or resisting criticism, is not a propositional object: it is an activity (directed upon a belief content). And this activity is something that is a possible ‘object’ of respect (in the sense of letting it be), or of disrespect (in that others attempt to overcome the resistance of believers to criticism). The same applies to religious doctrines and the propositional contents of holy books, as distinct from the books themselves as objects. As argued, strictly it does not make sense to respect such contents. But enabling or resisting criticism of the contents are quite different ‘objects’ which are open to respect or disrespect. TOLERANCE—BUT NO RESPECT The previous points provide the basis for a minimal account of tolerance that need only involve respect2, that of respect of rights and liberties. The notion of tolerance is a complex matter, so only a sketch of a quite minimal notion of tolerance will be given which highlights three broad components. The minimal account of tolerance requires (1) that there be something to which one objects, but (2) one puts up with the objectionable. Putting the matter somewhat paradoxically, toleration involves tolerating what one finds intolerable. The trick to tolerance is (3) how to achieve the right balance in tolerating the intolerable by setting the right limits to tolerance. Tolerance lies somewhere between total permissiveness and total repression; the problem is to find where it ought to lie. Consider the first ‘objection’ component of tolerance. This can be illustrated in the case of Atatürk’s wishing all religion at the bottom of the sea. Supposing that Atatürk’s lack of respect for religion is well grounded, then these grounds can also provide good reasons for objecting to religion. Here the ‘objection’ component cannot be watered down to something like indifference. One cannot sensibly tolerate that to which one is indifferent. If one is indifferent, or has no objection, then the matter of toleration cannot arise. One might have had to exercise tolerance in the past towards some X to which one objected, say, married gay couples, but if one no longer objects to married gay couples, the question of tolerating them can no longer arise.

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Having a well-founded objection to some X, like good grounds for lack of respect, is an essential component of tolerance. This is important because sometimes the phrase ‘you are tolerant’ in ordinary usage just means one is permissive and has no objection, but this is to lose some of the distinctive features of the concept of tolerance in political and social contexts. 7 The second aspect of tolerance requires one ‘to put up with’ that to which one objects. One has to put up with the objectionable if one is powerless to do otherwise. But being powerless is not a component of tolerance as normally understood. One has to be in a position to act against and suppress the objectionable either because one already has sufficient power to so act, or if not so, one can politically act to obtain such power in a reasonable time. (One might form a lobby group or even a political party to legitimately obtain the means of suppression, e.g., to prevent various kinds of abortion.) What the second aspect of tolerance requires is that one refrains either from exercising successfully one’s powers of suppression or acting to obtain powers of suppression. Here the acceptance component is a matter of not interfering with or (actively, not passively) letting something be, when one could interfere (or readily obtain the means to do so). Putting this in terms of respect with its appropriate ‘object,’ one gives respect2 to the liberties and rights of others to believe and act as they choose without interference, even where one has objections to their beliefs or actions. So respect in the sense of respect2 is an important component of toleration. But no other kind of respect is involved. The third component of minimal toleration is the more philosophically contentious; it attempts to spell out the reasons for which one might restrain oneself, to strike the right kind of balance in tolerating the intolerable and to set limits to toleration. Here only two approaches to this issue will be briefly mentioned, and the second endorsed. The first could be called the co-existence conception of tolerance (a somewhat ‘Hobbesian’ view). As a (perhaps not entirely accurate) historical illustration, consider the various religious parties who battled it out for various lengths of time now encapsulated in the title of one of their more devastating wars—The Thirty Year War (1618–1648). This war had complex causes starting, maintaining, and ending it, religion being only part of the story, but it can be used to provide an illustration of how the coexistence kind of tolerance could come about. Suppose the war did not end because the contending parties recognised some ‘higher moral principle’ to be culled out of the Christian tradition to which the various parties all belonged that led them to stop fighting. (This would be the ideological explanation that religious believers would like us to accept.) Rather, the contending parties recognised, as any game theorist would, that the degree of destruction wrought by the war indicated that it was time to call it quits (e.g., the German population had been reduced by over a quarter). It was time to recognise that it was in their mutual interest to put up with, that is tolerate, one another. This can, of course, lead to a rather unstable situation in which one religious group realises that it is no longer in their interests to be tolerant. But if the power relations between the contending parties were roughly equal, this could lead to sufficient stability over time; then it might be possible for trust to develop and so tolerance to prevail.

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This coexistence conception of tolerance turns on the recognition by roughly equal contending powers that mutual toleration is in all their interests and is the best of all possible outcomes, even given the strong objections that each has to the other. But such a kind of tolerance would not apply where the contending parties were not of equal strength and one party was much stronger than the other and in a position to overwhelm them. So if toleration prevails, other grounds need to be sought for it. There is a quite different account of tolerance that might be called the reciprocal recognition of autonomy conception of tolerance (a somewhat ‘Kantian’ view). One way of achieving the balance is that each person in a society recognises the autonomy of others in their beliefs and actions. Each might have quite different sets of beliefs and each might have quite different conceptions of what constitutes the good life leading, perhaps, to quite different practices and actions. But what is required is that each recognises the autonomy of others concerning their beliefs and actions even when this involves matters to which one has objections. In particular, religious believers are autonomous agents when it comes to the beliefs they hold, even though there are others, such as Atatürk, who have no respect for religion and wish it at the bottom of the sea. And conversely, one is an autonomous agent in having no respect for religion, but autonomy of this sort is to be recognised by religious believers even though they may have objections to one’s stance. Tolerance is a two-way street because of the reciprocal recognition of autonomy which lies at its heart. Tolerance applies not just to beliefs but to actions based on these beliefs as well. One can object to the actions of others yet be required to tolerate them within a democracy. We can suppose that all our actions fall within the framework of some conception of law, the laws being ultimately decided by democratic processes. These processes can, of course, be quite contentious as are revealed by the considerable differences over abortion, civil marriages, euthanasia, the right to leave a religion (in some countries), and so on. What is important here is that, whatever the outcome of the democratic process, tolerance will be required in the case where one still objects to that outcome. There is a reciprocal recognition of each as an autonomous agent within a democratic process that yields an outcome to which some of the parties can still harbour objections. In this context the issue of free speech becomes significant. In order for the democratic process to work properly free speech is a necessary requirement—and this includes the speech that might be deemed disrespectful by some parties to the debate. In order for autonomous agents to be fully autonomous, free speech must prevail—and tolerance as well when the outcome of the democratic process is still something to which one objects. In the context of a reciprocal recognition of autonomy conception of tolerance, a secularised notion of respect, respect2, can be invoked. Tolerance involves only respect2 with its special ‘object,’ that of the respect given through the recognition of the autonomy of others, in particular their rights and liberties. It does not involve other kinds of respect, and may even involve absence of these kinds of respect or positive disrespect. This applies in the case of religion; religion is owed no special respect. As has been argued, respect for religion is a different ‘object’ from the ‘objects’ that properly

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apply in the case of respect2, namely, respect for the rights and liberties of believers and nonbelievers alike. Importantly for a tolerant society, respect creep to respect6 with its demand for universal respectful reverence for religion simply has no place. Within a liberal society in which there is tolerance of this kind, there is scope for each to have objections to the positions of others. There is no scope for suppression of any sort, and no scope for restrictions on freedom of speech that would impose restrictions on stating one’s objections. In particular, there is no scope for the universal demand of respect for religion (respect6). This concludes my case for three claims: 1. Religion is owed no respect—particularly in the sense that there is any universally binding requirement of respect upon all (respect6). Whether the ‘object’ religion is to be respected in any other sense is also not a universally binding matter. 2. Tolerance is a superior political ideal to that of respect. (It is one ideal of liberal democracies that is often not an ideal in other forms of society.) 3. Tolerance is quite consistent with according religion no respect, and even overt disrespect. NOTES 1. This chapter is an abridged version of a public address given on 14 May 2008 at the University of Auckland and originally entitled ‘Religion Is Owed No Respect.’ The address was under the auspices of the philosophy department of the University of Auckland and the philosophy department of Monash University as part of their Australasian Philosophy Project. I would like to thank Alan Musgrave and Ray Bradley for comments on earlier drafts that led to the improvement of the chapter. 2. Relevant passages can be found on pages 44–45 (e.g., ‘Why should I bless His name?’), 78–80 (e.g., ‘I was the accuser, God the accused.’), and 88–89 (e.g., ‘How can I believe, how can anyone believe, in the merciful God?’). 3. It should be noted that from ‘A does not respect X’ it does not follow that ‘A disrespects X.’ There remains the option that A neither respects not disrespects X and A is neutral. 4. For a good statement of the paradox and a range of responses to it, see Yanal (1999). 5. The case for this cannot be argued here; see Dworkin (2006). 6. The term ‘act’ in the context here of mental acts is intended to be generic. In some cases a better term might be ‘state,’ as in the case of a person’s long-term mental state of believing that p. The term ‘act’ as applied to believings tends to indicate that they are episodic, while the term ‘state’ does not. In what follows the common usage of philosophical tradition is adopted; the more generic sense of ‘act’ is what is intended, and this can be taken to include longer lasting mental states. 7. Acceptance of diversity within society is not necessarily an indication of tolerance since there is no explicit objection to aspects of that diversity. A person who tolerates needs to have an objection to some belief or activity; in this respect the tolerator (despite their refraining) may have a less liberal disposition than a person who is more broadly accepting. In ordinary language the tem ‘tolerant’ is often applied to someone who is accepting and has no objection to some belief or activity. The minimal account of tolerance expounded here is not to be confused with this ordinary and loose sense of the term ‘tolerant.’

Chapter Fifteen

Continental Philosophy in Australia Paul Patton

A discussion of ‘Continental philosophy’ in Australia cannot avoid addressing the question what is meant by this term. Since there is no easy answer to be found, I will begin by canvassing some of the ways in which it can be answered. Within academic and professional circles, the term has only become current since the 1970s, often replacing older designations for courses or areas of research such as ‘existential and phenomenological philosophy.’ It remains a complex and contested category, in part because it covers such a variety of topics and approaches to philosophy, and in part because it is bound up with a number of other dichotomies and stereotypes that are part of English-language intellectual culture. For example, the alignment of analytic philosophy with a scientific approach in contrast to the more literary style of much European philosophy has meant that the differences between them have widely been interpreted in terms of the difference between the ‘two cultures’ of the sciences and the humanities that C. P. Snow wrote about at the end of the 1950s (Critchley 2001: 49–52). The simplest way to understand the term would be as a geographic or rather an ‘ethnogeographic’ category, such that Continental philosophy is what is done by Continental Europeans, whether on the Continent or elsewhere (Nancy 1991: 2). However, the first problem with this approach is that it does not take into account the degree to which Continental philosophy has taken on a life of its own beyond the borders of Europe. It is now practised in many parts of the world and by many philosophers of non-European descent. The second problem with this ethnogeographic approach is that it overlooks the important contributions made by Europeans to other kinds of philosophy. For example, the origins of analytic philosophy include the work of Frege, Carnap, and other German-speaking founders of logical positivism, many of whom emigrated to Britain and the United States. There are many contemporary European philosophers who work in philosophy of logic, philosophy of language, or philosophy of science and who have no interest in what is otherwise known as Continental philosophy. 159

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This suggests that it might be more helpful to understand what is meant by ‘Continental philosophy’ in historical and methodological terms, so that it becomes an umbrella term for a whole series of orientations or traditions within philosophy since Kant. The list of such Continental traditions would include German idealism and the romanticism associated with nineteenth century figures such as Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Schlegel, Novalis, and Schopenhauer; the contrasting materialism of a range of anti-metaphysical thinkers including Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Bergson; the phenomenological and existential philosophy practised by German and French thinkers such as Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, De Beauvoir, and Levinas; the hermeneutical approach of Dilthey, Gadamer, Ricoeur, and others; the critical theory associated with thinkers of the Frankfurt school such as Adorno, Horkheimer, Lukacs, Marcuse, Habermas, and Honneth; and the structuralist and poststructuralist philosophy of French thinkers such as Althusser, Lacan, Foucault, Deleuze, Derrida, Irigaray, Le Doeuff, Nancy, and Lacoue-Labarthe (Critchley 2001: 13, Glendinning 2006: 41–57). The historical depth and open endedness of this method of defining Continental philosophy are both its strength and weakness. On the one hand, it acknowledges the diversity of approaches and the historical interconnections between them. On the other hand, it encompasses such a wide range of traditions and styles of philosophy that it becomes difficult to see what they have in common. Simon Critchley suggests that the appropriate conclusion to draw is that the term is little more than an Anglophone projection onto others who would not recognise themselves in this way. In this sense, to refer to Continental philosophy in Europe is about as helpful as asking for a ‘Continental breakfast’ in Madrid, Paris, or Berlin (Critchley 2001: 32). Simon Glendinning takes this approach even further, arguing that there is no internal unity to the idea of Continental philosophy other than the functions it serves for the predominantly Anglophone and analytic philosophers who make use of it to exclude certain authors from serious consideration and to legitimise the refusal to read their work. In this sense, he argues, Continental philosophy is ‘the Other’ of analytic philosophy (Glendinning 2006: 12). One advantage of understanding the term as an Anglocentric projection, or simply as a generic term for many of the ‘others’ of analytic philosophy, is that it allows us to understand how the term has become overlain with a series of additional cultural stereotypes, all of which contribute something to the popular understanding while none exactly coincide with it. Chief among these would be C. P. Snow’s two cultures mentioned previously: that of the sciences and that of the literary intellectuals. We still find elements of this in the contemporary university, particularly when it comes to research cultures, although in this context and despite their best efforts to be considered scientific even the analytic philosophers tend to be lumped in with the literary intellectuals. Another deep-seated cultural divide that sometimes overlaps with the analytic-Continental division in philosophy involves the perceived differences between the honest, plain-spoken, business-like culture of the Englishspeaking world and the less honest, less plainly spoken, and less businesslike approach of much European culture. Here there is room for national stereotypes such as those that differentiate the flowery and effete airs of

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French and Latin cultures from the Northern European defects of woolly abstraction and mysticism found among the Danes and Germans. These cultural stereotypes embody the kind of Anglocentric sense of superiority expressed in the famous headline in the London Times: ‘Fog over the Channel. Continent Cut Off.’ They form part of what Michèle Le Doeuff has called ‘the philosophical imaginary,’ that is to say the images, metaphors, and figures of speech in terms of which philosophers often make sense of who they are and what they do (Le Doeuff 1990). The list of such imaginary representations of philosophers and philosophy includes Locke’s underlaborers of science, Descartes’ tree of knowledge, Kant’s surveyors of the island of truth, Nietzsche’s philosophers of the future, and many more. These ideas or images recur in different and sometimes contradictory forms throughout the history of philosophy as their referent and context changes from one occasion to the next. So, for example, the imagery of mist and fog is often employed to characterise the confusion of Continental thought in contrast to the clarity of British philosophy, while in a recent prize-winning Australian Broadcasting Corporation production the prevalence of fog and mist is used to characterise British as opposed to Australian philosophy. In response to the question why Australian philosophers have played such a prominent role in defending materialist theories of mind, one of the discussants reports the widespread view that: the trouble with when you study philosophy in other parts of the world . . . especially . . . somewhere like England . . . there’s just so much fog and mist and so forth outside, people tend believe that the world is ethereal and they never really get out and do the hard work. Whereas in Australia, in the hard light . . . it just exposes everything, we’re forced to look at the world as it really is and it means that we can be honest about that and we can really get down and do some important work. (O’Brien 2006)

A third dichotomy that bears on the characterisation of Continental philosophy concerns the difference between knowledge and wisdom. Western philosophy at its origins, among the Greeks, was above all practical knowledge. It embodied the love of wisdom, where this was supposed to tell us what is a good life and how to live. Such moral questions were central to philosophy, at least up until the early modern period, but they have since been displaced by a more technical and science-oriented concern with knowledge of the world, including the human and biological world. There has been a revival of interest in the classical questions in recent years, evident for example in the popularity of works such as those by Alain De Botton (De Botton 1997, 2001). Many of the Continental traditions in philosophy listed previously have long been considered closer to the classical questions of wisdom about life. This is especially true of the phenomenological and existential traditions. So, Critchley suggests, ‘the appeal of Continental philosophy is that it seems closer to the grain and detail of human existence. It seems truer to the drama of life, to the stuff of human hopes and fears, and to the many little woes and weals to which our flesh is prone’ (Critchley 2001: 11). Here too, one should not overestimate the degree to which this is true: some of the

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higher reaches of German Idealism or the formal complexities of Structuralism in its heyday remain far from the grain and detail of human existence. Conversely, some Anglo-American analytic philosophy, such as the work of Peter Singer, engages closely with very personal and everyday questions about how we should live (Singer 1979, 1995). A further, related difference between much of the philosophy that is called Continental and its analytic counterpart concerns their respective attitudes to history and the historical context in which they unfold. It is a feature of much Continental philosophy that the present moment in history is considered problematic in some way that calls for its overcoming, critique, or resistance. This attitude informs the political stance of many Continental thinkers, up to and including that of French poststructuralists such as Deleuze, Derrida, and Foucault, all of whom understand the political import of philosophy in terms of its relation to an undetermined but different future. In the final section of this chapter I will suggest that this attitude has something to offer societies such as Australia that are still caught up in the effort to free themselves from their colonial history. HISTORY OF CONTINENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN AUSTRALIA There is a long tradition of engagement by Australian philosophers with Continental European thought. The standard English translation of Edmund Husserl’s Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1913, English translation 1931) was the work of William Boyce Gibson, professor of philosophy at the University of Melbourne from 1911 until 1935. Boyce Gibson was among a small group of Melbourne philosophers interested in the work of Continental European thinkers such as Husserl, Rudolf Eucken, and Henri Bergson. After World War II, philosophy in Australia was largely dominated by analytic approaches, until the 1960s and 1970s when there was a revival of interest in phenomenology and existentialist thought (William Ginnane, Kimon Lycos, and Genevieve Lloyd at the Australian National University in Canberra; Max Deutscher and Luciana O’Dwyer at Macquarie University in Sydney). A phenomenology conference was held in Canberra in 1976, then another in Brisbane in 1980 at which the Australasian Association for Phenomenology and Social Science was formed. In 1984 this became the Australasian Association for Phenomenology and Social Philosophy, which held a series of conferences, often with international guest speakers, during the early 1990s. This was the immediate predecessor of the Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP), established in Melbourne by a group of postgraduate students in 1995. This led to a series of very successful conferences in Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra, and Brisbane, and eventually the adoption of a formal constitution and executive committee in 2007. The ASCP held its first conference in Auckland in 2008. From the late 1970s, there was also a growing interest in German critical theory, Marxism, hermeneutics, and French poststructuralist thought, especially among graduate students. Significant publications to emerge from this period included the translations and essays collected in Michel Foucault:

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Power, Truth, Strategy (edited by Meaghan Morris and Paul Patton, 1979); What Is Deconstruction? (co-authored by Andrew Benjamin and Christopher Norris, 1988), The Lyotard Reader (edited by Andrew Benjamin, 1989); Kevin Hart’s The Trespass of the Sign: Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy (1989); Elizabeth Grosz’s book on Kristeva, Irigaray, and Le Doeuff entitled Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (1989); and Rosi Braidotti’s Patterns of Dissonance: A Study of Women in Contemporary Philosophy (1991a). Since the 1980s, a number of Australian philosophers working in Continental philosophy have been appointed to permanent positions at universities in Australia and elsewhere. This has led to increasing numbers of graduate students and a steady flow of books and articles in this field. A recently compiled list of publications by members of the ASCP during the two years 2007–2008 included sixteen monographs and five edited collections. The monographs included major works with leading international publishers such as Jeff Malpas’s Heidegger’s Topology: Being, Place, World (2007); Paul Redding's Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (2007); Alison Ross's The Aesthetic Paths of Philosophy: Presentation in Kant, Heidegger, Lacoue-Labarthe, and Nancy (2007); Russell Grigg’s Lacan, Language and Philosophy (2008); and Bruin (Carleton) Christensen's Self and World: From Analytic Philosophy to Phenomenology (2008). The edited collections include Transcendental Heidegger (edited by Jeff Malpas and Steven Crowell, 2007); Recognition, Work, Politics: New Directions in French Critical Theory (edited by Jean-Philippe Deranty, Danielle Petherbridge, John Rundell, and Robert Sinnerbrink, 2007); Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts (edited by Rosalyn Diprose and Jack Reynolds, 2008); and Cinematic Thinking: Philosophical Approaches to the New Cinema (edited by James Phillips, 2008). This is an impressive list. Moreover, it is undoubtedly incomplete as a list of contributions to contemporary work in Continental philosophy by Australians. It does not include the work of a number of expatriate Australians such as the collection of essays entitled Counter-Experiences: Reading Jean-Luc Marion (2007), edited by Kevin Hart who is now at the University of Virginia; the Wellek Library Lectures by Elizabeth Grosz, formerly at Sydney and Monash Universities, now at Rutgers University, entitled Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (2008); or the monograph on the work of French philosopher Alain Badiou, entitled Badiou: Live Theory (2008), by Oliver Feltham, who teaches at the American University in Paris. Feltham is also the translator of Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (2007), which is a major work of recent French philosophy. In more than 400 pages Badiou discusses many of the principal figures in the tradition of European ontology from Parmenides to Heidegger and Deleuze, in the course of outlining his own fundamental ontology and associated concepts of the event and the subject. Justin Clemens, art critic for The Monthly and lecturer in English at Melbourne University, points out that Feltham continues a tradition of Australian translators of major European works that goes back to Boyce Gibson and even earlier—he mentions Christopher Brennan’s correspondence with Mallarmé in the 1890s—and that has continued with my own translation of Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition (1994); Russell Grigg’s

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translations of Lacan (Lacan 1997, 2006); Louise Burchill’s translations of Badiou’s book on Deleuze (Badiou 1999); Steven Corcoran’s translations of Badiou (Badiou 2006, 2009) and Rancière (Rancière 2007); and the translation of Bernard Steigler’s Acting Out by David Barison, Daniel Ross, and Patrick Crogan (Steigler 2008). Barison and Ross are also the directors of the 2004 prize-winning film, The Ister, based on a 1942 lecture course by Heidegger devoted to Hölderlin’s poem about the river Danube and featuring interviews with Steigler, Jean-Luc Nancy, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe. Clemens canvasses a number of reasons why Australians, who otherwise live and work in an ‘aggressively monolingual public culture’ seem to be such preeminent translators of difficult foreign works. He points to the adoption of a resolutely internationalist approach, which is the antithesis of the border-security mentality that otherwise prevails in the public culture; to a commitment to the ideas themselves, but also to a perpetuation of the terra nullius attitude that says there is really nothing important here so we have to go overseas to find real philosophy/politics/theory. I am not sure that there is a single answer to the question why Australians so frequently take on translations, or why they do it so well, but I disagree with the suggestion that it boils down to cultural cringe or perpetuating in thought the role of ‘indispensable auxiliaries in the service of great foreign powers’ (Clemens 2006: 24). Rather, I think that it is often a form of intellectual apprenticeship, to which Australians are perhaps drawn by virtue of a sense of remoteness, but which also enables them to understand the ways of thinking of philosophers from very different languages and cultures in a way that is less readily available to citizens of the great metropolitan and colonial societies. As the previous list of translations and scholarly monographs suggests, Australian Continental philosophers have often played an important role in bringing European and Anglo-American traditions into conversation with one another. As such, they are not merely auxiliaries, whether as translators or commentators, as important and valuable as that work often is. They are, increasingly, significant contributors to international debates in their own right. Let me give one example from the recent works mentioned here. AUSTRALIAN CONTRIBUTIONS TO INTERNATIONAL DEBATES After a long period during which Hegel’s philosophy was largely confined to outer darkness for most English-speaking philosophers, there has been a substantial revival of interest since at least the publication of Charles Taylor’s Hegel (1975). Initially, this renewed interest in Hegel was confined to his social and political philosophy. More recently, however, the emergence of a so-called non-metaphysical interpretation of Hegel has shifted attention to central themes of his concern with the developmental and self-correcting character of human reason in general. This is a non-metaphysical Hegel in the sense that he is no longer read as relying upon implausible theses that present human history and culture as the progressive expression of an otherworldly spirit. Rather, Hegel is read as someone concerned to elucidate the self-transforming and self-legitimating character of the norms that underlie

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the reasons that we give for accepting certain judgments. In the terms of the American philosopher Wilfrid Sellars, Hegel is concerned to understand human knowledge and judgment in the absence of any empirical or logical given. The development of this idea of the absence of any given foundation for knowledge by other American analytic philosophers influenced by Sellars, notably John McDowell and Robert Brandom, has led, if not to a widespread embrace of Hegel, at least to his readmission alongside Kant, Leibniz, and others into the canon of philosophers who should be seriously read and discussed. Sydney philosopher Paul Redding has long written articles in support of the non-metaphysical reading of Hegel. His recent Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (2007) is a further contribution to this important, double-edged movement in contemporary philosophy. One reviewer describes it as ‘the most substantial account of this parallel movement to date’ (Wretzel 2008: 138). Another describes it as ‘a genuine attempt to fuse the horizons of two deeply related but historically separated traditions’ (deVries 2008: 5). CONTINENTAL CONTRIBUTIONS TO AUSTRALIAN DEBATES I drew attention earlier to the suggestion that a helpful way to think of Continental philosophy was as a series of overlapping traditions and approaches, each with their own characteristic methods and paradigmatic problems. Conceived in this way, there is no single feature that unites all the approaches commonly described as Continental, but rather a family of different, overlapping, and contingently related features. It is therefore open to us all to choose which features and therefore which approaches we find useful, appealing, or important. From the perspective of an interest in political philosophy and its application to the particular kind of quasi-postcolonial society we find in Australia, I think that the problem of the Other and the critical attitude towards the present have something to offer contemporary public debates in Australia and similar societies established by colonisation. The question of the Other or of our relations to others, especially those foreign others very different to ourselves, is one of the problems shared by a number of Continental traditions, including existential, critical-theoretical, and poststructuralist approaches. This question has a long history in Continental thought, from its origins in post-Kantian theories of the nature of individual subjectivity to the overtly political concern with what Kant called the cosmopolitan right of individuals to arrive in a foreign country and to be received without penalty. Hannah Arendt, Levinas, Derrida, and others have discussed the ethical and political status of Others in the post-war period. Similar questions have been raised in Australia in recent years in relation to illegal immigrants, sometimes within the framework of the cosmopolitan concept of hospitality: what are our obligations to those who arrive, unannounced and in need? (Diprose 2004, Mills and Jenkins 2004). However, this question of our relations to Others also lies at the heart of the history of the treatment of Indigenous peoples in Australia. It is crucial to the unresolved issues of reconciliation and a treaty or form of agreement that

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might establish relations on just foundations. What does justice mean in this context? Contemporary philosophical approaches to the question of justice tend to consider this in distributive terms, which is a way of putting aside questions of historical injustice and focussing instead on the present-day rights of individuals to equal treatment or ‘fair shares’ of primary social goods. However, approaches such as this miss a number of important features of the injustice experienced by colonised Indigenous people. They do not address the sense of injustice which flows from the belief that colonisation itself was a violation of the rights of Indigenous peoples. They don’t address the idea that justice also requires a certain kind of recognition of others. It requires acknowledgment that others have their own conceptions of what is fair and right. This calls for a willingness to negotiate rather than simply assuming that justice may be imposed in the terms of one party to the colonial relationship. It requires the recognition of cultural difference and the recognition that such differences do not disqualify others from equal consideration. These ideas are bound up with a conception of justice more commonly found in the writings of Continental philosophers such as Derrida or Levinas, even if it is one that often arises in the Australian debates over the common law doctrine of native title (Patton 1999: 72). I mentioned previously the critical dimension of much Continental philosophy that involves a willingness to pose questions about the particular culture or the particular historical moment in which the philosopher finds himor herself rather than being concerned only with universal conditions of knowledge, or moral or aesthetic judgement. The universalizing approach to philosophical questions has not been the only tradition within Australian philosophy. In an article published in The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy in 1940, a lecturer at the University of Sydney and former student of John Anderson, P. H. Partridge, canvassed the idea of a social philosophy which would involve more than just the examination of a given disciplinary field or well-established series of problems, but would also play a role in the evolution of a sustainable culture. Partridge points out that there is a long tradition, which includes Hegel and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, which views philosophy as an important mode of inquiry because it fulfils the function of ‘providing the stimulus or direction for a general cultural advance.’ He concludes his discussion of the relation between philosophy and science and their role in the culture at large with a call for a social philosophy that might assist ‘in forming the structure of a stable culture’ (Partridge 1940: 17). The French philosopher Michel Foucault outlined a similar conception of philosophy at the end of his life in the 1980s. Situating his own work in precisely the tradition referred to by Partridge, Foucault took Kant’s newspaper article ‘What Is Enlightenment?’ to exemplify a way of philosophizing which takes as its object the present moment in history. The question posed in this essay, Foucault suggests, is ‘What is happening right now? What is this right now we all are in which defines the moment at which I am writing?’ (Foucault 2007: 84). Foucault uses Kant’s text to characterise his own manner of criticizing the present. In doing so, he renounces a teleological conception of the present as progress towards some predetermined state in

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favour of a negative conception of the present understood in terms of its difference from the past. The focus of his own genealogical criticism is always a particular break with the past, a point at which what was previously considered universal or necessary is now seen to be ‘singular, contingent, and the product of arbitrary constraints’ (Foucault 1997: 315). Foucault was less concerned with questions about the normative bases or institutional forms of stable and just political regimes than he was with questions of change and of ways to bring about rupture with the past. Yet, even though neither Foucault nor Partridge ever wrote about the situation of colonised Indigenous peoples, the questions they both raised are relevant to the current state of Australia’s efforts to overcome its colonial past. The conception of philosophy to which they appeal has immediate application to the situation in which we now find ourselves. The significant negative aspect of our present is the abandonment of the principle of terra nullius that was previously regarded as an irremovable foundation of Australian law. The landmark judgments of the High Court in relation to native title have shown this to be the product of particular racist assumptions embedded in earlier decisions all the way from colonial courts up to the Privy Council. The ‘now’ which we inhabit involves a rewriting of the legal terms in which colonisation took place. The emergence of native title jurisprudence has collapsed elements of the colonial past into the present and made them part of the ongoing elaboration of the future. In this context, and in the terms of the conception of philosophy outlined by Partridge and Foucault, we can also envisage a more constructive task, namely the construction of concepts that give expression to the decolonisation of Australian law, institutions, and the social imaginary and that provide new foundations for a stable and fair society. Continental philosophy has a useful contribution to make to this ongoing public political debate.

Chapter Sixteen

Getting the Wrong Anderson?: A Short and Opinionated History of New Zealand Philosophy Charles R. Pigden

What is New Zealand philosophy? 1 Philosophy done in New Zealand or by New Zealanders. Philosophy is an import/export business and in a history of New Zealand Philosophy both the imports and the exports rate a mention. Philosophers who alighted here briefly and then took off again are not really part of the story unless they made a big impact during their short stays (as is perhaps the case with Feyerabend; see Motterlini 1999: 276–77, Ardley 1983: 38). Philosophers who left in their infancy are not part of the story either, even if they self-identify as Kiwis. But immigrants who have spent a substantial amount of time in New Zealand definitely count, as do emigrants who derived some of their inspiration from their New Zealand–based teachers. What do I mean by a ‘philosopher’? In a professionalised age, I mean primarily someone employed to teach or do research in philosophy (or in an allied area such as politics), though I don’t want to discount gifted amateurs. Finally, when I talk about philosophy ‘done’ in New Zealand or by New Zealanders, I am talking about books and articles about philosophy, public polemics with a substantial philosophical content, or the everyday teaching that is the professional philosopher’s bread and butter. So much for the ‘philosophy’ part. What about ‘history’? The history of philosophy is a borderline activity. Is it a contribution to philosophy or a contribution to history? The short answer is that it can be either or both. But there is a big difference in how we approach the subject, depending on whether our interests are primarily philosophical or primarily historical. Considered as a contribution to philosophy, the history of philosophy is a necromantic art. The idea is to revive the great dead (and sometimes the notso-great dead) in order to get into an argument with them. And the reason is that we think that they are importantly right or interestingly wrong. (The 169

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trivially right and the boringly wrong are generally allowed to slumber in their graves unless they attract the attentions of a history-for-history’s sake scholar.) If our interests are primarily philosophical, then we can employ what a true historian would regard with horror as the dark arts of anachronism. Since we want to get into an argument with the great dead, it is entirely appropriate to enhance their argumentative powers with bits and bobs of modern magic. We can reconstruct Hume’s argument that you can’t get an ought from an is (published in 1740) with the aid of the Tarskian concept of logical consequence (devised by a Polish logician in the 1930s; see Hume 1978: 469–70, Tarski 1983, Pigden 2010); we can analyze Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God (devised in the days of William the Conqueror) with the aid of modern modal logic (devised in the 1910s and not really reaching maturity until the 1960s); we can refurbish the ethics of Aristotle (written around 340 BCE) with data drawn from contemporary ethology and post–Jane Goodall primatology; and we can reconstruct Hobbes’s argument (developed in the 1640s) that in a state of nature the life of man would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, with the aid of game theory and the Prisoner’s Dilemma, intellectual tools developed since the 1940s in part to assist with nuclear strategy. Not only can we enhance dead philosophers with the aid of modern magic—we can criticise them too with the aid of the same tools. Thus is it perfectly proper to do as Popper did and expound and criticise works of Marx (written in the 1860s) with the aid of a philosophy of science developed in the 1930s (Marx 1990, Popper 1945: vol. 2). Of course, these procedures carry with them a certain risk. If we go too far, the ghosts we revive will be merely the creations of our own views and interests, rather than magically enhanced voices from the past. We will be arguing with ourselves rather than with the great dead. But nobody ever promised that practicing the dark arts was free from spiritual dangers. Alternatively, the history of philosophy can be viewed as a contribution to history. History is about human endeavour, about more-or-less rational agents operating in a problem situation, and about the unintended consequences of their actions and interactions. (That, in a nutshell, is the view of Karl Popper, perhaps the most famous philosopher ever to operate in New Zealand; Popper 1972b: 170–90.) And the theoretical problems of philosophy are just as real (if not always as momentous) as the practical problems of politics or of military campaigns. Thus philosophy has a history which, to some people at least, is as interesting as the history of other kinds of endeavour. Moreover, the history of philosophy has an advantage over other kinds of history. It tends to be less depressing. For if history is about human achievements and successes, it is also a record of the crimes and follies of mankind (Gibbon 1994: 102). The crimes of politicians can be catastrophic in their consequences, whilst the follies of generals condemn brave men to unnecessary deaths. Crimes against logic 2 tend to be bloodless, and if people die because of the follies of philosophers at least they don’t do it straight away. Ideas can kill, but they tend to do their killing at several removes from the philosopher’s desk. Hence the history of philosophy is a relatively cheerful business. Nevertheless it is in principle possible to conduct this kind of history whilst disliking or despising the thoughts that you are trying to recover. According to Cardinal Newman, ‘it is melancholy to say it, but the chief,

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perhaps the only English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the unbeliever Gibbon’ (cited in Swain 1966: 70). Gibbon had to discuss the theological controversies of the early church because of their impact on his major theme, the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Christianity was one of the religions that triumphed in the triumph of barbarism and religion, hence it had to be understood. But Gibbon does not seem to have regarded the ideas whose history he expounds as either importantly right or interestingly wrong. St. Athanasius may have been an interesting psychological specimen, but he was not a person that Gibbon wanted to have an argument with (Gibbon 1994: esp. ch. 21). If the history of philosophy is regarded as a contribution to history (rather than philosophy) anachronism begins to be a crime, since a large part of what interests us is the problem situation as it appeared to the actors rather than the problem situation as it actually was. Just as the military decisions of the general are determined by his beliefs about the facts rather than the actual facts, so the intellectual decisions of the philosopher are determined by his beliefs about the facts rather than the actual facts (if indeed there are any such facts). Since the thoughts of historical agents are determined by the information and the concepts that are available to them, if we are trying to reconstruct the thought processes of long-dead philosophers, we must confine ourselves to the concepts and the data that they were aware of. But contemporary knowledge still has a role to play even if our interests are largely historical. For just as the success or otherwise of a general’s endeavours will be determined by facts that may have been unknown to him (but known to us), so the success or otherwise of a philosopher’s endeavours may be determined by facts not known to him (but known to us). He might, for instance, have been trying to prove what we now know to be unprovable or defending a thesis now known to be false. Moreover, one of the things that interests us when investigating human endeavour is whether or not it succeeds. And success for a philosopher consists in getting it right or (as a second best) either getting it interestingly wrong or improving on the work of one’s predecessors. And what ‘improvement’ means in this connection is getting closer to important truths. Thus even the historically minded historian of philosophy is likely to do her history with one eye on what she takes to be the philosophic truth. But I can assume that you are not reading this article to get into a debate with the great dead. You want to find out about the history of New Zealand philosophy and perhaps to discover if any of it has risen to greatness. Thus I can presume that for the moment at least you are interested in the history of philosophy as a contribution to history. Resurrection is to be deferred until you know whether there is anyone worth resurrecting. But it is still worth rehearsing these distinctions. For one of the areas in which New Zealand philosophers have distinguished themselves—and New Zealand philosophy has burned with a very bright flame over the last seventy-odd years—is the history of philosophy, especially the history of early modern philosophy (roughly 1600–1800). Jonathan Bennett, one of the world’s leading experts on early modern philosophy, is a New Zealander and so is Annette Baier, one of the leading experts on Hume (Bennett 2001; Baier 1991). The two best books on the Anglo-Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville (1670–1733)

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were written by New Zealanders, one an emigrant and the other an immigrant (Monro 1975; Goldsmith 1985). Two of the best books on the anarchist philosopher William Godwin (husband of Mary Wollstonecraft and father of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein) were also written by New Zealanders (in this case both of them emigrants) (Monro 1953; Locke 1980). In my view (though this is a bit more controversial) the best book on the ‘British Moralists’ (a series of British moral philosophers who flourished between 1650 and 1800) is Logic and the Basis of Ethics (1949) by Arthur Prior, New Zealand’s homegrown philosophical genius. Susan Moller Okin, famous as the author of Women in Western Political Thought, was a New Zealander (though she spent most of her career in the United States). During his period as professor at Otago (1950–1955), the Australian philosopher John Passmore published Ralph Cudworth (1951) (another book about a British Moralist) and Hume’s Intentions (1952), and worked on his magnum opus, A Hundred Years of Philosophy, which did not come out until 1957 (a book of such massive erudition that people found it hard to believe it had been written by one man and were inclined to regard Passmore as the frontman for a committee). Indeed, Otago actually has an endowed chair in early modern philosophy, funded partly by an anonymous donor and partly by the government, and occupied, at present, by Peter Anstey, a noted expert on Boyle and Locke. So when New Zealand philosophers do the history of philosophy what sort of history do they do? Is it history for history’s sake or history for philosophy’s sake? Well of course they do a bit of both, and nobody is likely to do history of any kind unless they enjoy rubbing up against the past. But despite their delight in historical detail, it is history for philosophy’s sake that tends to predominate. The approach is typified by the title of Jonathan Bennett’s book, Learning from Six Philosophers: Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume (2001), and even more in his introduction in which he explains that learning from these six philosophers consists, in part, in arguing with them, and sometimes in convicting them of error. Jeremy Waldron’s book God, Locke and Equality (2002) argues that Locke’s conception of liberal equality—the idea that morally speaking, everybody counts for one and nobody for more than one—depends upon theological premises and looks decidedly shaky without them. (The tentative moral of Waldron’s story is not so much the worse for liberal equality but so much the better for the theological premises.) The most famous philosophy book ever written in New Zealand, Popper’s Open Society (1945), contains a strident critique of Plato who, in Popper’s opinion, betrayed his master Socrates by developing a totalitarian utopia. New Zealand philosophers, whether by birth or by adoption, are noted for their willingness to get to grips with the philosophers of the past, but not for excessive reverence for the great dead.

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INVISIBLE PHILOSOPHERS AND THE APPARENT LACK OF LOCAL INFLUENCE There is one more distinction I want to make before getting down to historical business. Is the history of philosophy in a country X primarily a contribution to the history of the country X or primarily a contribution to the history of philosophy? In the case of New Zealand it has to be primarily a contribution to the history of philosophy. For though New Zealand philosophy—that is, philosophy done in New Zealand or by native New Zealanders—has had a major impact on the international philosophical scene, it has not had much impact on New Zealand itself. At least it has not had the kind of impact that makes it necessary to talk about it much in a general history of the country, such as the well-known histories of Keith Sinclair (1980), Michael King (2003), James Belich (2001), Phillippa Mein Smith (2005), and Chris Trotter, (2007), or even in more topically focused histories such as Jane Kelsey’s The New Zealand Experiment (1997). 3, 4 In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, New Zealand has had more famous philosophers per capita than almost any other country (with the possible exceptions of Finland and Sweden). We punch well above our weight. But the names of philosophers are conspicuous by their absence in general histories of New Zealand. Sinclair mentions John Stuart Mill and R.G. Collingwood (neither of them New Zealanders) 5 and King has half a page on Popper. There don’t seem to be any philosophers in the index to Jane Kelsey’s The New Zealand Experiment. I rate a mention in my good friend Chris Trotter’s history, as does the polymath Jim Flynn, one of whose specialities is moral and political philosophy. 6 But Flynn appears in his capacity as a teacher and I appear in my capacity as comrade: we do not appear (at least not explicitly) in our capacities as philosophers. 7 As for my philosophical achievements, when Trotter introduced this paper at the Auckland Writers’ Festival, he had to ring me up to ask me what they were. But it is not quite true that the names of New Zealand philosophers don’t get a mention in general histories of New Zealand. In some cases at least their names get a mention but only because they share them with otherwise prominent relations. The name ‘Mulgan,’ for instance, appears in the indices of Sinclair, King, and Belich since it stands for John Mulgan, the author of the famous New Zealand novel A Man Alone. There is no mention of his philosophical grandson, my former student, Tim Mulgan, now one of the most prominent representatives of the utilitarian or consequentialist tradition of moral thought in the world today (Mulgan 2001, 2006, 2007). Sinclair had some excuse since he had been in his grave eight years before Tim published his first book, The Demands of Consequentialism in 2001. Not so King, since his history came out two years later. Another name that occurs in King is ‘Hursthouse,’ the moniker of a pioneer farming family in Taranaki. He does not mention—perhaps because he did not know—that Professor Rosalind Hursthouse, a scion of that family, is internationally famous as one of the chief representatives of a rival tradition in moral theory, virtue ethics, which derives its inspiration from the ethics of Aristotle. Her justly praised book, On Virtue Ethics (1999), came out four years before King’s history. Elsie Locke, the well-known activist and children’s writer, rates a mention in

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King, and the name of her younger son, the Green MP and former Alliance member, Keith Locke, will probably crop up in more detailed histories of the past twenty years. Not so that of her eldest son, the philosopher Don Locke, whose name was known to me since I studied philosophy at Cambridge in the seventies, long before I ever came to New Zealand. Again, a detailed parliamentary history of New Zealand would have to say something about the trade unionist, former MP, former Minister of Women’s Affairs, and (for a short period) Leader of the Alliance, Laila Harré. But it could afford to remain silent about her New Zealand–born uncle, the distinguished Oxford philosopher of science, Rom Harré, even though he is one of the most prodigiously productive philosophers in the world today with well over fifty books to his credit. But I am joking, of course. Neither King nor any of the other historians I have listed needs an excuse for not mentioning philosophers in a general history of New Zealand. For prominent as they have been on the international philosophical scene, they do not seem to have had much impact on New Zealand itself. Why not? And why is this generally true of the philosophers I have mentioned, many of whom really are internationally famous (at least among professional philosophers)? PHILOSOPHERS FOR EXPORT? One reason perhaps is that it is difficult to make an impact on a country if you live on the other side of the world, and most of the philosophers I have mentioned have spent all, some or most of their careers overseas. Annette Baier—Hume scholar, feminist, and moral philosopher, who was recently billed on a somewhat eccentric list of 100 living geniuses compiled by the consultants Creators Synectics—left New Zealand in the 1950s (she describes her head of department at Auckland, Professor R. P. Anschutz as an ‘enemy’ though a ‘generous’ one) (Baier 2008: 281) and did not return until her retirement in 1997 after a distinguished career, mostly at the University of Pittsburgh. Rosalind Hursthouse is now professor at Auckland, but before that she did a B.Phil. and a D.Phil. at Oxford, where she taught for six years before becoming a lecturer at the Open University for the next twenty-five. In other words she spent over thirty years abroad, mainly in Britain before taking up her present post at Auckland. Arthur Prior spent the latter part of his career at Manchester and Oxford, and Tim Mulgan, the baby of the bunch, is now a professor at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. But the saddest story comes from Jonathan Bennett, who explained to me by email how he had to give up his dream of a philosophical career in New Zealand for the second best option of a job at Cambridge: My career abroad? The main thing I have to say is that I badly wanted to return to New Zealand and live my life there, and for that reason I took a one-year job in the U.S. (immediately after my graduate degree) so as to be available for anything that came up. Nothing did come up. Prior badly needed an extra lecturer (by this time he

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had, I think, just one philosophical colleague), and it looked as though this was going to happen, with the post offered to me because (as Prior rightly said) I was better qualified than anyone they were likely to get who wasn’t drawn by patriotism. The two-part proposal was approved at various levels in the College, but was squashed by the finance committee (or whatever it was called), who said that they couldn’t afford another philosophy lecturer. So, having been warned by Ryle that it wasn’t wise to go on taking one-year jobs, I threw myself on the mercy of the UK job market and landed a full lectureship in Cambridge. At that point I stopped polishing my patriotism morning and night, and came not to want to go back to New Zealand to live. (email, 1 August 2007)

Bennett now lives on an island off the coast of Canada and occupies himself with translating the works of early modern philosophers (including the English speakers) into contemporary English. So perhaps the lack of impact is due to our habit of exporting our best philosophical talent? That’s part of the answer, perhaps, but only part of it. For there are several philosophers of roughly equal distinction who don’t rate a mention in books of general history despite long careers in New Zealand. The late George Hughes, famous as the coauthor of An Introduction to Modal Logic (1968), his former colleague Max Cresswell (ditto), my own professor and former head of department, the philosopher of science Alan Musgrave, are all good examples. Two are imports and one a homegrown talent, but all three have (or have had) big international reputations and careers that span thirty years or more in this country, though none would rate a mention in a book such as King’s. The talent we retain or attract does not seem to make much more impact on the local scene than the talent we export. IS NEW ZEALAND PHILOSOPHY TOO ESOTERIC TO EXERT MUCH INFLUENCE? But perhaps I am looking at this is in the wrong way. Perhaps the lack of impact is not so much a fact about New Zealand as a fact about philosophy, or at least the kind of philosophy that we practice here. Consider Finland. Finnish philosophy like New Zealand philosophy punches above its weight There are probably even more famous Finnish philosophers per capita than there are New Zealand philosophers. Two Finnish philosophers so far have achieved the ultimate accolade of a dedicated volume in the prestigious Library of Living Philosophers series, an honour accorded to no New Zealandborn philosopher (Schilpp and Hahn [1989], Auxier and Hahn [2006]). (Though Karl Popper, who did some of his best work here, merited a massive two-volume set; see Schilpp [1974].) Yet my guess is that you could write a pretty adequate history of modern Finland whilst relegating their philosophers to a couple of footnotes. (Certainly the online articles about Finnish culture that I have accessed make no mention of Finnish philosophy.) Finnish philosophers, like New Zealand philosophers, are big in areas which don’t

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seem to have much impact on public affairs or the intellectual consciousness of non-philosophers. The Finns are big in logic as are New Zealanders; the Finns are big in the philosophy of science as are New Zealand philosophers (notably Alan Musgrave: 1993, 1999, 2009; Robert Nola: 2003, Nola and Sankey 2007, and Kim Sterelny: 2001, 2003; Sterelny and Griffiths 1999, Maclaurin and Sterelny 2008). And you can be pretty massive in either of these areas without exciting much interest in (or exerting much influence on) the non-philosophical public. What follows from what is an important question as are questions about the status and reliability of science, the nature of natural selection, or the evolution of human intelligence. But research into these areas tends to be an esoteric business and it takes a fair bit of work to understand the basics. Perhaps modern philosophy—or at least the kind of analytic philosophy practiced by Finns and New Zealanders—is just too esoteric to make much of an impact outside the academy? That is part of the answer, but only part of it. To begin with, ideas derived from logic and the philosophy of science can have a considerable impact, not only on history, but on the intellectual consciousness of the non-philosophical public. For example, symbolic logic provides the conceptual underpinnings of the computing industry on which we rely for just about everything (for an interesting example of this, see the following). When it comes to cultural influence, consider Popper. Popper’s basic idea is that it is the mark of a genuinely scientific theory that it is refutable by experience. Thus Marxism is not a genuinely scientific theory (as Marx and Engels claimed) since in most of its formulations it is not refutable. Popper’s Demarcation Criterion between science and non-science (which has certainly had a massive impact in the sciences as well as on political thought) is based in part on a logical point. No finite set of observations can conclusively confirm a generalisation like ‘All As are Bs,’ but a single A which is not a B can refute it. Or consider the widely accepted idea that you can’t get an ought from an is, moral conclusions from non-moral premises. This too is based, in part, on the logical point that in a valid deductive argument the conclusions are in some sense contained within the premises, so that you cannot get out what you haven’t put in. I mention these examples because Popper did some of his most important work in New Zealand and because one of the best books and by far the most important article on the Is-Ought question is by New Zealand’s philosophical superstar, Arthur Prior (1949, 1960). Secondly, New Zealand philosophers have not confined themselves to the icy slopes of logic. They are also big in moral philosophy, political philosophy, and the philosophy of law. I have mentioned several examples already, but if you want another name to conjure with, Jeremy Waldron (1993, 2002), formerly of Otago and now of New York, is one of the most important theorists of liberalism working in the world today. He has just been appointed to the Chichele Professorship in Social and Political Theory at Oxford. 8 Finally, there are several examples of academic philosophers who have exercised an enormous influence within their own countries, despite the fact that their key ideas were fairly esoteric. ‘Did you ever read the book that made us all so wise and good?,’ wrote Virginia Woolf to a friend in 1940

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(cited in Baldwin 1990: xiii). The book in question: G. E. Moore’s Principia Ethica, first published in 1903, and the bible of the Bloomsbury group. It’s principal thesis is that goodness is a peculiar non-natural property, that morally what we ought to do is to produce as much of it as possible, and that it attaches primarily to beautiful people having beautiful relationships and contemplating the beautiful; hence the object of the moral life is to maximise such states. Because of its influence on Bloomsbury, and Bloomsbury’s enormous influence on British culture and politics, Moore had a large, though indirect, influence on British history. Lord Keynes, the one genuine genius of the Bloomsbury group, remained a true, though slightly ironic, believer all his life (Keynes 1972). The education policy of the Attlee government was designed to produce what the minister, Ellen Wilkinson, referred to as ‘the Third Programme Society,’ which means the kind of society where everyone has access to, and enjoys, the highest achievements of culture, the things on offer on the BBC’s ‘Third Programme’ (see O’Hear 1998). It’s a noble ideal and I suspect that it was partly inspired (though perhaps at one remove) by G. E. Moore. But there is a more interesting example closer to home. In 1927, following the colonial custom, the University of Sydney hired a gifted young Scotsman to be their professor of philosophy. He came with the highest recommendations and in some respects lived up to them. In person, if not in opinions, he resembled ‘the leader of a small dissenting Scottish sect’ (see Keynes 1972), an impression enhanced by a strong Scottish accent and a rather buttoned-up appearance. He was an inspiring teacher whose students include some of the biggest names in Antipodean philosophy: David Armstrong, John Passmore, and J. L. Mackie (the last two serving several years apiece as professors at Otago). ‘He was in love with philosophy himself and he communicated the love of it to others so effectively that many will have it while they live’ (Stove, cited in Franklin 2003: 48). But he probably was not quite what the University of Sydney was looking for. For a start, he was violently opposed to what was then the house philosophy of the British Empire—Absolute Idealism. According to idealism, though we may seem to be material boys and girls, living in a material world, this is an appearance only. Reality, the absolute, is basically mental, a sort of timeless and harmonious group mind of which our separate selves are (perhaps delusory) aspects. Idealism functioned as a sort of methadone program for high-minded Victorian intellectuals, providing them with moral uplift as they struggled to get off the hard stuff of official Christianity. ‘Of course, we don’t believe in anything quite so crude as orthodox Christianity, but philosophy assures us that though science is true (or partially true) in its own limited way, it is not to be taken as a guide to the basic structure of the universe which is essentially spiritual and therefore a homely sort of place. There is a lot more to Reality than atoms and the void’ (see Franklin 2003: ch. 6; Stove 1991: chs. 5, 6; and, for a more sober account, Passmore 1966: chs. 3, 4). Anderson would have none of this. He was a systematic thinker with an answer to everything and that answer was ‘No’ (see Bogdan 1984: 6–7; Armstrong is quoting the Australian poet James McAuley.) Is there a God? No. Is there a spiritual as opposed to a material reality? No. Do we have free will? No. Is there such a thing as the common good? No. Are there objective moral

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obligations? No. His views were summed up by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle as: ‘There are only brass tacks’ (cited in Franklin 2003: 35). Unlike Moore, he gloried in the role of a public intellectual, moving from communism via Trotskyism to a peculiar form of critical conservatism. But in the long run it was his metaphysical opinions that had the biggest influence, imparting to Australian culture a flavour of realistic materialism which it retains to this very day. He also instilled a mordantly critical turn of mind, ferocious habits of debate, and a certain contempt for traditional moral standards. Germaine Greer (as she herself admits) was in some degree inspired by the Andersonian tradition. So was the Sydney Push, a libertarian movement which in turn inspired a generation of sixties radicals (see Franklin 2003: ch. 8). You could not do a decent history of Australia in the twentieth century and leave John Anderson out of it. 9 But this brings us back to the original question: since academic philosophers can have a major cultural impact within their own countries, why was this not the case in New Zealand? The question is particularly puzzling since there are many New Zealand philosophers who are simply much better than John Anderson. By this I don’t mean that their views are necessarily closer to the truth, but that they are clearer, more coherent, and better argued. Furthermore, they are better in a way which might be expected to make them more influential—their stuff is better written. I have to admit that I find Anderson’s (1962) prose dreadfully hard going, whereas some New Zealand philosophers (particularly Musgrave [1993, 1999, 2009] and Prior) are a delight to read. So the question reasserts itself: why has no New Zealand philosopher had the kind of cultural influence in this country that Anderson had in Australia? GETTING THE WRONG ANDERSON? Perhaps because we got the wrong Anderson. For in 1921 another promising young Scot arrived in the Antipodes to take up a chair in philosophy. It was John Anderson’s elder brother William, who held the chair at Auckland for even longer than his brother held the chair at Sydney (dying on the eve of his retirement in 1955). He too had glowing references and, unlike his brother, he did not have the drawback of ostentatious communist sympathies (indeed Sinclair says that he ‘hated Marxism’ [1993: 119]). In fact, he was a sound man in every way, an adherent of idealism which he continued to maintain long after it had died out everywhere else. The trouble was that he was a bit of a dull dog. If he had any ideas of his own they did not find their way into print and they certainly failed to inspire his students. In so far as new thinking percolated into Auckland during his thirty-four-year reign, this was due to his assistants and deputies, particularly his long-time Number 2 and eventual successor, R. P. Anschutz (apparently an inspiring teacher and the author of a well-regarded book on Mill). In later life, William Anderson developed an antipathy to the educational reforms of Peter Fraser and C. E. Beeby, 10 and polemicised against them with a ferocity that rivalled his brother’s. Luckily, these polemics had little or no effect. He was perhaps more effective

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at the local level. Keith Sinclair, in his history of Auckland University, refers to him as ‘opposed to almost all changes,’ and change did not always occur at Auckland with the speed that Sinclair would have wished (1983: 132). But though we got the wrong Anderson, this cannot explain the relative invisibility of philosophy on the New Zealand cultural scene. At the most it can explain why Auckland philosophy was something of a frost for over thirty years. For uninspiring as the wrong Anderson undoubtedly was, there were good and even great philosophers in Christchurch and Dunedin during his reign. Not only were they better than the wrong Anderson, they were better than the right one too. But given that they were better, why didn’t they make an impact on New Zealand culture? CRITICAL THOUGHT AND INVISIBLE INFLUENCES Perhaps they did—but in a different way. For even the right Anderson had his defects. Though addicted to criticism, he did not like it applied to himself. ‘I don’t like classes that talk back’ (cited in Franklin 2003: 46) he confided to an intimate (though he certainly encouraged his students to talk back to other people). According to one of his most distinguished disciples, David Armstrong, Anderson’s ‘real intellectual weakness [lay] in his desire to make disciples, his encouragement of the growth of an Andersonian orthodoxy, his unwillingness to take criticism seriously’ (cited in Franklin 2003: 48). On the whole these are not defects that can be laid at the door of New Zealand philosophers. Quite the contrary. ‘There are no Hughesians.’ This was the boast of the G. E. Hughes, one of the giants of New Zealand philosophy, and foundation professor of philosophy at the University of Wellington. The reason that there were no Hughesians was that although Hughes taught his students to think, he did not teach them what to think. My colleague Josh Parsons was brought up in Wellington, and many members of his parents’ and grandparents’ generations used to rave about Hughes and what a great teacher he was, coming out with accolades like ‘He changed my life.’ But he did not change lives the way that Anderson did, by imparting a Hughesian worldview. As someone said to him once, ‘the only “ism” you believe in is the syllogism.’ He changed lives by teaching people to think logically, and to think for themselves (Cresswell 1994). And in this he was fairly typical of New Zealand philosophers. It is part of our propaganda, one of our selling points as a discipline, that philosophy cultivates a range of analytical and logical skills which will stand you in good stead in almost any walk of life. And the chief of these is the ability to think for yourself. As teachers we say this so often that it sometimes begins to ring hollow. But recently the Otago Department was reviewed, and former graduates (some going back fifty years or more) were invited to write in with their impressions of the department. Letter after letter rolled in, declaring in fervent terms how valuable the graduates’ time at Otago had been because it taught them to think clearly, and to think for themselves. (This just goes to show that if you say something over and over again, it may cease to seem true, but that does not mean that it ceases to be true.) But if all these people

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really learned to think for themselves (and they seem to be an ideologically diverse bunch) then they probably won’t have been thinking the same things. So although our teaching will have had an influence at the individual level, once we transcend individual biographies, there won’t be a unified tale to tell about the influence of New Zealand philosophers. There will be individual stories to tell about how this idea or that argument influenced this or that person. But because unlike John Anderson we have not been dominated by the desire to make disciples, or to encourage the growth of our own little orthodoxies, you won’t be able to talk about how the Hughesians or the Hursthousites have influenced public life. William Anderson’s successor and Baier’s ‘enemy,’ R. P. Anschutz, provides a case in point. John Mulgan, novelist, student of philosophy and progenitor of philosophers, was Anschutz’s student in the early thirties, and described him as ‘the greatest influence on my life.’ But in what exactly did that influence consist? Not in providing him with a philosophical nostrum of the kind on offer from John Anderson in Sydney. According to Mulgan’s biographer Vincent O’Sullivan, Anschutz: ‘did not presume to present his young undergraduate friends with an “answer” to anything [not even “no”]. His gift was for leading them to look at their own assumptions with the scrutiny they were encouraged to bring to any other set of beliefs . . . he and his English wife Robin were hosts to anyone who was inclined to argue.’ Anschutz may have offered an ‘opening door to modernism in the arts and socialism in politics,’ but he did not presume to push his students through it. His conversation ‘demonstrated the philosophic virtues: the commitment to following the argument wheresoever it might lead’ (O’Sullivan 2003: 50–51). (Perhaps it is not a coincidence that Anschutz was a Mill scholar.) Philosophers such as Hughes or Anschutz may well have made a difference to the history of New Zealand, but if so the difference that they made won’t be historically obvious. There is reason to hope that we have lived up to our propaganda and that we have made our students smarter, more thoughtful and perhaps more intellectually honest. And if that has been our influence on the New Zealand intellectual scene, that is good enough. CULTURAL PRODUCERS AND COSMOPOLITAN AMBITIONS There is one more point to make before moving on. The problem I have been exploring is why New Zealand philosophy, which has been so big internationally, seems to have had such a minimal impact within New Zealand itself. Why is it possible to discuss the history of New Zealand over the last seventy years without mentioning philosophers, but not the history of philosophy without mentioning New Zealanders? James Belich’s Paradise Reforged (2001: ch. 11) suggests another answer. Philosophy, like science, literature, and opera singing is a cultural good and as such follows the pattern of many other cultural goods produced in New Zealand or by New Zealanders. New Zealand is sometimes depicted, not least by its inhabitants, as a cultural wasteland. But by quantitative measures—books written, opera singers trained, and Fellows of the Royal Society educated—it looks like a site of

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cultural overproduction. It is just that much of this culture is produced either at one remove by expatriates or by New Zealand residents who address themselves to some larger international scene. On the whole New Zealand’s cultural products are not aimed specifically at New Zealand. Consequently they tend to influence New Zealand in the same sort of way that they influence the many other countries in which they are consumed. Detective novels and romances (genres to which New Zealanders have made a major contribution) have to be set somewhere and may be set in New Zealand, but even if they are, they don’t mean much more to their New Zealand readers than they do to their readers in other lands. When Rutherford split the atom it was a momentous historical event, but even though the revolutionary scientist was a native son, it affected New Zealand itself only as one country among others. The philosopher with the biggest impact on New Zealand was probably Popper, but he had almost as big an impact on countries he never lived in and perhaps never visited. And this is not surprising, since there is nothing especially New Zealandish about Popper’s philosophy. 11 Philosophy is about ideas and when it comes to historical influence it is where the ideas are consumed that counts, not where they are produced or who produces them. Moreover, philosophy is largely addressed to universal themes. Hence the ideas of a New Zealand philosopher need have no special relevance to New Zealand. Relevant Logic, for instance, is a New Zealand specialty, pioneered by the emigrant Richard Routley (later Sylvan; see Routley, Plumwood, Meyer, and Brady [1982]), and represented by the immigrant Ed Mares, but it is no more relevant to New Zealand than it is to anywhere else. The point is reinforced if we consider the typical mindset of the ambitious professional philosopher. She may be a patriot (whether native or adopted) who wants to do her bit for her country by influencing thought and perhaps public affairs in New Zealand. But as a professional, what she usually wants is to shine on the international philosophical stage. I sacrificed several years of my career to combating the New Right in New Zealand. Hence Trotter’s references to me in my capacity as a comrade. But as a philosopher, what I really want is for my stuff to be read and recognised in Cambridge, Canberra, and Princeton, and perhaps in Sweden and Peru. As for Timaru and Tauranga, I don’t really care. Thus I may have acted locally, but I do most of my philosophical thinking globally. 12 I tend to see myself as a cosmopolitan intellectual who happens to be a New Zealander, and this is true, I suspect, of many New Zealand philosophers, including those who were born here and thus started off as New Zealanders before they metamorphosed into cosmopolitan intellectuals. But if I am typical in this, then it is hardly surprising that New Zealand philosophy has not made much impact in New Zealand itself. For in so far as we are philosophers, it is not in New Zealand that we have aspired to make an impact.

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COSMOPOLITAN INTELLECTUALS AND NATIONAL CONCERNS But although most philosophers want to strut their stuff on the international philosophical stage, this does not preclude a little repertory work in New Zealand. There are some New Zealand philosophers who address themselves to local issues. In 1992 Graham Oddie and Roy Perrett (both then at Massey) coedited a collection Justice, Ethics and New Zealand Society which includes several articles on the Treaty of Waitangi, including a piece co-written by Oddie and the Czech/New Zealand philosopher Jindra Tichy, 13 arguing, with perverse brilliance, for the thesis that the Treaty of Waitangi is a Hobbesian social contract. 14 John Patterson of Massey has written a book, Exploring Maori Values (1992), in which he does precisely that. I well remember from my brief stint at Massey, an arresting paper of Patterson’s called, I think, ‘I Shall See the Maggots,’ 15 in which he applied the techniques of ordinary language philosophy not to the kinds of concepts bandied about in Oxford common rooms, but to the Maori concept of ‘utu’ (roughly ‘payback,’ with strong connotations of revenge). It made a refreshing change. Other philosophers have worked as part-time civil servants, employing their philosophical talents to improve public policy. My Otago colleague Andrew Moore provides a case in point. He chairs the National Ethics Advisory Committee for the Ministry of Health and is the author of (among other things) Getting through Together: Ethical Values for a Pandemic (2007). Thus, if New Zealand does suffer a pandemic, he may prove to have had a bigger impact on the history of his native country than any other philosopher. STRATEGIES FOR SUCCESS So much for philosophy’s contributions to the history of New Zealand. But what about New Zealand’s contributions to the history of philosophy? And how did New Zealand philosophy get to be as good as I claim it to have been? Before I get on to that, perhaps I should address a question that may have been bothering the more sceptical amongst you. I’ve been talking pretty big about the excellence of New Zealand philosophy. Is it really as good as I say it is? Well, there is a measure with some degree of objectivity. The research output of New Zealand’s academic institutions has been assessed twice in the last few years for the PBRF, the Public Benefit Research Fund, the New Zealand equivalent of the British RAE (Research Assessment Exercise). In 2003 and again in 2007 philosophy came out as the top research discipline. Not only was philosophy the top research discipline, philosophy departments topped the listings as the best research departments of any kind, Otago and Auckland in 2003, Otago and Canterbury in 2007. So what have we done to deserve these kudos? And how did we manage to do it? Well, it is partly a matter of the institutional framework. Let us start with the four original constituents of the University of New Zealand. After the University of Otago was founded in 1869 it became affiliated to a federal

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University of New Zealand (set up in 1871), which by the end of the nineteenth century had four constituent colleges: Otago (founded 1869 and opening for business in 1871), Canterbury (founded 1873), Victoria at Wellington (founded 1899), and Auckland (founded 1883). These colleges enjoyed a substantial degree of autonomy at the level of appointments and teaching, though examining was organised and degrees were granted by the University of New Zealand. This arrangement persisted until 1961, when the University of New Zealand was dissolved and the constituent colleges went their separate ways as independent universities. The history of New Zealand philosophy suggests that there are two paths to excellence. The first is to establish a proper department of philosophy with a proper professor and the necessary funding to pay for lecturers if the need arises. Then you keep on appointing the best people you can find, until you get somebody really good. This was the policy pursued by Otago from the very beginning, where philosophy has been taught since 1871. It took sixty years for it to pay off but when it did, it paid off big-time. The first three professors were interesting men—one leaving his post after a quarrel with the Presbyterian Church to take up a position as an inspector of lunatic asylums, another being noted for his five-ton book collection and his steam-driven motor-car—but they were not philosophers of any great distinction. The first professor of philosophy at Otago to win international renown was John Findlay, appointed in 1931, a South African who had studied at Graz and Oxford. A once and future Hegelian, he had been ‘de-idealised’ at Oxford, under the influence of Russell’s Our Knowledge of the External World. Whilst at Otago, he published one book (Meinong’s Theory of Objects [1933]), worked on another (eventually published as Values and Intentions [1961]) and devoted himself, as a teacher, to ‘introducing mathematical logic to the Antipodes.’ In this endeavour he was remarkably successful, since his most brilliant pupil was the great logician, A. N. Prior. In the 1930s, before the advent of the jet airplane, Otago was even more remote than it is now, and Findlay had to work quite hard to keep up to date. He cultivated a friendship with the notoriously difficult Karl Popper during the latter’s period as a lecturer at Canterbury, and devoted a sabbatical to sitting at the feet of Wittgenstein in Cambridge and acting as his official ‘stooge.’ (His job was to feed Wittgenstein tough questions when the notoriously long silences became too excruciating.) But before he could take up his position as stooge, he had to own up to his philosophical sins. Sitting in a Cambridge milk-bar, Findlay had to confess to the frightful crime of having visited Carnap in Chicago (a philosopher that Wittgenstein loathed). Wittgenstein was magnanimous. ‘[He] said that he did not mind except that he would lose his milk-shake if Carnap [were] mentioned again’ (quoted in Findlay 1972: 177). Since then the professors at Otago have been a distinguished bunch: D. D. Raphael, noted for his work on the British Moralists; John Passmore, who wrote his masterpiece, A Hundred Years of Philosophy (1966), whilst in Dunedin (though it was not published until after he had left); J. L. Mackie, notorious for his arresting opinion that all moral judgments are false; Dan Taylor, more notable for his students than his publications; and the present incumbent, Alan Musgrave, 16 who is about to retire after forty years in the post and who is noted for his defences of scientific realism and the rationality of science, and

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famous as far as Wall Street for his critique of the economic methodology of Milton Friedman (Musgrave 1999: ch. 7). Also important, from 1970 until his death in 1994, was the Czech logician Pavel Tichy, a refugee from the failed ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 who was promoted to full professor in 1981. (New Zealand philosophy has benefited considerably over the years from the input of refugees such as Popper and Tichy.) Tichy’s chief claim to fame was the invention of Transparent Intensional Logic, but he is also noted for a memorable encounter with Popper who was visiting Otago as a William Evans Fellow in 1972. Popper had recently proposed a definition of closeness to truth, which was intended to explicate the intuitive idea that one false theory can be closer to the truth than another. Tichy demolished this definition with a proof that on Popper’s account all false theories are equally far from the truth, finishing in a typically downright manner: ‘I conclude that Popper’s definition is worthless.’ There was a pause as everyone awaited the response of the notoriously temperamental Popper. When it came it was remarkably gracious: ‘I disagree with only one word of this paper—its last word. No definition can be worthless, when it provokes such a devastating criticism. I hope that Dr Tichy will join me in this project, [that is, of defining closeness to truth] and produce a better definition than mine.’ This Tichy proceeded to do with the aid of his student Graham Oddie (see Svoboda, Jespersen, and Cheyne 2004: 25). Thus one path to philosophical excellence is to set up a proper department headed by a full professor, with the funding for new staff as the need arises. There is, however, another strategy, though this one requires luck. First, you do things in a half-baked way, sometimes with a dedicated lecturer in philosophy and sometimes with a multi-professor, prepared to teach philosophy among other things. Philosophy struggles to maintain its status as a separate area of specialisation and is vulnerable to takeover bids from neighbouring disciplines. Neither beleaguered lecturers nor busy multi-professors are likely to have much time for philosophical research. However, you make up for this by sometimes appointing a man of genius. This was the policy pursued by Canterbury until about 1960, at which point they adopted the Otago plan of establishing a proper department (with considerable success). The two men of genius were Karl Popper (lecturer from 1938 to 1946) and Arthur Prior (lecturer and then professor 1946–1958). Both produced major works of philosophy whilst staggering under enormous teaching workloads. But then geniuses are noted for perspiration as well as inspiration. I’ve talked a bit about Popper already. His magnum opus during his New Zealand period was the Open Society and Its Enemies (1945), famous for its criticisms of Plato (a proto-fascist), Hegel (a fraudulent windbag), and Marx. The Open Society is one of those books that has been so successful that—at least so far as the second volume is concerned—it is no longer necessary to read it. Before the Open Society it was possible for an intelligent and honest intellectual to be a full-blown Marxist: not so afterwards. You could be marxisante, yes, but an unreconstructed Marxist, no. Popper’s vision of science as characterised by bold conjectures and empirical refutations influenced the opinions and perhaps the practices of many Canterbury scientists (and indeed the opinions of scientists the world over), and according to Canterbury’s official historian, his impact on academic life was greater that of any person before

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or since (King 2003: 417). One of his last acts before he left for Britain was to launch a reform movement which eventually converted the University of New Zealand (and with it its constituent colleges) into a respectable research institution. Prior was primarily a logician though very much alive to the philosophical implications of logic (witness his book Logic and the Basis of Ethics [1949]). Thus his work is difficult to describe to those unacquainted with formal reasoning. He was a pioneer of modal logic (reinvented as a symbolic discipline by the likes of C. I. Lewis and Ruth Barcan Marcus), which deals with the notions of necessity and possibility, elucidating these concepts with the aid of possible worlds. He invented tense logic, which formalises reasoning about the past, present, and future (on the assumption that the future is open and that we have genuine free will). Apart from its intrinsic interest, Prior’s work on temporal logic turned out to have implications for computing. In 1996, the computer scientist Amir Pnueli (of Tel Aviv and New York) was awarded the A. M. Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, computer science’s equivalent of the Nobel Prize. This was largely on the strength of a 1977 paper ‘The Temporal Logic of Programs’ which ‘triggered a fundamental paradigm shift in reasoning about the dynamic behaviour of systems.’ In this paper Pnueli applies Prior’s temporal logic to the verification of computer programs—proof, if further proof is needed, that the most esoteric logical researches can turn out to have practical applications. Whilst working on modal logic Prior corresponded with other philosophers and logicians including Saul A. Kripke, the most important philosopher of the last forty years, who was then a teenage prodigy working in isolation in Omaha, Nebraska. (Indeed, much of the work on modal logic in the late fifties and early sixties—featuring the elusive concept of an ‘accessibility relation’—was due to an overworked professor in Christchurch, a collection of Scandinavians, and a teenager in the Midwest. Sometimes the cultural periphery is where the intellectual action is.) This led to Kripke’s famous proofs of the completeness of modal logic—that is proofs that all the theorems that are valid in a certain sense can be derived from the axioms via the rules of inference. Though Prior may have staggered under an excessive teaching workload, he was by all accounts an inspiring teacher (as was Popper before him). 17 The reactions of his student Jonathan Bennett are typical: ‘Prior was splendid; I did and do greatly admire and love him. I adored the subject as presented by him’ (email, 1 August 2007). To be sure, these are the reactions of a lifelong philosopher, who presumably possessed ‘the philosophy gene,’ but it is clear that many others were affected in much the same way. Philosophy has continued to flourish at Canterbury since Prior’s day. Prior was succeeded by his deputy Michael Shorter. (Shorter is most notable, in my opinion, for a brief but seminal reply to an article of Prior’s. Prior had argued that, contrary to Hume and his own previous opinion, you can get an ought from an is. Shorter replied that all Prior’s is-ought inferences are ‘futile’ in a certain sense. Most subsequent work on the problem builds upon this idea [see Pigden 2010]). Under Shorter, the department continued to grow (though it acquired a distinctly Oxonian tinge) and when Shorter him-

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self left for Oxford in 1970, it had expanded to a teaching staff of five. Shorter was succeeded by Bob Stoothoff, famous, along with his Christchurch colleague Dugald Murdoch, as one of the translators of the Cambridge edition of the Philosophical Writings of Descartes (1985). Stoothoff retired in 1994, to be succeeded briefly by Graham Oddie, but in 1998 the chair of philosophy metamorphosed into a sofa to be occupied jointly by Graham and Cynthia Macdonald. Currently Canterbury has a permanent teaching staff of six. There are two full professors: Jack Copeland, notable for his work on his predecessor Prior and on the Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing, and Denis Dutton, the editor of Philosophy and Literature and famous both as the proprietor of the website Arts and Letters Daily and as the author of the spectacularly successful The Art Instinct (2010) 18 in which he endeavours to give an evolutionary explanation of our shared aesthetic sense. Victoria followed the half-baked strategy previously pursued by Canterbury until 1951 without having the good luck to appoint a man of genius. As soon as they adopted the Otago strategy with a proper department and a proper professorship, they got someone good straight away in the person of George Hughes, who continued as professor until 1983. His principal claim to fame is his Introduction to Modal Logic, co-authored with his junior colleague, Max Cresswell (though that does not exhaust his achievements). For a long time this was the teaching text on the logic of necessity and possibility—I remember studying it at Cambridge in the 1970s. The Victoria philosophy program continues to flourish. Professor Kim Sterelny (who moonlights at the ANU) is one of the world’s foremost philosophers of biology, winner of the Lakatos and Jean Nicod prizes for the philosophy of science, and notable for his work on the evolution of the mind (among other things). His colleague Ed Mares is an expert on another branch of logic— relevance logic—which tries to capture the idea that in a valid inference it is not enough that the premises can’t be true without the conclusion being true too—there must be some relation of relevance linking the premises and the conclusion. The last of the original four departments to make it to philosophical excellence was the University of Auckland (though it has well and truly made it now). To begin with, Auckland adopted the half-baked strategy, settling in 1905 for a professor of everything rather than a proper professor of philosophy. The multi-professor Joseph Grossman was a brilliant scholar, a successful journalist, an inspiring lecturer, and, unfortunately, a crook. Quite literally, a crook. He had already done time for forgery when he took up his demanding role as professor of almost everything. He kept his nose clean for most of his time at Auckland until the advent of a proper professor of philosophy in the form of William Anderson. He befriended Anderson, who proved to be a not-so-canny Scot, as Grossman got him to sign his name as a guarantor of various bills, leading him to the edge of ruin when Grossman defaulted on his debts. Grossman—by this time an old man—departed in disgrace to renew his career as a journalist. Anderson soldiered on, running a pretty lack-lustre department for the next twenty years. The department only began to pick up under Anschutz who succeeded his long-time chief, William Anderson, in 1955. Perhaps he had been the Number Two for too long, since his reign as professor does not

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seem to have been a happy one and he retired early. He managed to alienate one of his best staff, Annette Baier (then Annette Stoop), who left for Sydney and subsequently the United States. Indeed, it was only under the professorship of Ray Bradley in the sixties that the department began to metamorphose into the world-class outfit that it is today. Bradley reformed the curriculum, with new courses reflecting both staff and student interests, as well as a new emphasis on logic and argued positions. He left in 1969 to be succeeded by the modal logician, Hugh Montgomery (although Feyerabend guest-starred as a visiting professor in the early seventies). Montgomery retired in the late seventies just before succumbing to cancer, to be succeeded by the Swedish logician Krister Segerberg. Segerberg’s reign was characterised by an increasing emphasis on research. Indeed, many of the research stars of the Auckland Department—John Bishop (philosophy of religion, philosophy of action), Christine Swanton (free will, virtue ethics), Steve Davies (philosophy of music), Robert Nola (philosophy of science), Julian Young (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schopenhauer), and Fred Kroon (philosophy of logic)—were appointed in the seventies or the early eighties. Segerberg left for Uppsala in 1992, to be succeeded by John Bishop, but by that time the days of the God Professor were gone and the post had begun to lose its importance. Auckland now has five full professors (Davies, Bishop, Hursthouse, Nola, and Young), seven associate professors (one of whom heads the department), and a permanent teaching staff of eighteen. According to the Brian Leiter’s Gourmet Guide it is the highest ranking philosophy department in New Zealand. SHADOWS IN THE PICTURE Thus far I have presented the history of New Zealand philosophy as a ‘From Log Cabin to White House’ tale, ‘From colonial obscurity through struggle and adversity to philosophical excellence.’ But the success of New Zealand philosophy has not been unmixed. There is a dark side to the story and that too needs to be told. Up till now, I have concentrated on the first four universities that were once confederated in the University of New Zealand. But New Zealand has three newer universities—Waikato, Massey, and Lincoln—and in only one of these has philosophy had a reasonably happy history. Let’s get the success story out of the way first. Waikato was founded in 1965 and opened for business in 1966. The foundation professor was A. J. (Jim) Baker, once a prominent member of the Sydney Push (see Franklin 2003: ch. 8, though Baker is extensively cited throughout), and best known for his book Australian Realism, perhaps the standard introduction to John Anderson’s philosophy. He was replaced by Rudi Ziedins (a student of Prior’s), who was in turn succeeded by Benjamin Gibbs (once a ‘radical philosopher’ at Sussex, 19 but rather more tame by the time he returned to New Zealand as a professor). Gibbs held the chair from 1992 to 2002, though after he retired it was not re-advertised. Nevertheless, there are now seven philosophers working at Waikato, a number which has remained more or less

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constant for over a decade. Tracy Bowell is the coauthor of Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide (Bowelland and Kemp 2005), and Alastair Gunn is noted for his contributions to practical ethics, including, intriguingly, the ethics of engineering. They have got the students, they have got a good teaching record, and their PBRF rating is above the average for the university, which means that they have got job security. While not as stellar as (say) Auckland, Waikato philosophy is a solid success. 20 Contrast Lincoln. Philosophy has only been taught at Lincoln since 1994, at first by the husband and wife team, Stan and Glenys Godlovitch, and then, after their departure, by Grant Tavinor (appointed in 2003). In 2006 there was a proposal by the vice-chancellor to shut down philosophy as a costcutting measure. This was defeated at the consultation stage and for the moment philosophy holds on at Lincoln, but only by the skin of its teeth. In the circumstances, it is surprising that Tavinor has managed to do any research at all, but in fact he is a pioneer in the philosophy of video games. The story at Massey is rather more messy. The philosophy program began as a teaching department where research was not strongly encouraged, then flowered in the nineties before going through a bad patch at the beginning of the twenty-first century when it sometimes seemed on the verge of going under. It is getting better now, though it is still not as prosperous as it once was. Massey’s history demonstrates that even a department with good student numbers and a respectable research record can fall on hard times, especially if it is subsumed under a larger ‘school.’ First some background. Massey is the chief provider of extramural education in New Zealand. This is hard work for the teaching staff. Marking has to be far more informative for extramural than for intramural students since you can’t say ‘See me’ when you run out of red ink or intellectual energy. And when you do meet the extramurals during short mid-term courses (in itself an extra burden), they tend to suck you dry. Thus it takes drive and determination to remain research-active. Philosophy has been offered at Massey since 1969. The foundation professor was the Canadian Ross Robinson. He established a successful teaching department with a staff of four (the professor Jim Battye, John Patterson, and Tom Bestor), but as a research philosopher he was not only a non-entity in himself but someone who seemed to spread non-being around him. (It was only after his departure in 1986, for example, that John Patterson published his books on Maori values.) After a brief interregnum, Robinson was succeeded by Graham Oddie, who served as professor from 1988 to 1994 before departing for a job in Colorado. During this time, student numbers went up, staff numbers went up to a total of six, and the department began to flourish as a research institution. (Graham Oddie, Roy Perrett, John Patterson, and Tom Bestor were all philosophically productive during this period.) Graham Oddie was succeeded by Peter Schouls, and it was during his time as professor that the slide towards disaster began. In 1997, one staff member (Alan Brien) left, not to be replaced, and in 1998 the philosophy department was absorbed into the School of History, Philosophy and Politics. Perhaps philosophy would have been safe if Schouls had remained as the chief of this new academic unit, but he departed for Canada in 2001. He was not replaced as professor and a non-philosopher succeeded him as head of

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school. Bestor, Battye, Patterson, and Perrett all resigned or retired, sometimes in acrimonious circumstances, and as the number of philosophers began to dwindle, the remaining staff were soon struggling under enormous workloads. In 2004 Deborah Russell, then programme coordinator, resigned because of burnout, preferring to be a SAHM (‘Stay at home Mum’) than to work a forty-five hour week on teaching and administration alone. By 2008 the philosophy staff was down to two lecturers (A. A. Rini and Bill Fish) and two senior tutors (an arrangement which suggests a desire to economise on philosophical salaries). There have been two attempts to find a replacement professor but, as Lady Bracknell nearly said, to fail to find a replacement professor after one academic job search is unfortunate, but to fail to find one after two looks like carelessness. As one of the many philosophers whose shoulders were tapped the second time around, I can only give my own reasons for not applying. I preferred to serve in an academic heaven as a senior lecturer than to reign in what I suspected would be an academic hell as a full professor. I thought that if I got the job, I would be spending all the time and energy that I could spare from teaching fighting for a beleaguered programme and would have nothing left over for my own work. Perhaps I was wrong, but if I was, this was hardly an unreasonable belief. Things are a little better in 2010, now that the university is under new management. According to the website, the programme has five permanent staff, two senior lecturers, two lecturers, and a senior tutor, and Peter Schouls has returned to guest star as a visiting professor. But despite the achievements of some of its members (Bill Fish, in particular, is beginning to be big in the philosophy of perception), it has still got a fair way to go. It takes time for a programme to come back from the brink. It is hard to resist the suspicion that there were people in the administration at Massey who simply did not like philosophy and did not wish it well. (Certainly if they did want to foster philosophy, they did not know how to go about it.) This suspicion is reinforced by a news story of 2007. As noted already, the PBRF is the New Zealand equivalent of the British RAE. It ranks and rewards universities (and other ‘Tertiary Education Organisations’) according to their research outputs as measured by the performances of individual staff. There are four possible letter grades that a New Zealand academic can get: A, B, C, and R. 21 What do they mean? At a philosophy conference, an insider explained: ‘An “A” means that you really are world-class. A “B” means that you are a respectable research philosopher who can hold up their head in any department in the world—well, perhaps not Princeton. A “C” means that you do some research. And an “R” means that you are researchinvisible.’ Presumably the same thing applies, mutatis mutandis, to scholars in other disciplines. More formally, an A is worth 10 points, a B is worth 6, a C is worth 2, and an R is worth nothing, these scores representing both academic brownie points and cold hard cash for the ‘Tertiary Education Organisation’ in question. Thus if a university wants a particular programme, division, or college to look good, they have an incentive to ‘bury’ their research deadheads in other parts of the university by reassigning them to other subjects. On the 29th of June 2007 the New Zealand Educational Review reported that Massey University had tried to consign eleven lowscoring members of the College of Business to the subject area of philoso-

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phy, a manoeuvre which, if the Tertiary Education Commission had not picked up on it, would have pushed philosophy nationwide from the status of the top-scoring discipline to below the median level. (Apparently the discovery of this particular piece of ‘gaming’ delayed the announcement of the PBRF results by some weeks.) The New Zealand Division of the Australasian Association for Philosophy wrote a letter of protest: We were dismayed to learn that Massey University had attempted to assign a significant number of non-philosophers to the subject area of Philosophy in the recent PBRF round. This was a serious affront to our discipline. If successful, this action would have seriously damaged the status of Philosophy throughout New Zealand, and particularly at Massey University. Philosophy was the highest-scoring discipline in 2003 and 2006. If your underhand action had gone undetected, it would have been responsible for unjustifiably downgrading NZ philosophers’ hard-won reputation for research excellence. Philosophy has a fine tradition at Massey University and the university’s administrators have a clear duty to foster and maintain that tradition, and not to undermine the endeavours of its loyal and hard-working practitioners. It seems to us that you have treated our discipline with contempt. (AAP [NZ] to Vice-Chancellor Kinnear 27 July 2007; AAP Press Release, 7 August 2007)

Quite so—though Massey could reasonably reply that their research-invisible scholars did just as much research in philosophy as they did in management or business—namely none at all. However, there is a big difference between not doing any research in business and not doing any research in philosophy, at least when it comes to the status of philosophy as an academic discipline. What this episode suggests is that for the Massey authorities, boosting the research reputation of the College of Business was a lot more important than doing justice to philosophy, whether at Massey or anywhere else in New Zealand. It is worth recounting this sorry saga in some detail because it illustrates a problem that even successful departments and programmes have to cope with—there seems to be a strong undercurrent of hostility to philosophy in the academic world. 22 Though the hostility is seldom openly expressed, it is fairly clear that philosophers are often unpopular both with university bureaucrats and their academic colleagues, especially in the humanities. Even at Otago—by most standards a spectacularly successful department—we have often felt ourselves to be under threat, though the threat seemed to recede when we came out as New Zealand’s top-scoring research department twice in a row. But safety is one thing and popularity is another, and I still get the impression that there are quite a lot of people who actively dislike us. What is their beef? It is hard to say for sure since nobody ever says to our faces, ‘I dislike philosophy and/or philosophers because. . . .’ It is a matter of vague accusations reported at one remove or hostile remarks overheard in passing. However, I can make some educated guesses. It is partly a matter of content. Though there are some important exceptions, most New Zealand philosophers are in the ‘analytic’ tradition (broadly conceived), whereas many in the humanities derive their philosophical inspi-

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ration (such as it is) from the ‘Continental’ tradition, specifically postmodernism. They know that most of us take a dim view of this sort of thing and resent the contempt that they take us to feel. Of course, that is not what they actually say. What they say is that we are parochial, that we are living in the past, and that we are out of touch with new ideas. At a recent review of the Otago Department (2004), I felt constrained to write a 2000-word rebuttal to the charge that the analytic philosophy we practice is (i) basically British, (ii) rather narrow, and (iii) moribund. (Note the colonial cringe implicit in the accusation. The underlying assumption is that if we are not getting our ideas from France we must be getting them from somewhere else, presumably Britain. Obviously we can’t have thought any of them up for ourselves!) Now it is true, of course, that many analytic philosophers in New Zealand take a dim view of postmodernism, but that is only a rational cause for complaint if the dim view is unjustified. I would argue that it isn’t. But even when we argue against postmodernism, that does not help much with the hostility problem. Robert Nola may have influenced people when he wrote his extensive demolition job of several postmodernist thinkers in Rescuing Reason (2003), but he probably did not win many friends for philosophy. For it is partly our style of argument that our closet enemies object to. What is wrong with our style of argument? Well, it’s way too aggressive for a start. The norms of debate in other departments can seem positively oleaginous to a philosopher, a point that becomes clear if you attend interdisciplinary conferences. ‘All those women,’ said one (woman) philosopher to me after one such (women-dominated) gathering, ‘they were so polite to each other!’ Indeed they were, so much so that it almost seemed to be a faux pas to suggest that anyone could be wrong about anything. Philosophers, by contrast, male and female, 23 can seem horribly uncouth. We use the f-word (‘false’) and the c-word (‘contradiction’), and we tend to demand arguments and to complain if decent arguments are not forthcoming (a decent argument being one that stands up to criticism). Here is a jokey description that I wrote of the Otago philosophy seminar: Debate [at Otago] is vigorous even by the boisterous standards of professional philosophy. Speakers have to steer a careful course between Scylla and Charybdis. If you deliver a carefully crafted and nuanced paper, designed to provoke a sage nodding of heads, some obstreperous person (such as Moore, Musgrave or Pigden) is likely to demand exactly what the problem is and how exactly the argument is supposed to work. If you deliver a polemical paper with a clear argument to novel and interesting conclusions, either the premises or the conclusions are likely to be denounced as false, sometimes obviously so. You might decide to play it safe by arguing for an uncontroversial conclusion, but even this is not an entirely risk-free strategy, since it is hard to find uncontroversial theses in philosophy, and anyway, such a conclusion is likely to be dismissed as uninteresting.

People who carry on like this can seem rather threatening to other academics. After all, we might, in our rude way, refute somebody’s pet opinion. And there’s the rub. For philosophers are much given to disputing, and indeed refuting, the pet opinions of other people. And this tends to make

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them unpopular. There is a saying, ‘those who can, do; those who can’t, teach.’ When it comes to critical thinking, this is emphatically not true of philosophers. We teach, we can and we do, often with a reckless abandon that is not entirely good for us. For odd as it may seem, when we apply our critical thinking skills to the orthodoxies of the day we do not always meet with a positive response. What makes it worse is that some of us are equalopportunity offenders. We don’t just criticise the managerialist fads of university bureaucrats (which can be dangerous enough in itself), we also criticise the sentimental leftism that is so popular in academic circles (the kind that confines itself to an ideological sympathy with the oppressed without proposing or promoting policies that might actually make things better). 24 Thus at one and the same time I have been regarded by part of the management as a radical firebrand because of my unkind comments about vision statements and other such documents, and as a vicious reactionary by some of my colleagues because I ventured to suggest that just because Ngai Tahu (the local Maori tribe) have been swindled out of their land, this is not a good reason to give them a soft veto on academic research (see Plato’s Apology). 25 Philosophers are disliked, in part, because we publicly exercise the skills that it is one of our principal functions to teach. We are unpopular for the same reason that Socrates claimed to be unpopular (see Plato’s Apology). 26 We can make people look silly and they tend not to like it. CONCLUSION: A SPOT OF ACADEMIC SOCIOLOGY I am going to conclude with a bit of academic sociology. I am going to compare the educational and national backgrounds of the teaching staff at two New Zealand philosophy programmes, Otago and Victoria at Wellington, both highly successful (as measured by the PBRF). Where did these philosophers come from and where did they get their degrees? Do any interesting patterns emerge? Otago has eight teaching staff, and Victoria thirteen (though in each case some of them are part-time). The first point to note is that Otago has nobody below the rank of senior lecturer and Victoria only has two—not surprising given the successes of New Zealand philosophy. At Otago five out of eight (62 percent) are native New Zealanders; at Victoria, three out of thirteen (23 percent). Thus 38 percent of staff at the two departments are native New Zealanders. At Otago three out of eight (37 percent) are originally British; at Victoria, none. Thus 14 percent of staff at the two departments are originally British. At Otago—perhaps unusually—nobody is from North America (though the recently retired David Ward was a Canadian); at Victoria, five out of thirteen (38 percent). Thus 23 percent of staff at the two universities are from North America. At Otago, one out of eight (12.5 percent) is from Australia; at Victoria, three out of thirteen (23 percent), in each case including one of the professors. Thus 19 percent of staff at the two universities are from Australia. At Otago, two out of eight (25 percent) have Oxbridge degrees (one being a Rhodes Scholar); at Victoria, one out of thirteen (7.6 percent). That’s 14 percent of the two departments. At Otago, four out of

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eight (50 percent) have Australian PhDs; at Victoria, two out of thirteen (15 percent). That is just under 29 percent of the total. Three are from the ANU, two from Sydney and one from La Trobe. At Otago, nobody has a North American PhD; at Victoria, nine out of thirteen (69 percent). Thus 42 percent of the staff at the two departments have North American PhDs, three from Princeton, two from Ohio State, one from Rice, one from Maryland, one from Indiana, and one from Memphis. At Otago, two out of eight (25 percent) have New Zealand PhDs; at Victoria, two out of thirteen (15 percent)— that is 19 percent of the total. This confirms the cosmopolitan character of New Zealand philosophy: even the natives tend to have studied elsewhere. And this is not surprising since for many years our tendency was to ship our best students overseas on completion of an MA or an honours degree. They might come back thereafter but they would be coming back with an overseas degree; in the past a B.Phil. or a D.Phil. from Oxford, more recently a PhD from Princeton or the ANU. Those that remained to study in New Zealand tended to have personal reasons for staying, such as a job of their own or a spouse with a job and a well-established career. This is true, I believe, of all of the native New Zealanders with New Zealand doctorates in my sample, though two of them already had higher degrees from overseas universities when they started their PhD studies in this country (a B.Phil. from Oxford in one case and an SSL from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome in the other). There is only one non-native in the entire sample with a New Zealand PhD, namely Ken Perszyk, who came to do a doctorate at Victoria in 1985 and subsequently stayed on as a lecturer. My guess is that this is going to change. With the growing self-confidence burgeoning reputation of New Zealand philosophy, we are less inclined to send our best talents overseas. I think I can say, with my hand on my heart, that an Otago PhD is only slightly less saleable on the international job market than a PhD from Sydney or the ANU, though you would still be better off with a PhD from Rutgers or Princeton. Thus there is less reason now for an ambitious young philosopher to study overseas if he or she does not really want to. Moreover, many are now following the Ken Perszyk path, coming from foreign parts to study for PhDs in New Zealand. Of the five PhD students currently enrolled at Otago, one is from Columbia, two are from Britain, one is from Australia, and only one is a native New Zealander. In ten or twenty years’ time, New Zealand philosophy departments will be about as cosmopolitan as they are now in terms of national origins, but there will probably be rather more staff with New Zealand PhDs, as well as more professors with New Zealand PhDs in other parts of the world. There is one other point to note. At the moment philosophy in New Zealand is still a male-dominated discipline. Only four out of the twenty-one staff at Victoria and Otago are women. Why this should be, I don’t know, but if our PhD enrolments are anything to go by, this too is likely to change. Of the five students currently studying for a doctorate at Otago, only one is a man.

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NOTES 1. I speak of New Zealand philosophy as a participant observer. Though my participation is confined to the last twenty-four years, my observations go back to the beginning of my philosophical career in the late 1970s. 2. Perhaps it is worth pointing out that the author of the excellent Crimes against Logic (2003), the philosopher-journalist Jamie Whyte, is in fact a New Zealander. 3. An exception is Brian Easton’s The Whimpering of the State: Policy After MMP (1999), a book which combines recent history with political analysis. Easton refers to Bentham, Burke, Hobbes, Popper, the Mills, and Simmel, though of these only Popper could qualify as a (temporary) New Zealander. 4. Nor do many philosophers rate a mention in prime ministerial biographies. Sinclair (1976) mentions Marx, Mill, and T. H. Green in his life of Nash, but, so far as I can see, no New Zealand philosophers. Gustafson (1988) mentions Engels, Marx, and Hobson in his life of Michael Joseph Savage, but only one New Zealand philosopher, the disreputable multi-professor Joseph Grossman (of whom more later). Bassett and King (2000) mention Mill and Marx as philosophers consumed by Peter Fraser, though as a prodigiously well-read autodidact he was probably familiar with at least some others. But by the time New Zealand philosophy began to get into its stride Fraser would, as prime minister, have been rather too preoccupied with public business to read any contemporary authors. I can’t find any philosophers in the index to Lange (2005), but then, since Bassett (2008: 301), quoting Jesson, censures him for lacking ‘a coherent philosophy of his own,’ perhaps this explains his deficiencies as a prime minister. 5. Sinclair (1993: 179), however, acknowledges the influence of Popper on his own writing in his autobiography. 6. Flynn was for many years professor of politics at Otago where he taught a notoriously demanding first-year course on political philosophy. For his philosophy, see Flynn (2000); for his politics, see Flynn (2008). However, his most important work is in psychology as the discoverer of the Flynn Effect, the intriguing fact that average IQ scores worldwide have been going up for about a century. Flynn uses this discovery to cast doubt on the idea that you can use differences between group IQ averages to argue for differences in genetic endowments. The average IQ score of a given group is a temporary phenomenon, hence not readily susceptible to a genetic explanation. 7. Trotter and I were fellow members of the New Labour Party and drinking companions in Dunedin. He has also published several of my rants in the New Zealand Political Review of which he is editor. Hence a comrade. 8. It is a mark of Waldron’s achievement that in 1993 Cambridge University Press decided to publish a volume of his collected papers when he was only forty. 9. There was also a sinister side to the philosophical culture that Anderson helped to create—a moralistic cult of free love that some experienced as sexist and oppressive. See Baier’s autobiographical essay ‘Other Minds’ in Baier (2010: 259). 10. Beeby, in a speech drafted for Fraser, summarised the object of these reforms as follows: ‘The Government’s objective, broadly expressed, is that every person, whatever his level of academic ability, whether he be rich or poor, whether he live in the town or the country, has a right, as a citizen, to a free education of the kind to which he is best fitted and to the fullest extent of his powers’ (Bassett and King 2000: 144). Sounds pretty good to me, but then there is no accounting for tastes. 11. This is not to say that his time in New Zealand had no influence on Popper or that the history of New Zealand is irrelevant when it comes to interpreting his philosophy. Jeremy Shearmur, in his monumentally tedious book on Popper’s politics (1996), labors long and hard to prove that when he wrote the Open Society Popper was still quite left-wing and that at that time he thought of socialism and freedom as quite compatible. Had Shearmur bothered to reflect on a remark in Popper’s autobiography, he could have proved his point in a couple of lines: ‘I had the impression that New Zealand was the best governed country in the world’ (Popper in Schilpp 1974: 89). The government which received this glowing accolade was the Labour government of 1935–1949, led, successively, by Savage and Fraser, which was busy

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creating a welfare state and a highly interventionist economic order. It would have been one of the most left-wing (and dirigiste) democratic governments in the world at that time. Popper also thought that, after the United States, New Zealand was the ‘freest country that [he] knew’ (Schilpp 1974: 102), reinforcing the point that for the middle-aged Popper, socialism and freedom were not incompatible. Thus, although he was a friend of Hayek’s, at this stage of his career Popper was certainly no Hayekian. For an excellent account of Popper’s time in New Zealand, see Hacohen (2000: chs. 8–10). 12. Does this mean that my political actions are not motivated by philosophical ideas? No, but it does mean that they are not motivated by ideas that I consider intellectually interesting. Ideas can be politically important without being intellectually interesting and intellectually interesting without being politically important. 13. Jindra Tichy, once a refugee from the Soviet counterrevolution of 1968, taught political philosophy at Otago for about thirty years and is now a distinguished novelist in her native Czech. It is rumored that some of her novels are set in New Zealand and include characters recognisably similar to real-life Otago philosophers. 14. Despite their interest in specifically New Zealand themes, both Oddie and Perrett follow the cosmopolitan pattern. They have both spent much of their careers abroad, and now work in the United States. 15. The maggots the protagonist wished to see were those consuming the corpse of his enemy. 16. Musgrave is a disciple of Popper’s, though not an uncritical one. Indeed, he is sometimes inclined to make unkind remarks about the ‘Popper Church.’ 17. Prior not only had to cope with a heavy workload—he also had to deal with a series of domestic disasters. His house burned down twice and his wife and children all caught tuberculosis (though fortunately they all recovered). See Mary Prior’s delightful memoir (2003). 18. To call The Art Instinct an international smash hit would be an understatement. Not many philosophy books lead to dinners with Bill Gates and guest appearances with John Cleese. 19. See his Freedom and Liberation (1976), a book not calculated to arouse much enthusiasm for either of these objectives, at least as defined by him. Indeed, if this is typical of British ‘radical philosophy,’ it is easy to see why the movement failed to make much impact either on history or even on academia. 20. It is also the most feminised philosophy programme in New Zealand. Five out of the seven teaching staff are women. 21. Rumor has it that when the Tertiary Education Authority was setting up the PBRF they considered the letter grades A, B, C, and D, but rejected D because it carried connotations of failure (not to mention ‘defective’ and ‘dunce’). Apparently they were unfazed by the suggestions conveyed by the letter R: ‘remedial,’ ‘retarded,’ and ‘reject.’ 22. This is, as they say, an ongoing problem. See Geach’s (1991) account of his time at Birmingham. 23. I should stress that this disputatious disposition is not a purely masculine trait. In recent years another major player at the Otago Seminar has been the now-retired Annette Baier. Though notably ladylike and a declared foe of aggressive masculinity, she is quite capable of convicting people of error, especially if they make mistakes about Hume. 24. And I may add the kind of sentimental leftism that often allows itself to be co-opted to managerialist agendas. 25. To do Ngai Tahu justice, they have had the good sense not to exercise this soft veto. This does not mean that it is a good thing for them to have it. 26. Whether this was really the cause of Socrates’ unpopularity is a moot point; see Stone (1988).

Chapter Seventeen

Nature in the Active Voice Val Plumwood

It seems increasingly possible that many of those now living will face the ultimate challenge of human viability, reversing our species’ drive towards destroying our planetary habitat. Two important recent books—Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2005) and Ronald Wright’s A Short History of Progress (2004)—show how cultures that have been unable to change a bad ecological course have gone down (see also Reid et al. 2005). The appearance of ecological crises on the multiple fronts of energy, climate change, and ecosystem degradation suggests we need much more than a narrow focus on energy substitutes. We need a thorough and open rethink, which has the courage to question our most basic cultural narratives. Imagine this scenario: The northern tribe of Easter Islanders never question the desperate religious cult that has devastated their section of the island as they try to placate with tree sacrifice the angry gods who withhold the rain. Instead, their leaders look around for new sources of trees, casting their eyes perhaps on the still-forested lands of the smaller tribe to the south. Meanwhile, their clever men, their scientists, are set to search for tree substitutes— other types of vegetation perhaps. But the need to consume the trees, given by the religion, is not open to question. Most public discussion in our society is dominated by the tyranny of narrow focus and minimum rethink. A rethink deficit is a poor rational strategy in a situation where so many cracks are appearing in the empire, where multiple ecological problems are compounding and converging. Strategies that limit us to casting about for simple substitutes are dangerous. We revamp those hazardous sources good sense has led us to resist so far—nuclear fuels, for example. Rethink deficit strategies do not encourage us to question the big framework narratives that underpin commodity culture’s extravagant demands and cult of economic growth. Or to question our right, as masters of the universe, to lay waste the earth to maintain this cult’s extreme lifestyle. So, getting back to my case study, where could my putative Easter Islanders go to find intellectual help? The Islanders of my scenario obviously need people with the courage to look about them and speak up for change. Scien197

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tists and activists, you might call them. They need ecological knowledge and memory to help them recognise how nature supports their lives. Most crucially, they also need people who can open their culture to self-criticism, make them think harder about their big assumptions, such as their highconsumption religion and its suitability for their very limited support context. In my scenario, science does what it is told by power, and scientists are not encouraged or intellectually equipped to address the bigger questions. So the Islanders need more than science, and maybe a different kind of science. Perhaps what my Easter Islanders need is a college of philosophers, backed up by a full choir from the humanities? Supposedly, the subject area with the brief for the maximum, full-tank rethink is philosophy, whose best traditions have claimed to hold everything open to question. As a feminist philosopher, I would say that philosophy does not always live up to these ideals, and itself has a significant self-reflection deficit. Much of it is far too uncritical of the canon, to which I myself feel very little loyalty. (My own allegiance is to certain kinds of philosophical argument and methods but not to the canon.) Obviously, philosophy with an excessive respect for tradition won’t help the Islanders with their rethink problem. They might get more help, though, from the more radical strand of philosophy that endeavours, in Foucault’s words, ‘to know how and to what extent it might be possible to think differently, instead of legitimating what is already known’ (Foucault 1992: 9). Could the recent area of environmental philosophy help the Islanders to ‘think differently’ about the dogmas that are ruining their island? ENVIRONMENTAL PHILOSOPHY First appearing in academia in the area of value theory in the early 1970s, environmental philosophy has now made itself felt across the whole discipline of philosophy, taking in such areas as political philosophy, ethics (including justice ethics), history of philosophy, moral epistemology, and metaphysics. In all these areas philosophers have exposed the dangerous logic of human-centred frameworks that devalue and background the nonhuman world. Some, such as myself, have drawn upon epistemological standpoint theory to argue that human-centredness weaves a dangerous set of illusions about the human condition right into the logic of our basic conceptual structures (Plumwood 2002). Environmental philosophy remains marginal, many would say, in academia. 1 There have been some great recent contributions to the field (e.g., Mathews 2003, 2005), but my overall assessment from over thirty years of involvement is that the discipline needs recommitment and renewal, and presently is not sufficiently addressing our planetary ecological crisis or providing us with adequate guidance. (Perhaps the increasing influence of money in our learning systems would help explain why this area has been neglected.) Certainly, environmental philosophy no longer holds the premier place it held in the 1970s and 1980s among new non-science disciplines, and the area has receded in Australia. In the humanities, the baton has been

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picked up by emerging stars—ecopolitics, ecoanthropology, and ecocritique in literature. I’ll have more to say about their important contributions later. 2 For those who understand how serious the crisis is, this is a race for survival, a race against time to remake the culture. But you would never think so from the low priority these areas are accorded in the humanities and in general philosophy programs and discussion. Perhaps one reason the Easter Islanders might not get much guidance from environmental philosophy is because the college has been conventionally divided since the early 1970s into the shallow and the deep factional polarities, depending on whether their concern is with humans or nonhumans. Australian environmental philosophers have contributed in major ways on both sides: John Passmore arguing in 1974 for the adequacy of a ‘humans only’ tradition was balanced by local theorists from the same period on the deep side. Deep Ecology and Deep Green Theory were major brand names that emerged in the 1970s. Themes of respect for nature, critiques of human arrogance and human-centredness, and debates about intrinsic and instrumental value appeared in their 1970s papers. Deeps focused on a better deal for nonhumans, with other human-oriented ecological issues counted as shallow. Many argued for an expansion of ethics to nonhumans, or for their inclusion in a larger ethical community, but with very different views about how to constitute it. People like Peter Singer wanted to extend the ethical community minimally to those individuals most like humans, that is to certain animals, while others including myself wanted a much larger, less humanised community, with an ethic of respect and attention needing no stopping point. On the other, ‘shallower’ wing, philosophers like Passmore argued that a position considering only human interests would be enough to get us by, that it is dangerous to question human supremacy, and advocated minimum rethink—a cleverer instrumentalism is what is needed. Nonhuman harm, on this view, matters just when humans suffer too. I would argue against the minimising rationality of instrumentalism that genuinely sustainable systems cannot be ones that allocate merely minimum resources for providers’ survival, as egoist economic rationality currently dictates. They must encourage greater levels of consideration for nonhuman providers’ long-term well-being. This rules out instrumental, servant or slave-like relations, as well as competitive market relations (to name a few of those that encourage us to cut costs at the provider’s expense), and rules in mutualistic forms of rationality. This is why I think the conventional deep/shallow division is a pernicious false choice. A rigid division that makes us choose between human and nonhuman sides precludes a critical cultural focus on problems of human ecological identity and relationship, and is also bad for activism. It assumes a fallacious choice of self/other, ‘us versus them’ approaches, in which a concern is contaminated by self-interest unless it is purely concern for the other. Most issues and motivations are double sided, mixed, combining self and other, human and nonhuman interests, and it is not only possible but essential to take account of both. Global warming is a case in point. Humans will lose, and so will nonhumans. Both kinds of concerns must be mobilised and related.

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Philosophy, I think, must understand humans as immersed in a medium that is both deep and shallow (although not in the same place). Our shift into a mixed framework enables us to see that human-centredness can have severe costs for humans as well as nonhumans. Under the old criterion of depth, in which consideration of costs to humans is inevitably ‘shallow,’ it is not possible to consistently raise the question of how far human-centredness is a disadvantage to humans themselves. I think a more promising approach is to redefine what is ‘deep’ as what challenges human-centredness. Then we can address both sides and kinds of issues, human and nonhuman, in a deeper way. Human-centredness is a complex syndrome which includes the hyperseparation of humans as a special species and the reduction of nonhumans to their usefulness to humans, or instrumentalism. Many have claimed that this is the only prudent, rational, or possible course. I argue contrary to this that human-centredness is not in the interests of either humans or nonhumans, that it is even dangerous and irrational. My argument is that one of its results is a failure to understand our embeddedness in and dependency on nature, that it distorts our perceptions and enframings in ways that make us insensitive to limits, dependencies, and interconnections of a nonhuman kind. Where mind is taken as coincident with the human, hyperseparation is expressed in denying both the mind-like aspects of nature and the nature-like aspects of the human, for example, human immersion in and dependency on an ecological world. When we hyperseparate ourselves from nature and reduce it conceptually, we not only lose the ability to empathise (and to see the nonhuman sphere in ethical terms), but also get a false sense of our own character and location that includes an illusory sense of agency and autonomy. So human-centred conceptual frameworks are a direct hazard to nonhumans, but are also an indirect prudential hazard to humans, especially in a situation where we press limits. This is one of many places where insights drawn from feminist theory can be helpful. Male-centredness (a good parallel in some ways to human-centredness) can be damaging to men as well as to women. It makes men insensitive to dependencies and interconnections, as well as devaluing women. It has to be tackled from both sides, by changing men and by changing women, changing individuals and changing institutions. Human-centredness is similarly double sided, and we have to see the denial of our own embodiment, animality, and inclusion in the natural order as the other side of our distancing from and devaluation of that order. Human-centred culture damages our ability to see ourselves as part of ecosystems and understand how nature supports our lives. So the resulting delusions of being ecologically invulnerable, beyond animality and ‘outside nature,’ leads to the failure to understand our ecological identities and dependencies on nature. This failure lies behind many environmental catastrophes, both human and nonhuman. The inability or refusal to recognise the way nonhumans contribute to or support our lives encourages us to starve them of resources. It has justice aspects because we refuse to give other species their share of the earth, and it has ethical aspects because we fail them in care, consideration, and attention. This means that our ‘deep’ human-centred ethical failures and our ‘shallow’ prudential failures are closely and interactively linked.

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NUCLEAR POWER A corollary is that a deep analysis that challenges human-centredness can have much to say to human sustainability. The deep aspects come from the need to see ourselves as more limited beings, constrained by the ecological needs of the larger biospheric community. There is definitely a deep side to the energy and climate issues, although we don’t hear much about it. A classic example is nuclear power. There are major concerns about human welfare, but the issue definitely has a deep side, both in terms of ecojustice for nonhuman lives and systems risked, and in terms of technological overconfidence and the approach to risks and limits. I think the illusion of ecological invulnerability appears in the way its advocates fail to imagine or take seriously its enormous ecological risks and costs—the risks of storing radioactive wastes for up to half a million years, for example, and the enormous risks involved in transport and storage. We get nuclear instead of rethink. Nuclear advocates would inflict a horrendous burden of waste disposal and other risks on many future generations of humans and nonhumans, none of whom will benefit or be consulted (Routley and Routley 1980, 1982). Why? So we can put off the inevitable rethink for another fifty years and continue the energy extravaganza that derives from seeing ourselves as masters of the universe. The deep aspect of climate and energy issues is the need to rethink ourselves as more limited and responsible beings in the biosphere. This also implies rejecting technologies that demand future human invulnerability and perfection, such as perfectionist forms of nuclear and genetic tinkering. REDUCTIONISM AND HUMAN/NATURE DUALISM Contemporary human societies seem to have many similar problems to the Easter Islanders: failure to understand our ecological situation, being out of touch with what is happening to our ecological world and with ourselves as ecological beings. Can environmental philosophy perhaps help us understand how we got into this situation? I think it can. We need to understand the history and the logic of some key concepts to see how the trap we are in has been put together. Then there is a chance we might work out how to get out of it—although sadly, causative insight provides no guarantee of escape. The hyperbolised opposition between humans and the nonhuman order I call human/nature dualism is a Western-based cultural formation going back thousands of years that sees the essentially human as part of a radically separate order of reason, mind, or consciousness, set apart from the lower order that comprises the body, the woman, the animal and the prehuman (Plumwood 1993; Lloyd 1984b). Human/nature dualism conceives the human as not only superior to but as different in kind from the nonhuman, which is conceived as a lower, nonconscious and noncommunicative purely physical sphere that exists as a mere resource or instrument for the higher human one. The human essence is not the ecologically embodied ‘animal’

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side of self, which is best neglected, but the higher disembodied element of mind, reason, culture, and soul or spirit. The other side of this is the reduction of nature that is part of the dualist formation. On the one side of this hyperseparation, we set ourselves sharply apart from everything else. On the other side we get the concept of nature as dead matter, all elements of mind and intelligence having been contracted to the human. The idea of nature as dead matter, to which some separate driver has to add life, organisation, intelligence, and design, is part of human/nature dualism. This ideology of dualism and human apartness can be traced down through Western culture through Christianity and modern science. With the Enlightenment, human apartness is consolidated and augmented by a very strong form of reductionist materialism, whose project, in Descartes’ formulation, is ‘the empire of man over mere things.’ This framework identifies mind with consciousness, solidarises the human species as uniquely conscious agents, and reduces nonhuman forms to ‘mere matter,’ emptied of agency, spirit, and intelligence. Reductive concepts that restrict even the vocabulary of mindfulness and moral sensibility to humans naturalise the treatment of nonhumans as slaves or mere tools—making it seem natural that they are available for our unconstrained use and are reduced to that use (are ‘resources’). Reductionism, as an important cultural development associated with modernity, actually relies on a reified separation that took place a lot earlier, through a process of splitting and a hegemonic construction of agency and identity. According to a typical hegemonic pattern, the most general form of mind/body dualism, matter itself (chaos) is not creative, but is silent and formless. Being is split into an uncreative, featureless material part and a hyperseparate, externalised, and often dematerialised ‘director’ or ‘driver,’ usually intelligence, mind or reason, on the other side. The ‘driver’ is the real author of change (of the outcome or issue), as a separate mechanism or intelligence driving the materially reduced organism from outside, and it is to this external driver that true agency and respect is attributed. Plato plays this out in the Timaeus with a cast of cosmos (rational principle) as driver of chaos—prior, formless, empty, and inchoate matter. It is important to understand how the reductive materialism that defines modernity derives from this older construction splitting from and devaluing the material. It is not a bold new beginning, launching out into the void in an explosion of brave new rationality. It simply affirms universally one side of this older dualism, denying the spirit side of the original dualism completely or confining it to humans (or gods). That is, the reductionist materialism that is regarded as the new beginning to modernity is actually just a truncated dualism which preserves at its heart the original splitting and reducing process that strips mind, intelligence, and agency out of materiality and awards it to a separate driver. It represents nature as passive and uncreative, real creativity coming only from (various) mind-identified drivers, usually humans or humanoid. Modernity’s philosophical contribution so understood is less impressive, that of killing off the driver, but without questioning the reduced concept of materiality that was its other side. This truncated dualism

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is what underpins the empire of man over mere things, what propels its commodity spirituality. 3 Modernist reductionism is highly relevant to the ecological crisis. This ideology has been functional for Western culture in enabling it to colonise and exploit the nonhuman world and so-called ‘primitive’ cultures with less constraint. But it also inherits the dangerous illusions denying human embeddedness in and dependency on nature I have been discussing. It generates modernity’s dominant narratives of scientific progress, unconstrained commodity culture, and unlimited growth. By consolidating the narratives of the empire of man over mere things, reductionist rationality removes key constraints at the dawn of commoditisation and capitalism. This is no coincidence, of course. I think we do have to understand philosophy in social terms, not as a collection of individual philosophical ideas. SCIENCE CONSOLIDATES THE EMPIRE Science is crucial in consolidating the Empire of Man over mere things. In the new scientific fantasy of mastery, the new human task becomes that of remoulding nature to conform to the dictates of reason to achieve salvation— here on earth rather than in heaven—as freedom from death and bodily limitation. The idea of human apartness emphasised in culture, religion, and science was, of course, shockingly challenged by Charles Darwin in his argument that humans evolved from nonhuman species. But these limited insights of continuity and kinship with other life forms (the real scandal of Darwin’s thought) remain only superficially absorbed in the dominant culture, even by scientists. The traditional scientific project of technological control is justified by continuing to think of humans as a special superior species, set apart and entitled to manipulate and commodify the earth and other species for its own exclusive benefit. This world is conceived as an aggregation of material objects, meaningless in themselves and only given meaning or form by their driver. This has been called ‘the death of nature’ (Merchant 1980). The idea of nature as intelligent and organised has to be killed off by capitalism because nature in the active and intelligent voice can’t so easily be backgrounded, appropriated, and destroyed for human gain. Scientific reductionism assumes a mindless, meaningless, materialist universe open to endless unrestricted manipulation and appropriation: nature is the suppressed slave collaborator—a mere resource, or transparent enabler of projects. 4 Most modern philosophy has supported this materialist reductionism in the name of defending ‘hard-headed’ scientific rationality. In this, Australian philosophers (many operating under the rather misleading label of ‘empiricism’) 5 have been in the lead, insisting that no other rational possibilities exist. Alternatives are debunked as involving superstition and primitivism, even animism, in contrast to science and rationality. I think it is a serious mistake to identify science and rationality with materialist reductionism, and that more respectful forms of science are not only possible but are better forms of rationality.

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This minimising rationality that makes the least of the nonhuman other is not materialism in the sense that it respects the material order or works generally in its favour, and in my view it should not be called ‘materialism’ at all. Of course, some materialist philosophers concede that often it’s a better predictive assumption to think as if there was some mindfulness to the nonhuman world (what Dennett [1989] calls the ‘intentional stance’), but add that we don’t really have to take that mindfulness seriously—it’s all just a metaphor! This way we can preserve the exploitation benefits of reduction without all the costs of sacrificing knowledge and order. As a philosophical animist, I argue that this is doublethink, and that we do have to take the intentional stance quite seriously for nonhumans (see Plumwood 1993: ch. 8). We will lose the justification for empire—an empire of growing human, cultural, and biological poverty—but can open another door to magnificent gifts from a richer world, and can begin to negotiate life membership of an ecological community of kindred beings. CREATIONISM This analysis casts the contemporary position known as ‘Creationism’ in an interesting new light. I see Creationists as affirming the original reductionist split that deprived nature of creative power, meaning and mind. Creationists say things like: I’m not a mere accident. I am not a cosmic accident of a chaotic medium. I am not just a ‘fluke of nature.’ I’m a product of unnatural selection, not natural selection, the product of a designer, a creator. I’m not the descendant of apes. I was put here by a designer. It [nature] couldn’t have got there by itself. It needed a designer. Several interesting things are happening here: an insistence on human apartness, and an insistence on nature’s blindness and lack of mind. The original mind/matter split is strongly affirmed, together with a wish to restore the original driver/father, or something very like him. 6 It is clear that in rejecting the ‘random selection’ of evolution and calling for a designer, Creationists are affirming the very same reduced concept of material order as ‘mere things’ posited by reductive materialism. Nature is an accidental, chaotic, and basically meaningless sphere lacking genuine creativity. In this impoverished creation narrative, mere things have no creativity, only an external designer can have it. Creationists are endorsing the reductionist, debased, ‘mere matter’ concept of nature supplied by reductive science, following in the Platonic footsteps. Creationism distances itself from the meaningless ‘mere things’ it sees science as revealing, as well as expressing the faith that the missing meaning will be returned by an all-powerful creator in the future paradise to come. Creationism is very much a reassertion of human apartness, plus the assimilation of the world of nature to the mindless and meaningless sphere left after

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the external driver is done away with. Nature—portrayed as random, heartless, and lacking (‘mere’)—is reduced to mere accident, a chaotic sphere evolving through blind chance and meaningless accident, and thus incapable by itself of delivering the culmination of history—the human mind, as uniquely exhibited in our own species! Meaning, intelligence, and communicativity belong to the external driver, who is to be found only in the human or humanoid sphere (Plumwood 1993: 110). At bottom Creationism buys the very same reduced framework as reductive materialism. We can see that contemporary Creationism is a reaction to and is conceptually parasitic on reductionism. Of course Creationists are right in wanting to reject the meaningless universe, but wrong in endorsing the driver/materiality split or in demanding restoration of the original defunct driver. Both positions are guilty of the same fault of denying and suppressing nature’s own mindfulness and creativity. Science has been busy generating wondrous narratives (usually told by the scientific community in very inhibited, mind-evacuated vocabularies, and in mutually censoring ways) about this self-creativity. These narratives are usually much richer and more attentive to the world around us than the simplistic patriarchal narratives of the Creationists in which the world is the recent creation of a humanoid god. But science is severely hampered in countering the Creationist worldview, and in representing and celebrating the creativity of nature it discloses, by its traditional identification of rationality with reductive materialism. In a way, reductive forms of science have themselves to blame for Creationism. A sufficiently stripped-down, dualised machine nature demands an external, anthropoform designer. So reductionist science has helped produce the demand for a designer through its own mistaken reductionist and mechanistic stance. So to the Creationist, the philosophical animist would say: Your story of Creation is really impoverished compared to the incredible, infinite complexity of the real earth story written in the rocks and in the bodies of living things, species diversity, and evolution. Without the draining out of spirit and creativity from matter and its centralisation in your god-figure, we have creative, active, and mindful matter all around us. 7 In an intentional universe we can have it both ways, a dispersed creativity and a decentralised intentionality. For this, we need to spread concepts of agency and creativity more widely into what we have thought of as the dead world of nature. THINKING DIFFERENTLY So reductionism (reductive materialism) represents a very incomplete rejection of the original spirit/matter dualist framework. A genuine rejection would be an enriched materialism that puts back what has been stripped out, the mindful and creative properties handed over to the defunct driver. However, the debate usually assumes a false choice of reductive materialism versus creationism, with conventional science calling on us to defend the

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extreme reductionism and human hyperseparation that it so wrongly identifies with rationality. The debate has assumed a false choice of creativity as the prerogative of the intense agency/pinpoint of singularised Creator versus creativity as confined to the human knower (culture) and stripped from non-agentic nature. The real alternatives are not creationism versus reductionism, but creationism, reductionism, and animism as enriched materialism, where animism would spread mind and creativity out much more widely. That the opportunity is available philosophically to do this via openness to the intentionality of the world is something I argued for in my 1993 book, Feminism and the Mastery of Nature. Monopolising mind may make us feel superior but it is not helping our accommodation to the earth. An animist materialism has a different answer to Creationism than reductive materialism identified with science (which really doesn’t have an answer at all except self-promotion). It advises science to re-envisage materiality in richer terms that escape the spirit/matter and mind/matter dualisms involved in creationism. Forget the passive machine model and tell us more about the self-inventive and self-elaborative capacity of nature, about the intentionality of the nonhuman world. If the other-than-human world has such capacities, we don’t need an external designer to put them in. It is its own designer, to the extent that design is in question. Recent work in ecoanthropology supports this possibility for thinking differently. It finds that many indigenous cultures have much more animated, agentic, and intentional views of the world of nature. Writers such as Graham Harvey, Deborah Bird Rose, and Tim Ingold have shown how our concepts of rationality have misunderstood and misrepresented indigenous animism in our own dualistic terms. Colonial ethnocentrism saw ‘animism’ as holding that humanoid (often demonic) spirits inhabit and animate material objects as separate drivers, which could be welcomed, influenced, or evicted (see Harvey 2005 and Rose 2004). This ploy enabled them to read our own dualisms back into other cultures, and to present a major alternative to reductionism as primitive and anti-rational, thus heading off the possibility of anyone (at least anyone rational) being able to think differently. So the big question is: Can we think differently? Can what has been stripped out of our conception of the material world be put back? Can we begin to entertain the hypothesis that the world of nature around us may have many of the intelligent and creative powers the splitters hive off to the designer? Suppose that instead of splitting and denigrating the intelligence of the nonhuman world and attributing creation to an external deity or driver, we began to try to see creativity and agency in the other-than-human world around us. Although it helps to reveal the wondrous creativity of life, science has been doing an ambiguous job in conveying this message of evolutionary theory, because of its ideological commitment to reductionism and its mistaken identification of this narrow and human-centred outlook with rationality. We need to rethink concepts of meaning and accident in relation to the nonhuman world, and to question the reductive and human-centred frameworks that depict places in nature, often rich in narrative, as the product of meaningless coincidence. Ancient places like the Stone Country of Arnhem

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Land confront us sharply with the difficult knowledge of our own limitations as knowers, for in the complex and intricate narrative that explains the emergence of the correspondingly complex and intricate stone forms we see around us, we can as human observers never know the full story that matches the intricacy we observe. We can discern only a few of its broader outlines: that these extraordinary formations have evolved through the ancestral processes of sea, rain, and wind that have sculpted them through deep tides of time. To save face, our instrumental culture conveniently dismisses the rest under the rubric of coincidence, contingency, accident, or formless chaos, belittling all complexities we cannot know or control. So thinking differently is (in part) about recognising wisdom and intelligence in nature and in evolution. Why can’t we see evolution, for example, as a form of experimentation, of testing and learning, like trial and error, a form of wisdom? Why can we not consider evolution as a demonstration of mind in nature, of the intelligence involved in species differentiation and elaboration, the intelligence of forms, ‘the wisdom in the wing’ (Dennett 1996), and in the form of the species body and its adaptation (via species difference and elaboration) to a particular creative ecological niche via a process of evolutionary learning? Dispersing creativity and agency, we can think the possibility of creative, mindful matter. We don’t need to make the choice between materiality and meaning that the Creationists insist upon. These philosophical alternatives discerning wisdom and intelligence in the material world can help move us from the monological to the dialogical, from domination to negotiation with our very material ecological context. They make possible respect and renarrativisation, as ways to combat the regime of anonymous commodities, and have an important role to play in reducing overconsumption. We need new origin stories that can disrupt the commodity regimes that produce anonymity by erasing narratives of material origins and labour, replacing them by ones of consumer desire and endless, consequenceless consumption. THE ROLE OF WRITING The enriching, intentionalising, and animating project I have championed is also a project that converges with much poetry and literature. It’s a project of reanimating the world, as well as remaking ourselves as multiply enriched but consequently constrained members of an ecological community. Opportunities for reanimating matter include making room for seeing much of what has been presented as meaningless accident as creative nonhuman agency. In reanimating, we become open to hearing sound as voice, seeing movement as action, adaptation as intelligence and dialogue, coincidence and chaos as the creativity of matter. Writers are amongst the foremost of those who can help us to think differently. Of course, artistic integrity, honesty, and truthfulness to experience are crucial in any rediscovery of ‘tongues in trees.’ I’m not talking about inventing fairies at the bottom of the garden. It’s a matter of being open

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to experiences of nature as powerful, agentic, and creative, making space in our culture for an animating sensibility. But there are certain critical concepts that are used to stop us thinking differently, that are used in inhibiting and delegitimating any new or old animating sensibility. The concept of anthropomorphism, of ‘presenting nonhumans illegitimately as more like humans than they really are,’ plays a major role here. This charge of anthropomorphism is often invoked when someone is found guilty of presenting the nonhuman world in more agentic and intentional terms than reductionism allows. Anthropomorphism is a very tricky concept, with many functions. But one of its main recent roles is that of policeman for reductive materialism, enforcing polarised and segregated vocabularies for humans and nonhumans. Its covert assumption is usually the Cartesian one that mentalistic qualities are confined to the human, and that no mentalistic terms can properly be used for the nonhuman. Attempts to apply intentional terms for the nonhuman can then be said to involve presenting them in unduly human-like terms. For example, in reviewing the recent movie about emperor penguins, The March of the Penguins, many critics took particular exception to the film’s intentional description, to the idea that the emperor penguins could be said to ‘love’ one another. In terms of the cluster of behavioural criteria for applying the term ‘love,’ such as being willing to suffer in major ways for the loved one, the application of the term to the penguins seems well warranted. True, penguin lovers may move on at the next breeding season, but why require permanence? A high redefinition of love as lasting forever would certainly rule out most human loves. Of course, this charge of anthropomorphism completely begs the question on nonhuman minds. That has become its major function now, to bully people out of ‘thinking differently.’ It is a highly abused concept, one so often used carelessly and uncritically, to allow us to avoid the hard work of scrutinising or revealing our assumptions, that there is a good case for dropping the term completely. 8 Stop hiding behind that wall of Greek, and try saying what you mean in simple direct language! If your thesis is to be stated as, ‘This film/book presents nonhumans as much more like humans than they really are,’ be prepared to be asked: ‘In what respect’? If your reply is, ‘Only humans can have minds, or the capacity to love,’ be prepared to defend this indefensible claim, which is now out there in the open for all to see and object to. Otherwise, my advice is: free up your mind, and make your own contributions to the project of disrupting reductionism and mechanism. Help us reimagine the world in richer terms that will allow us to see ourselves as in dialogue with and limited by other species’ needs, other kinds of minds. I’m not going to try to tell you how to do it. There are many ways to do it. But I hope I have convinced you that this is not a dilettante project. The struggle to think differently, to remake our reductionist culture, is a basic survival project in our present context. I hope you will join it.

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NOTES 1. I’m not happy about confining the term ‘philosophy’ to academic or written philosophy, as some want to do. Arguably environmental philosophy is not just a recent academic invention but at the heart of the philosophy and life practice of indigenous people in Australia, for whom relations with the land were at the centre, not the margin of life. 2. The emerging transdisciplinary area of ecohumanities has made some important contributions to environmental thought, but also some problematic ones, the latter emerging especially from forms of postmodernism. Indeed the humanities harbours its own forms of reductionism and idealism about nature that maintain human self-enclosure and hinder the rethink. For example, a major recent humanities preoccupation has been developing idealist concepts and arguments that reject all concepts of nature as presenting limits and treat nature as a human construction. These sorts of positions are unlikely to help the Easter Islanders come to terms with their major problem of recognising how nature supports their lives. For a critique of these tendencies, see Plumwood (2005, 2006). 3. I argued the case that reductive materialism was a truncated dualism in Plumwood (1993). This analysis also explains why it is a mistake to locate the entire problem in modernity, as many green thinkers do. I think we must go further back and draw in an older range of positions, such as monotheism. This means that the crucial development marking modernity is not the loss of Christianity or some other monotheistic faith, but the adoption of such a secondary reductionism. 4. On the knowledge model involved here, see Plumwood (2002: ch. 2). 5. And behind them stand many other English-speaking philosophers. 6. The parallel here is an Aristotelean-style theory of reproduction, involving the suppression of the female party and the promotion of father as true creator. (Suppression means use plus denial.) The narrative that underpins these concerns links women, nature, and materiality. 7. Monotheisms have much to answer for here too. Monotheisms have long aimed to expel the creative from all but their chosen pinpoint of reverence, and they have been able to conspire together to represent this as the normal orientation of religions. Creationist theory posits God as an external creator concentrated into a single, minimum point of intentionality and agency, a personally responsive mind who can provide salvation from the mortal estate if properly invoked or placated. But many so-called ‘primitive religions,’ as Vine Deloria (2002) points out, have been profoundly different in acknowledging revelations of the sacred as appearing at many points and in diverse spheres. Deloria (2002) writes, quoting from Keith Ward: ‘The Eastern stream in which Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism interact develops from forms of animism to the idea of a cosmic order, a way of balance and harmony following which brings stability and calm of mind, and peace and right order in society. In this stream, there is little stress on one Absolute being or God’ (p. 127, emphasis mine). Deloria also quotes from Ernest Benz to the effect that, ‘Hinduism, like Buddhism and Shintoism, lack one other distinction so fundamental for our Christian thinking: the belief in the basic essential difference between creation and Creator’ (p. 129, quoting Benz n.d.: 5). Why the compulsive separation, which so many panentheist theologians have rejected? ‘Can we not simply say that the world makes sense to us and that we can operate safely within its rhythms’ (Deloria 2002: 130). 8. I believe there are some valid uses of the term, such as pointing to failures to respect nonhuman difference, but these uses are now so enmeshed with the problematic ones that they are best stated in other terms. For a more extended discussion of the concept, see Plumwood (1993: ch. 2).

Chapter Eighteen

Why Asian Philosophy? Graham Priest

Philosophy is like a city. It has distinctive areas, like ethics and epistemology, and these all link up, sometimes in obvious ways, sometimes in surprising ways. The connections give the polis its integrity. If you start to study philosophy at a university, then after a few years you have a reasonably large-scale map of the city, but you don’t really know any of the neighbourhoods very well. Later, if you are a research student, you get to know one of the neighbourhoods in great detail, but most of the rest of the city is still terra pretty much incognita. If you have the luxury of becoming a professional philosopher, you can explore more of the city. Sometimes you walk from the suburbs you know to neighbouring areas. Sometimes you take the subway, and come up in a whole new area. Gradually, over the years, you start to know the whole city: all the neighbourhoods and their wealth of interconnections. About fifteen years ago I had spent half of my life as a professional philosopher, and was just starting to feel that I had a sense of the city of philosophy. I met with a rude shock. Because of the good fortune of making new friends, I came to realise that I knew only half of the city. I knew the Western half: those philosophical traditions that grew up West of the Euphrates. But there was a whole Eastern part of the city: those philosophical traditions that grew up East of the Euphrates. I have spent much time since then exploring these areas of the city (as well as continuing my explorations of the Western part). I’m sure that there is much that I do not know about both parts of the city. And maybe there are other quarters of the city that are still unknown to me. But my knowledge and understanding is, at least, less parochial than it used to be.

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THE IGNORANCE OF ASIAN PHILOSOPHY How is it that I could have spent half of my professional life as a philosopher in ignorance of half of the city? Part of the answer is simple: I was educated in, and taught in, philosophy departments in Western countries, and there is just no tradition of, or knowledge of, Asian philosophy in such places. Clearly, this is a situation that is self-reproducing. As an aside, we should note that the epithet ‘Asian philosophy,’ though standard (and I shall often use it), is inappropriate. There is no such thing as ‘Western philosophy.’ There are many Western philosophies: compare the different styles and contents of Plato, Hume, Wittgenstein, Heidegger. Similarly, there is no such thing as ‘Asian philosophy.’ There are many Eastern philosophies. Indeed, the situation is even less unified than it is in the West. At least there the philosophies spring from a single culture, that of ancient Greece. But in the East, they spring from two quite different great and ancient cultures: those of India and China. Returning to my own ignorance of the Asian traditions, what I have so far said is a very partial explanation of this. An obvious question is why there has been so little engagement with such traditions in Western philosophy departments. After all, philosophers tend to be curious people, and there was nothing stopping them finding out what they did not know. Or was there? Until the last couple of centuries, there has generally been little knowledge and understanding of Eastern cultures in Western countries. This is now, of course, no longer the case. But in more recent times, there have been other, and more insidious, barriers. The standard view of professional Western philosophers throughout most of the twentieth century was that ‘Asian philosophy’ is not philosophy at all: it’s religion, mysticism, nonrational. These views, it must be said, were held even though virtually no philosophers had taken the trouble to read and engage with the material. It is certainly true that much Asian philosophy has important connections with Asian religions, though certainly not all of it. But the same is true of much Western philosophy. The great period of medieval philosophy in the West was heavily connected with Christianity (not surprising, since most philosophers then were clerics); it was philosophy none the less. And, yes, there are parts of Asian philosophy that have connections with mysticism and the ineffable. But the same is true of Western philosophy. Leaving the great Christian mystical philosophers like Eckhart out of this, there are definite mystical strands in Plato and even in writings of two of the greatest twentieth-century Western philosophers: Wittgenstein (in the Tractatus) and Heidegger (on Being). SO WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY? What is philosophy anyway? We could spend much time discussing this: it is itself a hard philosophical issue. For present purposes, we won’t go too far wrong if we think of it as the critical articulation of ethical or metaphysical

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views. The word ‘critical’ here is crucial. All people and cultures have views about the nature of the world in which they live, and of how one should behave. This does not make them philosophers. Philosophy requires the intellectual scrutiny of such views (which is why it is such a valuable discipline). The Indian and Chinese traditions clearly have articulations of ethical and metaphysical views: to see this one need look no further than Buddhist metaphysics or Confucian ethics. But do these traditions have the appropriate kind of critical engagement? The answer concerning India, to anyone who takes the trouble to read the material, is an obvious ‘yes.’ There is constant argument and counterargument between Buddhists and Hindus, not to mention the critiques and countercritiques between various Hindu schools and Buddhist schools themselves. Prima facie, the answer is less clear in the Chinese traditions. Indeed, if there is a split in world philosophy, it is not at the Euphrates, but at the Himalayas. Whilst the cut and thrust of philosophical debates is patent in Indian texts to anyone who reads them even superficially, the same is not true of Chinese texts. It is there none the less. For example, there was much debate between Confucians, Daoists, and Moists, and also between the various Chinese Buddhist schools. What makes this harder to pick up is that the style of argument is often rather different from more explicit debate forms. Arguments are usually made by analogy, and the consequences of the analogy are often not spelled out, but are left for the reader to ponder. For the perceptive eye, though, critical engagement is clear. The view that Asian philosophy is not really philosophy is, therefore, a view that can really be held only out of ignorance. THE TIMES THEY ARE A CHANGIN’ Fortunately, then, Western philosophers are finally shaking off this misguided view and are starting to engage with Eastern philosophies. There are courses on Asian philosophy, or various parts of it, in many Australian universities. (I think that in this way Australia is ahead of countries such as the United Kingdom.) It is still, it is true, a minority interest, but I have no doubt that familiarity will breed content. Of course, it is not easy to engage with Asian philosophical traditions. There are many barriers in the way. For a start, there is the language. The texts are in Sanskrit, classical Chinese, and other Asian languages. For scholarly purposes, it is clearly desirable to have a knowledge of these. Such languages are not taught in schools, and require hard work. Fortunately, much good philosophy can come out of reading the texts in translation. (Most Western philosophers deal with texts originally written in Latin, Greek, French, German, English, and other languages. Few of them speak all of these.) Many of the extant translations are not good, qua philosophy, since they were produced by people who were not philosophers, but by philologists or scholars of religion who lacked the appropriate philosophical sensitivity. But many key texts now have good translations, and the situation is getting

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better all the time, as more translations are being made by philosophers with the requisite language skills. The second problem is the style of writing and arguing. I have already noted that this tends to be quite different in Chinese texts, but even in the Indian traditions, the style of arguing can be somewhat scholastic and unfamiliar to someone who is used to reading only twentieth-century Western texts—though those versed in Presocratic or medieval scholastic Western texts will feel at home very soon. The third problem is the culture. Philosophy is not written in a vacuum. To understand the philosophy of a text properly, one needs some appreciation of the culture in which it was generated. One needs to understand the assumptions that are being taken for granted, the allusions to historical events, religious customs, and so on. This is true of all philosophy, whether Eastern or Western, but our knowledge of Western cultures is generally much better than that of Eastern cultures. For a start, we live in one, and much that is now past has permeated our contemporary culture—as well, of course, as being taught in schools. Someone who wishes to understand Asian philosophies must be prepared to learn enough about the relevant culture without these advantages. We therefore have at least three hurdles to be jumped. But these are hurdles that philosophers are well used to jumping. Someone who has read only contemporary philosophy must jump these hurdles with respect to ancient Greek philosophy, for example. But many do, and find much of importance on the other side. And what do we find on the other side of the Asian hurdles if we make the jump? We find a landscape that it at once familiar and unfamiliar. Any Western philosopher will immediately recognise there familiar problems. To name but a few: Is there a god? What is the nature of reality? How does this relate to language? How do I know these things? How should I live? How should the state be run? But Asian philosophers have often had singularly different takes on answers to these questions, or singularly different reasons for or against answers than those familiar in the West. THE OVERALL LANDSCAPE Let me try to give just a little idea of this. Let’s start with a general overview of Asian philosophy. The timeline in figure 18.1 is very rough and highly selective, but will suffice to provide a general perspective. The first column records events in the development of Western philosophy for comparison. Emerging from a ‘Homeric’ period, the earliest philosophers were from greater Greece. Western philosophy took a decisive turn with the Greek trilogy of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Socrates wrote nothing, but much of the writings of Plato and Aristotle survive; indeed these have, in many ways, provided a frame for later Western philosophy. There are subsequent important developments in Greek philosophy, such as Stocism, but another major turn is taken by Western philosophy with the impact of Christianity. The early Church fathers, such as Augustine, strug-

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Figure 18.1.

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Philosophical Timeline

gled to put the new religion on a sound theoretical footing, fusing the Greek philosophy they knew with biblical pronouncements. This was followed by the great period of Islamic philosophy, when thinkers such as Ibn Sina (Avicenna) did the same with the Qu’ran. (As an aside, note that Islamic philosophy is not an Asian philosophy. Though Islam is of course widely practiced in Asia, Islamic philosophy comes out of the same cultural crucible as other Western philosophies.) The Islamic period informed the subsequent rise of medieval European philosophy, with numerous important thinkers, such as Aquinas. The next major transformation of Western philosophy occurred around the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Many things influenced this, but probably the major one was the so called ‘scientific revolution’: this had a profound impact, removing Christianity from centre stage, and defining a whole new agenda for philosophy. If there is a major difference between Eastern and Western philosophies, it is that there was no scientific revolution in the East, and no corresponding upheaval of thought.

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The Indian philosophical traditions, in the next column, also emerge from a religious literature, the Vedas, going back well before 1000 BCE. The writings retain their religious content, but gradually become more philosophical through the later Upanishads and parts of the epic poems, such as the Bhagavad Gita. A primary philosophical concern is god (Brahman) and the self (Atman), which are considered to be in some sense one. From this background emerge six schools of orthodox Hindu philosophy in the first millennium CE. These schools articulate the Hindu view in various ways, engaging with all the other questions which it raises. One of the most influential of these schools was that of Sankara, Advaita Vedanta. According to this, the world of experience is a mere appearance, cloaking the identity of Atman and Brahman. Around the fifth century BCE, a number of views emerged which reacted against the authority of the Vedas, and so rejected a number of their claims (though, naturally, others were preserved). These included Jainism (attributed to Mahavira) and Buddhism. The most philosophically influential of these was Buddhism. This rejected both the existence of any god and of the self: a person is just a bunch of parts (physical and mental), which come together at a certain time, interact, change, and then fall apart. Buddhism developed in a number of early forms, only one of which now survives, Theravada Buddhism. Around the beginning of the Common Era, another form starts to emerge, Mahayana Buddhism. This has a much more radical analysis of the nature of reality than the earlier forms of Buddhism: everything is empty. (More of this anon.) Mahayana itself takes different forms, one of which, Madhyamaka, is associated with probably the greatest Buddhist philosopher, Nagarjuna (unkown dates; some time around the first or second century). Another, Yogacara, is associated with the brothers Vasubandu and Asanga. A central difference between these two schools concerns the relationship between the mind and reality. The Yogacarins are philosophical idealists of sorts, holding that reality is a mental construction. For the Madhyamika, on the other hand, there is a dialectical interplay between the mind and reality, which privileges neither. Buddhism collapsed (or was crushed) in India with the advent of Islam. But, by this time, Thervada had moved into Southeast Asia, and the two forms of Indian Mahayana had merged and taken root in Tibet. Let us now cross the Himalayas and look at China (third column). There are very definite ethical views articulated in Hinduism and Buddhism (which I have not mentioned), but I think it fair to say that for the Indian philosophers the centre of gravity is metaphysics. Classical Chinese philosophy is quite different. Though metaphysical issues are certainly present and debated, the centre of gravity revolves very much around ethical, social, and political concerns. Classical Chinese philosophy emerges from its own religious and literary tradition. Perhaps the book that exerted the greatest influence on it was the I Ching (‘Book of Changes’). This is a book, maybe first formulated about 1000 BCE, essentially for divination. A certain process is undertaken to produce a figure called a ‘hexagram.’ The I Ching provides a somewhat cryptic commentary on each hexagram, which is taken to guide future actions. The book is not a work of philosophy, but in it one finds the picture of

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reality as an ever-changing flux, with two basic aspects, yin and yang, which wax and wane reciprocally. This provides the metaphysical backdrop of subsequent philosophy in China. Two philosophies, in particular, emerge around the fifth century BCE. (It is a striking fact that this was a crucial time in the philosophical development of China, India, and Greece.) One of these was developed by undoubtedly the most influential Chinese philosopher of all time, Kong Fuzi (Confucius). For him, the state is a highly regimented place, ordered by customs and rites. Individuals flourish by knowing their place in society and sticking to the rules. The other philosophy was Daoism, associated with the name of Laozi, the probably fictional author of the Dao De Jing, and, a couple of hundred years later, Zhuangzi. The Daoists rejected the regulation of the Confucians, and thought that one should ‘go with the flow’ (that is, the flow inherent in the cosmos, the Dao). They are naturally thought of as political anarchists of sorts. As an active philosophy, Daoism ended around the turn of the Common Era, when it transmuted into a popular religion concerned to find the elixir of life—though Daoist philosophy continued to exert an important influence on subsequent Chinese thought. Confucianism, however, continued to develop via the thought of subsequent Confucians, such as Mengzi (Mencius), and critics such as Mozi (a utilitarian) and Han Fezi (a totalitarian). Out of this tempering emerges a Confucian view which is politically orthodox in China until the beginning of the twentieth century (though it underwent important developments later, in a form sometimes called Neo-Confucianism). Mahayana Buddhism spread from India northeast into central Asia and thence, via the Silk Route, into China. It started to arrive in China in the early years of the Common Era, and was mistaken for an esoteric form of Daoism. Good translations of the Buddhist texts into Chinese begin to appear in about the fifth century, and Chinese versions of Madhyamaka and Yogacara appear, but they do not last long. Distinctively Chinese forms of Buddhism then develop, the influence of Daoism playing a large role here. Several schools flourished (only a couple of which now survive). The most distinctive of these is Chan—or, as it is more commonly known, Zen, its Japanese name. It is often associated with the name of the legendary Indian Buddhist monk, Bodhidharma, who took up residence at Shaolin in China. Chan is a strongly anti-philosophical school: all language is in the end an obfuscation of reality, to be ditched. It also developed a very sophisticated philosophy to justify this—just one of the many paradoxes that Chan juggles. So much for a broad map of the terrain. I have painted the canvas in rather crude (and perhaps sometimes potentially misleading) brush strokes. Moreover, there is much in India and China that I have not mentioned, nor have I mentioned other countries, such as Tibet and Japan, where important developments took place. However, it at least provides a rough orientation to Oriental philosophical traditions.

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THE METAPHYSICS OF EMPTINESS I cannot hope to put much flesh on these bones here. But let me just discuss a couple of issues from Asian philosophy in more detail, illustrating the way in which views in Asian philosophy can be both similar to and different from those in the West. I shall take these from Buddhist philosophy, and start with an issue in metaphysics. Returning to the Buddhist notion of ‘emptiness’ mentioned earlier, what does it mean to say that something is empty in this sense? It does not mean that it does not exist. It means that it is empty of something: empty of selfexistence (svabhava). But what exactly does this mean? Let me try to explain by using an example from Western philosophy. Could the universe be exactly the same as it is, except that everything was moved two kilometres in one direction? Or, could the course of events in the cosmos be exactly the same, except that everything occurred exactly two minutes later? There was a famous debate in the seventeenth century between Newtonians and Leibnizians on these questions. The Newtonians held the answers to be ‘yes.’ For them, space and time were a sort of receptacle in which things and events were dumped, as it were. They would be there even if they were not occupied, or nothing happened. They exist in and of their own accord: they have self-existence. The Leibnizians, on the other hand, held the answers to be ‘no.’ Places in space and time are just defined by certain spatiotemporal relations. If everything was picked up and ‘moved two miles to the east,’ all the spatial relations would remain exactly the same, and so everything would be exactly at the same place as before. Similarly for the temporal case: if everything happened ‘two minutes later,’ all temporal relations would be preserved, and so all events would occur exactly at the same time as before. For the Leibnizians, spatial and temporal places have no selfexistence: they are simply loci in a network of relations: outwith the network, they are nothing. Mahayana Buddhists mount intriguing arguments—which there is not time to go into here—for the conclusion that everything is empty like this: nothing has self-existence. The view that some things are empty is certainly known in the West. As we have just seen, Leibnizians took space and time to be like this. But the view that everything is empty is not a familiar view. Generally speaking, Western metaphysics has been wedded to the view that reality is founded on substances, things that have self-existence. Thus, suppose that Leibnizians were right, and that points in space and time depend on objects and events. Maybe some of these objects themselves depend on other things. Thus, it might be thought, a chair depends for its existence on its parts—legs, back, and so forth. And maybe some of these things depend on other things. Thus, it might be thought, the back of the chair depends on the molecules which constitute it. But this regress cannot go on for ever. Sooner or later, we must ‘bottom out’ in things which do not depend on anything else, substances—or nothing, it might seem, would exist at all. There is a story about the Western philosopher Bertrand Russell giving a public lecture in London, in the early years of the twentieth century. He was

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lecturing on ancient cosmology, and part of his lecture went something like this: The Ancients wondered why the earth did not fall down. Obviously it must be because it rests on something. What could it rest on? Well, perhaps an elephant. After a while, it occurred to them to wonder why the elephant did not fall down. Presumably it had to rest on something. What could it rest on? Perhaps a tortoise. After a while, it occurred to them to wonder why the tortoise did not fall down. After further reflection, they decided . . . to change the subject.

At the end of Russell’s lecture a little old lady from the back of the audience came rushing up to him excitedly. ‘Mr. Russell, Mr. Russell,’ she said. ‘I’ve got it: it’s tortoises, tortoises, all the way down!’ We find the story funny, because it seems pretty clear that if one tortoise cannot support the earth, a whole infinite regress of tortoises won’t do the job either. The whole lot would fall down together. The urge to require substances is of a piece with this. If every x depends for its existence on a y, and y depends for its existence on a z, and so on for ever, there would be nothing that determined anything to exist. But if the Buddhist arguments are right, reality really is ‘tortoises all the way down.’ Things exist alright, but not in a grounded way. Or, to change the metaphor, things exist, but in ‘freefall.’ Clearly, we are at the start of an interesting philosophical discussion here, but let me change the subject . . . COMPASSION . . . to ethics (but still in the Buddhist tradition). The basic ideas of Buddhism were enunciated by the historical Buddha, Siddhartha Guatama (‘Buddha’ is an honorific, like ‘Christ,’ and it just means ‘the awakened one’). One of these is that suffering appears to be a fact of life. (Suffering is a standard translation of the Sanskrit ‘duhkha’; but it might better be translated as ‘unsatisfactoriness’ or ‘uneasiness.’) We are all going to get ill (often painfully), age, die, and lose loved ones, jobs, and other things we treasure. You’d have to say that it is hard to fault him on this! The Buddha also offered a diagnosis of this suffering. We suffer because we are attached to things, such as health, our job, and so forth. But everything is impermanent. (Again, it is hard to fault this claim!) And we suffer when the things we are attached to disappear. The attitude of attachment is itself predicated upon a failure to understand the way the world is. Impermanent, for a start, but more profoundly, we have an illusion that there is a self-existent self who can posses the things in question. But there is not. People are empty. The good news is that once one sees the world aright, the attachment and the suffering will disappear, and the Buddha gave a list of things that can be done towards this end—the Eightfold Path. Obviously there is much here to discuss, but let me just isolate the following: that suffering is a bad thing, and that it is good to get rid of it. (The view might itself be contentious, but let us grant it for this occasion.) Early Bud-

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dhism is very much oriented to each individual following the Path, and so ‘awakening.’ But Mahayana Buddhism broadens this. People should be concerned not just with stopping their own suffering, but with helping others to do the same. Thus, compassion becomes a central virtue of later Buddhism. Compassion, of course, is a moral virtue well known to Western philosophy, though not, perhaps, a major one, but Buddhist philosophy has a very distinctive take on it, and especially its ground. Compassion is acting in such a way as to get rid of, or at least minimise, suffering. In this sense, one can obviously have compassion for oneself. Why should one? That seems like a rather silly question. We all go to the dentist if we have a toothache. Fair enough. But why should I be compassionate to other people? Come back to emptiness. What I am is defined by my place in a network of relations, and especially causal relations, and especially the relations between me and others: my parents, my teachers, my friends, my children. We are all, in fact, defined by this web of interconnections. The thought is illustrated by what I think is one of the most beautiful metaphors in the Buddhist literature, that of the Net of Indra. (And though Indra is an Indian god, the metaphor is, in fact, found only in Chinese Buddhism.) Indra is an all-powerful god. He has hung a net (like a fishing net) through all space. At every join in the net, he has hung a brightly polished jewel. Each jewel, being brightly polished, reflects every other jewel. But look closer. Jewel x reflects jewel y, but jewel y reflects jewel x, so one thing reflected in jewel x is jewel y reflecting jewel x. And of course, that is itself reflected in jewel y, which is in turn reflected . . . and so on. In the same way, if you place two mirrors opposite each another, and look into one of them, you will see each reflected in the other to infinity. In this metaphor, the jewels are to be thought of as objects in phenomenal reality. And the reflection to infinity illustrates the way in which each object depends on all other objects. Indeed, each object encodes all other objects; its very being is defined by this encoding. (In this way, the objects are not like the jewels in the metaphor, which are naturally thought of as having existence independent of each other.) Now, come back to compassion, and apply this interdependence to people. I am not a self-standing entity. (No man is an island.) My very being encodes all others. There is no sense in which I can detach myself from the being of others. In particular, then, I cannot hope simply to get rid of my own suffering. While there is any suffering around, this will be part of me (much as I may fail to realise this). The ground for compassion towards others is therefore, in the end, no different from the ground for compassion towards myself. Thus, in Buddhist thought, compassion has a very distinctive ground, of a kind unfamiliar to Western ethics. CONCLUSION Of course, there is much here to be thought about and discussed too. All I have tried to do in both of the examples I have given is to open up discussions. That is, indeed, one of the most important things that an engagement

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with Asian philosophical traditions can do for Western philosophy. I do not suggest that Western philosophers will find definitive answers to questions with which they have struggled for over two millennia by looking East—any more that I would suggest that philosophers from Asian traditions will find definitive answers to the questions with which they have struggled for over two millennia by looking West. Nor do I wish to suggest that all Western philosophers should take up the study of Asian philosophers—any more than I would suggest that they take up the study of Greek philosophy, or logic, or aesthetics, or whatever. The point is simply that those Western philosophers who do make the effort to look beyond the confines of that with which they are familiar will be richly rewarded by doing so. That is what an increasing number of Western philosophers are finding as they realise that they, like I, have known only part of the city.

Chapter Nineteen

Logic in Australasia Greg Restall

Ever since the 1960s, philosophical logic has played an important part in the shaping of philosophy in Australasia, and Australasian work in philosophical logic has played its part in research in the area. In this chapter I will introduce and assess this influence, concentrating on two major themes in Australasian philosophical logic, modal logic and paraconsistent logic. THE DISCIPLINE OF LOGIC To set the scene, I must say a little about logic as a discipline, for it does not find itself wholly inside the academic discipline of philosophy. Just as logic has a long history, reaching back to the work of Aristotle, it also now has a very wide intellectual geography. The discipline finds a home in philosophy, and philosophical logic is the theme of this chapter. However, logicians find a home also among mathematicians, computer scientists, and also linguists, cognitive scientists, and engineers. As Robert K. Meyer (of the Australian National University [ANU]) often said, logic is the Poland of the sciences. It has very many large neighbours, who sometimes harbour benign interest, and sometimes wish to colonise the territory for its own. The history of academic work in logic in Australasia, then, covers not only philosophy, but also these other fields. Though out of the scope of this chapter, there is much interesting work in logic done in other disciplines in Australasia, from the mathematical logic of Martin Bunder (Wollongong), John Crossley (Monash), and Greg Hjorth (Melbourne), the mathematical analysis of modal and temporal logic of Rob Goldblatt (Wellington) and Mark Reynolds (Western Australia), the knowledge representation of Norman Foo (University of New South Wales [UNSW]/Sydney), complexity theory of Christian Calude (Auckland), the digital systems of Jen Davoren (Melbourne), and the implementation of proof systems and model generation of John Slaney (ANU) and Rajeev Goré (ANU). Work in logic in Australasia 223

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is diverse and thriving. Regular conferences and collaborations bring various subgroupings of these researchers together, frequently across disciplinary boundaries. In some rare cases, including at present at Melbourne, there is also collaborative and interdisciplinary teaching of logic to undergraduate students. However, since philosophical logic is our theme, I will not touch further on the wider interdisciplinary context. Instead, let us focus on the home of logic in philosophy in Australasia. Genuine research in logic in Australasia commenced in the 1960s with Len Goddard and Richard Routley, both then the University of New England (UNE). They taught a masters program in logic, of whom Ross Brady (La Trobe), Rod Girle (first Queensland, later Auckland), and Malcolm Rennie (first Auckland, then Queensland, and later, ANU) are the most notable graduates. In 1964 a logic conference was held at UNE, after which the Australasian Association for Logic (AAL) was inaugurated, and which held its first regular conference 1966: AAL conferences have been held regularly in Australian and New Zealand since then. While the association is interdisciplinary in membership and orientation, it is fair to say that its membership is primarily from among the philosophical community. As a glance at the abstracts of presentations given AAL conferences shows, 1 research in logic in Australasia is broad and varied. However, noticeable themes emerge: I will pick out just two to concentrate on here (1) work in modal logic, from the pioneering New Zealanders George Hughes and Max Cresswell (Wellington), through work on the modal logic of actuality by Hazen (Melbourne) and the two-dimensional modal logic of Humberstone (Monash); and (2) work in non-classical (relevant and paraconsistent) logic, through the work of Richard Routley (later named Richard Sylvan), Robert K. Meyer (ANU), and Graham Priest (Western Australia, then Queensland, then Melbourne), and their collaborators and students. These themes do not exhaust the work of philosophical logic in Australasia, but they will enable us to understand its impact and influence both inside Australasian philosophy and in the discipline of philosophical logic worldwide. We will consider these themes in turn, bookending the discussion with considerations of other currents in philosophical logic in Australasia, and closing with an evaluation of what distinctive features we can discern considering an ‘Australasian approach’ to philosophical logic. POSSIBILITY AND ACTUALITY: MODAL LOGIC Before introducing the distinctive contributions of Australasians to the study of modal logic, I must take some steps back to introduce the core concepts. One way to introduce modal logic is to consider the core logical notions of identity and difference. Identity and difference are intimately bound up with our conceptions of what it is for something to be a thing, and therefore, how we conceive of the world around us. We use the concepts of identity and difference when we count. To say that there are at least two cows in the top paddock is to say that there is a cow in the top paddock and that there is a cow in the top paddock that is not the same as that other one. That ‘not the

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same’ is ‘not identical to’ or ‘differs from.’ Notice that this works even if we don’t have names for the things in question (we can judge that there are three goldfish in the bowl even when we can’t tell them apart), and even in the infuriating case where we have names but we give two things the same name. John Howard (the former prime minister) and John Howard (the actor) are two people, not one. Sometimes identity and difference of things is a tricky matter: ‘Phosphorus’ is the Ancient Greek name for the morning star: that star that is the last to fade away as the sun rises. ‘Hesperus’ is the name for the evening star: that star that is the first to appear as the sun sets. In fact, they’re both the same thing: they’re both the planet Venus, which is quite close to Earth, and has cloud cover which means it reflects a lot of light and is often the brightest small object in the night sky. Now, it was not a matter of reason alone that could convince an observer that Hesperus is the same thing as Phosphorus. Only astronomical observations and calculations (together with a bit of theory about what planets are) could do that. We can be ignorant of facts about identity. We can get things wrong when we count, not just by making slips of the finger or memory as we point and number things off, but because we don’t truly understand what is what. But consider how to count properties instead of things. Philosophers have often wondered not just about things—whether everyday things like cows and planets, or more controversial things like minds, pains, numbers, species, dispositions, and absences—philosophers have also wondered about the nature of properties. Take the property of being a feeling. Philosophers argue about what sort of property this is. What is it for something to be a feeling? Is a feeling located in the head? In the central nervous system? In what is felt? Australian philosophy is known (in the work of J. J. C. Smart and David Armstrong) as robustly materialist. For the materialist, whatever the property of being a feeling is, it is a material property, possessed by the brain or body. But this is a thesis about the identity of a property: it’s what’s known as a property-property identity thesis, identifying one property (of being a feeling) with another (say, with being a particular kind of brain state). If this is a genuine identity, then we should say that anything at all that is a feeling is a kind of state of the brain. But we can ask this question in reverse. What would show us that the property of being feeling wasn’t identical to being the property of a brain state? One way philosophers have attempted to show this is by way of ‘thought experiments’—by arguing that it could be possible that there be a creature that had no brain states, that yet had feelings, mediated by some other mechanism. We need not go into the details of how a thought experiment might work, for the very idea of a thought experiment is enough to introduce modal logic. For a thought experiment like this is only convincing if one can conclude that it is possible that this creature possess a feeling without possessing a brain state of the required kind. When convinced by this thought experiment you are distinguishing two concepts by finding a scenario in which one applies and the other doesn’t. The crucial factor is not that the scenario is plausible, likely, or realistic. However, it has to be possible, at least in the sense of being a coherent ‘way things could have gone.’ With such a scenario—what we may call a ‘possible world’—we have the grounds to conclude that it is

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possible that something be a feeling without being a brain state, and hence that the two properties are not identical. So, to take a prosaic example: the property of being an Australian prime minister is not the same as the property of being a member of the Liberal party because there are very many people who have been Australian prime ministers who aren’t Liberals. On the other hand, if you look at the property of being an Australian prime minister and the property of being a male Australian prime minister, they’ve been exemplified in exactly the same way through history so far. 2 Everyone who’s been an Australian prime minister for the time we have had them has been a male Australian prime minister, and vice versa. So you can’t tell that these two properties are different, if they really are, just by looking at who has actually exemplified them. Now clearly, things don’t have to always be like this. You could imagine a slightly different way that things could have gone, such that a woman has been an Australian Prime Minister. The mere fact that this is a possibility tells us that the property of being an Australian prime minister is not the same as the property of being a male Australian prime minister. And this is a way of thinking that has become systematic in philosophy, that people have thought about not only how things are but how things could have been had things been different. Now this technology of things being differently in different possible circumstances (possible worlds) has been used by many philosophers, to understand the structure of what we can say about possibility and necessity. We now start taking these different circumstances where things could be different very seriously, and we’ll say that something is necessary, something has got to be the case if it’s true in each of these different possible worlds and it’s merely possible if it is true in at least one possible world. This kind of structure is studied in the discipline of modal logic, so called because we can think of possibility and necessity as modes of truth, respectively weaker than and stronger than bare truth. This work connects with considerations of time and tense, as modifiers such as ‘always,’ ‘at some future time,’ and ‘sometime in the past’ have similar logical structures to the modalities of necessity and possibility. We can conceive of necessity and possibility as ranging across different possible scenarios or worlds; temporal modifiers range in a similar way across different moments or times. The study of modal and temporal logic flowered from the middle of the twentieth century, and Australasians have played their part. At the beginnings of the field, it was dominated by New Zealanders—first Arthur Prior’s work from the 1950s (at Canterbury, then taking up a chair at Manchester in 1956, then Oxford from 1966), then in the work of George Hughes and Max Cresswell (Wellington), whose textbook An Introduction to Modal Logic (1968) provided the means for generations of students to learn modal logic. The later arrival of Krister Segerberg in Auckland meant that for the latter part of the twentieth century, New Zealand was a hotbed of work in this area. It took some time for work in modal logic to find a place in philosophy departments in Australia. However, with the arrival of Lloyd Humberstone at Monash University in 1975 and Allen Hazen at Melbourne in 1983, research in modal logic not only found its place in Australia, but this research found a home in wider work in philosophy as well.

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To explain the insight in Hazen and Humberstone’s work, consider this. I eat ice cream. My favourite ice cream is Homer Hudson Chocolate Rock. One thing that I console myself with, after having eaten rather more ice cream than I should, is this fact: that I could have eaten even more ice cream than I actually did. At least I showed a certain amount of restraint. In one possible world (one which describes how things have actually gone), I have eaten one small tub of ice cream. In some other possible world, I have eaten three tubs. In possible world 1, I am excessive. In possible world 2, I am gluttonous. From the perspective of world 1, ‘I ate one tub of ice cream’ is true; from the perspective of world 2, ‘I ate three tubs of ice cream’ is true. Furthermore, from world 1, we can say ‘I ate one tub, but I could have eaten three,’ and from world 2, I can say ‘I ate three tubs, but I could have eaten one.’ What is true is relativised to a possible world. This much is standard modal logic. Notice, however, there is nothing yet in this picture that helps us understand my consoling thought: ‘I could have eaten more than I actually did.’ We didn’t think of this as saying ‘I could have eaten more than one tub.’ That much is straightforwardly true. From the point of view of world 2, I did eat more than one tub. But from the point of view of world 2, did I eat more than I actually did? If world 2 is what is what happens, then what I actually ate is three tubs not one. What we need is some way to figure out—from the perspective of world 2—that world 2 is not what is actually the case, but merely what could have been the case. This is where Allen Hazen’s work in modal logic begins: he has studied modal logics with actuality. The simplest way to conceive of the picture is to contrast a paper street directory with a shop directory in a shopping centre. In the paper street directory, we see many different locations, but nothing distinguishes the one where you are. A directory at a location in a shopping centre shows not only the different locations in that centre, but also where you are as you look at the

Figure 19.1.

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directory. If we expand the picture just a little, flagging world 1 with the ‘@’ sign, meaning ‘you are here,’ then we can reason as follows: If we start at world 1, we should say that from the point of view of world 1, what I ate is one tub. Then there is another possible circumstance where I ate three. In that circumstance I ate more than I actually ate, because to say that something actually happened is to refer back to the actual world: the world marked with ‘@’ in the picture. In hypothetical circumstance, world 2, the statement ‘I ate three tubs’ is true, because that’s how things go there, but the statement ‘I actually ate three tubs’ is false, because to see what actually happens, you need to go and look at the actual circumstance, rather than remain in the hypothetical alternative. And it turns out, when you modify the picture of possibles to keep this in mind, it answers these kinds of puzzles and the picture is a very nice one. But this picture is incomplete. Consider what we have learned as astronomers have changed their mind on how we should use the word ‘planet.’ Going with the astronomers’ official definition, it’s actually the case that there are eight planets in the solar system. I used to think that there were nine, but we now learn that we have misclassified Pluto as a planet and there are actually eight planets. Now of course ‘there are nine planets’ could have been true. In fact, most of us thought that this was true. However, there are at least two different senses we could mean ‘could have’ here. One is that we could have meant

Figure 19.2.

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something different by the word ‘planet,’ but we don’t need to mean that. What we could mean is that had the history of solar system gone differently, had there been a little bit more matter in between Mars and Jupiter, so that the material now in the asteroid belt had actually coalesced into a planet, instead of just remaining lots of little asteroids, then there would have been nine planets; there would have been another rocky planet in between Mars and Jupiter. And had something really terrible happened and split Jupiter into two bits which had slightly knocked themselves out of orbit so that there were two planets about the size of Uranus or Neptune instead of one planet the size of Jupiter, had that happened, then there might have been ten planets in our solar system, and so on. These possible scenarios are the kinds of things we philosophers have in mind as possible worlds. Now those are different possibilities, but what’s actually the case scientists tell us, and I have no reason to doubt them, is that there are really eight planets. Now think back to the morning star and the evening star: Hesperus and Phosphorus. What’s actually the case is that Hesperus, that planet, is identical to Phosphorus, they’re the same planet. Now imagine, had there been nine planets, had the stuff between Mars and Jupiter coalesced into a planet, would Hesperus still be Phosphorus? The answer is yes, Hesperus would still be Phosphorus because what’s Hesperus? Hesperus is that planet there—imagine we’re outside in the early evening, pointing at Venus. What’s Phosphorus? It’s the planet right there—imagine that we’re outside in the early morning pointing at Venus. When I’m asking ‘Is Hesperus Phosphorus?’ I’m asking about that planet. Is it identical to itself? The answer is, yes. Could the world have gone differently so that this planet were not identical to itself? No. There’s no possible world in which that heavenly body (the one we pointed to, twice) was not identical to itself. But there’s another sense in which, of course, the sentence ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ could have turned out to be false: it may well have been for all we knew, consistent with everything that appeared to us, that the planet that we saw first thing in the evening was Venus and the planet that we saw last thing as the sun was rising was Jupiter instead. So now I’m not asking of some planet, ‘is it identical to itself,’ but instead, I am asking whether, for all the evidence that we had at the time, was this something that would have been consistent with the way we were using the words ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus.’ Could the environment have been such that we were using the words ‘Hesperus’ and ‘Phosphorus’ to refer to different things. If that were the case, then there is a sense in which ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ could have turned out to be false. This means that variation of possibility can take two different dimensions: we can think of possible worlds as alternatives to the way things are in two different ways. We can think of them as alternative histories, in which we apply the concepts with the ‘meanings’ they really have. In this sense, there seems to be no possible world in which Hesperus is not Phosphorus. On the other hand, we could think of them as alternative bodies of evidence, or alternative contexts in which we could have learned our words or our concepts. In this sense, there is an alternative circumstance with respect to which ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ is false. We can say that ‘Hesperus is Phosphorus’ is metaphysically necessary (true in every alternative circumstance) but epis-

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temically contingent (false in some epistemic possibility). Clarifying these distinctions and elucidating the logic of these two different notions of necessity and possibility was the work of Martin Davies (Oxford; for some time at the ANU) and Lloyd Humberstone (Monash). This was not only a great insight into the nature of the concepts of possibility and necessity, it also had far-reaching applications into metaphysics and other areas of philosophy: to take one example near to the heart of Australian philosophy, these distinctions apply to topics such as the philosophy of mind. Different positions in the philosophy of mind are actually characterised as identity statements. Is the state of being in pain identical to the state of neurons firing in a particular way? In one sense, you wouldn’t think so, because you’re not going to get to this conclusion just by introspecting, examining what the concept of pain is and the concept of a neural firing is, even the concept of a neural firing in a particular way that does things to the limbic system and so on. You might get connections between these things but you’re not going to get there by examining the concepts—or so many of us think. But that’s just like saying you’re not going to get the fact that Hesperus is identical to Phosphorus just by examining the concepts of Hesperus and Phosphorus, you’ve got to go out and do a bit of astronomy. Well, various people say you’ve got to go out and do a little bit of cognitive science and a little bit of phenomenology and a little bit of other things to do the connections. But once you do that, perhaps you may be able to conclude that as a matter of identity, a pain is a neural firing, even though that’s something that we have had to learn empirically. Furthermore, this does not mean that the concept ‘pain’ is identical to the concept ‘neural firing of kind P’ (for some characterisation of neural findings that constitute pains), for though they might agree in application in any different circumstance considered as a hypothetical possibility, they do not need to agree in all alternative epistemic circumstances. The routes by which we learn the concept pain and the concepts of neural firings of kind P may well differ (from the ‘inside’ and from the ‘outside’ as it were), though the targets may (on this story, at least) end up at the same place. And so, we’ve got many philosophers in Australia such as Frank Jackson (Monash, ANU, and now La Trobe), David Chalmers (ANU), John Bigelow (Monash), and Laura Schroeter (first Monash, then Melbourne) who are examining the use of this kind of two-dimensional logic to analyse these kinds of questions. How can we characterise possibility, necessity, identity, and meaning? Two-dimensional modal logic is an attempt to provide a framework for this kind of discussion. PARACONSISTENCY AND RELEVANCE: NON-CLASSICAL LOGIC Possible worlds can be very, strange. There are possible worlds in which kangaroos have no tails, there are possible worlds in which swans are blue,

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there are possible worlds in which there are ten planets in the solar system, there are possible worlds in which there’s a Greens prime minister at the moment. Possible worlds can be very strange things indeed. But maybe possible worlds not quite strange enough. Maybe there aren’t enough different circumstances to make as many discriminations as we would like. For example, when I was talking about the identity and difference of properties we discriminated between properties when a thing could bear one of the properties without the other. We don’t demand that there be anything that has the one without the other, we just ask if there could be. But are there pairs of properties, which as a matter of necessity, if you have one you have the other, but which we recognise as different properties? Consider the following pairs of properties: . . . is a triangle with each interior angle the same. . . . is a triangle with each side the same length. As a matter of geometrical necessity, if a triangle has interior angles the same, its sides are the same, and vice versa. Equiangular triangles are equilateral. Are the properties of being an equiangular triangle and being an equilateral triangle the same? To pick another example, consider the properties: . . . being a prime minister of Australia. . . . being a prime minister of Australia and being such that 2 + 2 = 4. It seems that Kevin Rudd, John Howard, Paul Keating, and so on are equally good candidates for both of these properties. Nothing could bear the one without bearing the other, given that it is necessary that 2 + 2 = 4. However, in each case, some have wanted to say that there is something different said when we say that a triangle is equiangular than when we say that it is equilateral: that to say ‘Kevin Rudd is PM and 2 + 2 = 4’ is to say something more than merely to say ‘Kevin Rudd is PM,’ even though they are true in exactly the same circumstances. There is a sense in which two claims, though impossible to pare apart in any different circumstances, nevertheless have different subject matters. An account of logic respecting relevance is needed to distinguish them. Philosophical logic in Australia is known for tackling these issues too. Ever since Routley (a New Zealander) commenced work in relevant logic in the early 1970s, to be joined by Robert Meyer at the ANU in the middle of the 1970s, the centre of gravity of work in relevant logic moved from the United States, where it started with the work of Anderson, Belnap, and Dunn, to the southern hemisphere, and especially, the ANU. A succession of students of Routley and Meyer, including Ross Brady (La Trobe), Michael McRobbie (ANU, then Indiana), Paul Thistlewaite (ANU), Jacques Riche (Leuven), André Fuhrmann (ANU, Konstanz, Sao Paolo, and now Hamburg), Errol Martin (Canberra), John Slaney (ANU), and Dominic Hyde (Queensland), together with research fellows, visitors, and collaborators such as Nuel Belnap (Pittsburgh), J. Michael Dunn (Indiana), Stephen Read (St. Andrews), Edwin Mares (ANU, McMaster, then Wellington), Rod Girle (Queensland, ANU, then Auckland) and Greg Restall (ANU, Macquarie, then Melbourne) worked on relevant logic and related issues in Canberra

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through the 1970s to the mid-1990s. This work took many and varied forms. Routley and Meyer were most famous for their ‘semantics’ for relevant logics, which related talk of relevant implication and consequence to ‘worlds’ in a way analogous to the way that possible worlds can model the logic of possibility and necessity. The crucial feature of ‘worlds’ in a semantics for relevant logics is that they can fail to be consistent and complete scenarios representing a coherent possibility. To distinguish the property of being an Australian PM from the property of being an Australian PM such that 2 + 2 = 4, they would use a scenario in which Kevin Rudd (say) is PM, but in which 2 + 2 = 4 would fail to be true. More radical even than that, relevantists would want to say that the arguments from p to either q or not-q and from p and not-p to q both ought to fail, on the grounds of relevance: in each case, the premise has nothing to do with the conclusion. For this, Routley and Meyer would have us consider circumstances in which one piece of information p holds, but that the seeming tautology either q or not-q fails, and most drastic of all, they would take there to be a circumstance in which the self-contradictory statement p and not-p holds, but in which the unrelated statement q fails to hold. Routley and Meyer’s vision of the logic of relevance is one which grounds relevance on a family of ‘worlds’ or better ‘scenarios’ or ‘set-ups’ which may be incomplete (deciding neither q nor not-q) and inconsistent (taking both p and not-p to be true). This analysis of the logic of relevance is well understood throughout the logical community, but it is perhaps salient that it was in Australian soil that these radical ideas most took hold and were taken seriously and thoroughly investigated. Since the first flush of these ideas in the 1970s and the radical impressions made by the founders, the current state of play in relevant logic is perhaps more measured and conservative. Recent work by Mares and by Restall has brought work in relevant logic in close connection with other traditions in information theory and ‘situation semantics.’ Though developed in isolation from much of the rest of the world, these ideas are now a part of the great tradition of modal and so-called ‘substructural’ logics. However, relevant logics are, in one important sense, the less radical sibling in the family of non-classical logics studied in Australia. The relevantist says that the argument from the contradictory premise p and not-p to the conclusion q can break down on grounds of relevance. The fact that the premise is never true does not mean that the conclusion follows: one way to understand this is to say that there is an ‘impossible scenario’ in which p and not-p is true, but q is not. Relevant logics are, therefore, paraconsistent. They do not take inconsistent information to be disabling. Relevantists do not take inconsistencies to be possible, but they at least allow that we can tell stories about such things, and in the telling of those stories the meanings of what we’re saying doesn’t break down irreparably, we can still tell what the things are about. We can still apply the concepts to those things in these inconsistent scenarios. However, not all paraconsistentists are paraconsistentists on the

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grounds of relevance. Some Australian logicians are famous for taking a harder line on contradictions. Instead of thinking of these inconsistent scenarios as merely hypothetical, some would have us think of them as possible, and indeed that some inconsistent scenarios are the way things actually are. This is the paraconsistency of the dialetheist, one who takes some contradictory statements to be true. Dialetheism is the radical strand of Australasian philosophical logic. We can introduce dialetheism by way of the paradoxes. Consider the Liar Paradox: This very statement is not true. Reasoning about this statement, if it is true, then what it says, goes. But what it says is that it’s not true, so if it’s true, it’s not true. That must mean that it isn’t true. But then, what it says, goes: it is true. QED. The liar statement is true, and it isn’t. Or so says the dialetheist. The traditional response to this reasoning is to point to some principle I have used somewhere, and blame that. Frankly speaking, there is no consensus on where we should point the finger of blame. It is not called the Liar Paradox for nothing. The dialetheist takes the more radical position, to say that this reasoning is all okay as it stands, and that we should simply accept the conclusion. This is a case where the contradictory pair of statements ‘the liar statement is true’ and ‘the liar statement is not true’ are both true. Now, this requires a revision of our traditional understanding of how logic works, for it is nothing if not widely assumed that if a statement is true, then its negation is not, and that there is no circumstance in which a statement and its negation are both true. Here, the connection with relevant logic comes into the fore. Dialetheists have willing partners in relevantists, who agree that we should consider circumstances in which inconsistencies hold. Relevant logics have helped provide a coherent understanding of how inconsistent scenarios are to be modelled: relevantists and dialetheists differ only on whether we are to think of any of these circumstances as the way things are. Graham Priest (UWA, then Queensland, then Melbourne) is Australasia’s—indeed, the world’s—most prominent dialetheist, and his students and colleagues, Chris Mortensen (Adelaide), Dominic Hyde (ANU, then Queensland), Mark Colyvan (ANU, Tasmania, Queensland, then Sydney), Koji Tanaka (Queensland, then Macquarie, then Auckland), J. C. Beall (Tasmania, then Connecticut), have applied dialethic ideas to issues of mathematics, semantics, vagueness, and ontology. In this research, philosophical logicians undertake (at least, collectively) a dual task. The technical part of the exercise is to develop and articulate the logical theory: this part of the work is mathematical and precise—though it is motivated by concerns in philosophy. The discursive and interpretive aspect of the work is to defend such accounts of things, and to tell a story about what it might mean. In the case of dialetheism, this dual task has been doubly urgent, because of the number of ‘incredulous stares’ from colleagues, both friendly and not-so-friendly, who, under-

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standably, take the doctrine of the possibility of true contradictions to be literally unbelievable. Priest’s work, especially, views the inconsistencies arriving from the paradoxes as not merely a trivial, technical, or ‘housekeeping’ matter at the outlying edges of our concepts. For Priest, the paradoxes come from the totalizing nature of our concepts: it comes from applying our concepts to their limits. The picture goes like this: For many of our concepts, there is a field Ω of application: truth applies to statements, concepts to objects, sets are members of sets, and so forth. In many cases we have a rule δ where for any subset X of that field, Ω, we are able to find a thing δ(X) which is outside the original set X, but which is inside the field Ω. For example, given a set X of numbers, we can ask for the least number greater than all of them. That is a number (at least, it is if we continue counting into the infinite). We then ask, what about applying δ to the collection Ω of all the numbers? It’s a number, but it’s bigger than all the numbers! Priest’s dialetheist argues that we have a true contradiction here: δ(Ω) is both bigger than all the numbers and is one of the numbers. It is not our place to assess the strength or otherwise of the argument here. 3 Suffice to say the inclosure schema provides a fruitful and interesting view not only of mathematical and semantic paradoxes, but also of other totalising phenomena from early Greek philosophy to poststructuralist paradoxes of the late twentieth century. Dialetheism provides a unique analysis of inconsistent boundaries at the limits of thought.

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OTHER STREAMS I have not been able to touch on other important streams in philosophical logic in Australasia: I must only mention other highlights here. In the 1970s and 1980s the teaching of logic both in universities and in schools in Queensland was revolutionised in the work of Rod Girle. Logic formed a part of the high-school curriculum in Queensland in the 1980s, and Girle’s teaching methods have brought logic to classes of hundreds and thousands each year, at Queensland, and now at the University of Auckland. The teaching of logic in Australasia has long been a matter not only of practice but also critical reflection: Rod Girle founded the Australian Logic Teachers’ Journal, which ran during the 1970s and 1980s, and Timothy van Gelder (Melbourne) brought a reflective practice to the teaching of critical thinking: he researched the effectiveness of teaching methods in critical thinking courses, and has shown that structured argument mapping techniques significantly improve students’ ability to analyse and evaluate arguments. The research community in philosophical logic Australasia has regularly been enriched by outsiders coming to visit and to stay: Hazen, Humberstone, Mares, Meyer, Priest, and Segerberg all came to Australia from elsewhere. Pavel Tichy (Otago) and Stan Surma (Auckland) also came to Australasia from Europe, enriching our community with expertise in transparent intensional logic and consequence relations, respectively. More recently, Jeremy Seligman (Auckland) came from the United Kingdom, via the United States, bringing with him expertise on situation theory and hybrid logics. In the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, Australia and New Zealand has seen more home-grown expertise in logic, but migration both into Australasia and out will continue to enrich and cross-fertilise philosophical logic and its surrounding disciplines. THE WAY WE DO LOGIC I will conclude by considering the way Australasians do philosophical logic. As with other aspects of Australasian life, we are influenced by our isolation from the rest of the world. The centres of power and influence of the Englishspeaking academic world are far-enough away for radical ideas to take root here, without the watching eyes of any orthodoxy. Prior’s work in modal and temporal logic was a strongly minority interest during the mid-1950s, and it was at the forefront of the development of these ideas which are now completely mainstream in philosophy in the English-speaking world today. Relevant logic started its life in the work of Anderson and Belnap in the United States, but it never reached a critical mass and dominated an environment in any place other than Australia in the 1970s and 1980s. Paraconsistent logic (and to a lesser extent, dialetheism) is now widespread, but centres of research are to be found in Australia, Canada, Brazil, Belgium, and Italy: each of which is, to put it politely, outside the major U.S./UK axis of English-

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speaking philosophy. Our isolation provides room for idiosyncratic theorising to flourish, without the kind of uniformity imposed by a conservative orthodoxy. But rebelling against orthodoxy for its own sake is not much of a virtue. 4 The virtue, it seems to me, in the Australasian approach to philosophical logic is the way that we have viewed logic itself. In a very important sense, the idea is not a new one: it goes back to Immanuel Kant’s view of logic as a mere account of the form or structure of thought. This is both very humbling and inspiring. The view is humbling because we don’t get to examine what particular thoughts are about, but merely their general form or structure, and it is inspiring because when we do logic we are giving an account of the structure and form of thought as such. Different logical theories in the tradition of modal, relevant, and paraconsistent logics are providing tools for understanding the kinds of things we can say and can think—we are giving theories of the very stuff of our thought and talk. Looking back on our work in logic over the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, you can see that our accounts of the forms of the things that we can say are very different from Aristotle’s. Aristotle’s logic subsumes judgement into the subject–predicate form: all footballers are bipeds, or Socrates is a footballer. In our work in philosophical logic we have an account of logical structure in opposition to Aristotle's: claims of possibility and necessity have their place and they have a different logical structure to other kinds of claims. Paraconsistentists and dialetheists proffer a different account of what we are doing when we negate or deny. When you develop a logical theory you are sketching out a map and proffering it as a way of viewing the landscape of what we can say and think. When logic is done well, that is a large and roomy map, which can serve as a place where different positions and theories and accounts can find their home, and which gives us illuminating ways to understand relationships between different claims and theories, and provides ways to see interconnections where we couldn’t before. If you think of logic like that, then you see it as opening up spaces for consideration and bringing new possibilities or interpretations to mind: The caricature of logic is that it is the kind of thing which constrains debate, by merely drawing out the inexorable conclusions which follow inevitably from the premises we have granted. But logic is never just like that because logic is not only driving the inexorable conclusions where the person doesn’t necessarily want them to lead, logic isn’t just about what arguments are good, it’s also about what arguments are bad, and how conclusions don’t have to follow because now we understand that there are different possibilities we may have not previously considered. Even more helpfully, accounts of logic provide us with new ways to say things, new understanding of what we have already said and thought, and a new sense of possibilities ahead. If the past is anything like the future, or even if it is radically different, there is reason to hope that philosophical logic in Australasia will play its role in charting out some of those possibilities.

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NOTES 1. These abstracts are found in issues of the Journal of Symbolic Logic from 1967 to 1993, and then in the Bulletin of Symbolic Logic from 1994 to the present day. 2. However, happily, since this text was first written, Julia Gillard has served as acting prime minister while the serving Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was away from Australia. (Editors’ note: In June 2010, after this chapter had been written, Julia Gillard did of course become Australia’s first female prime minister.) 3. I haven’t even given all the argument: the most interesting part of the argument is Priest’s defence of the claim both that δ(X) is always larger than the numbers in X, and that δ(Ω) is itself a number. 4. Though many of us have been known to quote Mao’s dictum to ‘let a thousand flowers bloom, and a thousand schools of thought contend’ approvingly. Hopefully the outcome is not to eliminate wrong-thinking opponents when someone has the power to do so.

Chapter Twenty

The Analytic/Continental Divide 1: A Contretemps? Jack Reynolds

In the late 1980s, U.S. economist Jeremy Rifkin claimed that a battle was brewing over the politics of time because he felt that the pivotal issue of the twenty-first century would be the question of time and who controlled it (Rifkin 1987). I want to suggest that a battle over the politics of time is also what is at stake in the differences between so-called analytic and Continental philosophies. Of course, judging purely by the names bestowed upon them, the distinction between analytic and Continental philosophy is rather confused. It simultaneously invokes both a method—analysis—and a geographical location—Continental Europe. Even on its own terms, the geographical determination is clearly inadequate, since most so-called Continental philosophy is currently practiced in the United States, and Europeans (especially Germans and Austrians) were fundamental to the emergence and development of early analytic philosophy. Despite these definitional problems, however, I think Bernard Williams (1985) and Hilary Putnam (1997: 203) are wrong to conclude that it is a distinction without a difference, and that we are all just doing philosophy with no need for any preceding ‘adjective’ like Continental or analytic. In what follows, I will argue that very different philosophies of time, and associated methodological techniques, serve to define representatives of each of these groups and also to guard against their potential interlocutors. To begin with, then, let me offer a patchy history of philosophy of time in the early twentieth century, the period in which the idea of a ‘divide’ between two ways of doing philosophy became entrenched. Primarily through the work of John McTaggart, Bertrand Russell, Edmund Husserl, and Henri Bergson, and then slightly later in the work of the logical positivists (especially Rudolph Carnap and Hans Reichenbach) and Martin Heidegger, time came to the forefront of both philosophical attention and the broader social milieu as these philosophical accounts of time were forced into an engagement with physics, particularly Einstein’s theory of relativity. Einstein 239

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showed, firstly, that time is relative, in that if one travels at close to the speed of light away from their friend, their time will pass considerably slower compared to their friend who is still ‘stationary’ on Earth. This might seem to call into question the notion of objective or absolute time, but given other related developments in physics, particularly in quantum mechanics, it actually led to the generally accepted idea (by most analytic philosophers and physicists) that rather than time and space being separable we need to think of a single space-time continuum (or ‘block’) with four-dimensions, of which time is a one-dimensional sub-space. Such a position entails a radical questioning of any primacy accorded to the ‘now,’ perhaps best exemplified by the philosophical position termed ‘presentism,’ where only the present is thought to be ontologically real, and the past and the future are not—that is, since we can’t point to Socrates anywhere, he is not real. 2 In fact, it is usually accepted that four-dimensionalism in physics means that our experience of the ‘now’ (the ‘immediate present’) and the notion of temporal becoming are but subjectively compelling illusions. This constitutes quite a challenge to both commonsense conceptions of time and our everyday experience of time. I will return to the question of whether such reductionism is necessary towards the end of the chapter, but the Continental ‘temporal turn’ reached its ‘tipping point’ with the work of Bergson, Husserl, and Heidegger. Arguments against any ontological privilege accorded to the ‘now’ and any conception of time based on a succession of instants were also raised by these philosophers, but generally their reflections on time were not couched in terms of the latest developments in physics or mathematics. Certainly, the deferential relation to the findings of the sciences that is evinced by most analytic philosophers is not apparent. Bergson, widely regarded as the most famous philosopher in the world from the turn of the century to World War I, initiated a very different revolution in thinking about time around the start of the twentieth century. He did so by illustrating the importance of a nonmeasurable lived time (duree) that is also said to be the proper medium of thinking (via ‘intuition’ rather than the intelligence), and he also proposed radical alterations to the way we think about memory. For him, the past remains real and part of all of our experience, existing as what he calls a virtual temporality (a time that is real, but not present), and it is not reducible to the linear order that clock-time or the ‘succession of instants’ model gives us, in which we proceed from past to present to future. In fact, he refers to a notion of the ‘pure past’ that coexists with the present, and constitutes it; the present, on this view, is a dimension of the past rather than vice versa (see Bergson 1990, and Deleuze 1994: 82). Around the same time, Husserl’s rich analyses of internal time-consciousness significantly deepened our understanding of time by showing that rather than conscious life being comprised of a series of ‘now’ moments, there is a necessary intertwining of anticipative ‘protention’ in relation to the future and ‘retention’ of the past. His concern was to describe our experience of time, as well as to delimit some of the non-empirical (and non-analytic) conditions of possibility for any experience of time. For most phenomenologists, it is this relation between protention, primal impression, and retention which makes possible the experience of, say, temporal flow. We need not have an actual experience of protention, but we must deduce such features in

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order to coherently explain our experience of, say, listening to a melody. In other words, these features are claimed to be the transcendental conditions of temporal experience in its myriad forms, and these time-constituting phenomena are not themselves determinable as occurring in the present, past, or future, in the same way as the events that historically happen. In 1927, Heidegger’s Being and Time also gave time a transcendental significance, insisting that, both for Dasein and ontologically, a philosophical priority must be accorded to the ‘not yet,’ the ‘to come,’ the possible, and the future. In fact, the temporal structure that Heidegger calls ‘care’ is the basis from which he seeks to derive his philosophical accounts of space and place, and this privilege that he initially gave to time over space has been influential on much of the ensuing Continental ‘tradition,’ especially poststructuralism. It is important to note what dialogues did and did not occur during this formative period of the ‘divide.’ In terms of what did not take place, it is telling that there was very little substantive engagement between the phenomenological/Bergsonian accounts of time and McTaggart’s metaphysical concerns with what he called the A-series and B-series of time. Moreover, McTaggart’s 1908 paper, ‘The Unreality of Time,’ was very influential upon the analytic tradition that was to follow, with the community roughly polarising around two perspectives—presentism and eternalism—that overlap substantially with what McTaggart designated as the A-series and B-series, even if few accepted his conclusion which is captured by the paper’s title (McTaggart 1993). Briefly, McTaggart illuminated two ways in which positions in time can be ordered. His A-series of time represented a psychological experience of succession that roughly corresponds to what the phenomenologist might call the natural attitude in regard to time, with certain events being futural, coming to be present, and then moving into the past and the even further past. All of these temporal designations are relative to a given ‘present,’ from which certain events are seen to be in the future and others in the past. To put this another way, for the A-series positions in time are orderable according to their possession of properties like being two days future, being present, being one day past, and so forth. But McTaggart also suggested that positions in time can also be ordered by two-place relations like two days earlier than, one day earlier than, simultaneous with, and so forth. This B-series of time—of before, now, and after—involves a succession that maintains permanent relations among events, and suggests that temporally tensed sentences (like ‘I will finish this talk within the allocated time’) are not required. Most analytic philosophers agree that modern physics supports this view. Advocates of the A-series are therefore forced to either dispute this claim about modern physics, or argue that if it is true then modern physics leaves out something fundamental. This latter approach, although relatively rare in analytic philosophy, seems to be the position that most Continental philosophers are tacitly committed to, and this is explicitly the case in Heidegger’s work, as we will see. In terms of what interaction did occur between the incipient forms of analytic and Continental philosophy, there was a series of polemical encounters between Russell and Bergson, and one of the major philosophical points of contention between them concerned time. 3 Russell was considerably worried about Bergson’s anti-intellectualist valorisation of ‘intuition,’ having

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once famously quipped that ‘intuition is at its best in bats, bees, and Bergson’ (Russell 1912: 331). 4 From Bergson’s perspective, however, bound up with the method of intuition, and justifying its philosophical deployment, was his understanding of time. Bergson’s view can be summarised as arguing that ‘the real nature of time resides not in its segmented parts but in its given, experiential character as duration: the irreducible, purely qualitative, cumulative flow of a multiplicity of states which forms an indivisible, heterogenous continuum’ (Bradley 2003: 441). All attempts to understand time (or, for that matter, life or existence) by partitioning it into quantifiable items are bound to fail. They are spatialising abstractions that use the ‘intelligence’ to break things down into their subcomponents (what Michael Beaney [2007] might call decompositional analysis), but for Bergson time is underivable or irreducible, in that it cannot be analysed by reference to anything which is nontemporal. And we should note that the real nature of time was thought to pertain to this experiential (and, simultaneously, transcendental) characteristic, not to the four-dimensional continuum advocated by physicists and analytic philosophers. For Bergson, it is the former that is the condition for the latter, rather than the other way around. Prima facie this kind of sentiment sits uneasily with analytic philosophy as a method, and, unsurprisingly, Russell was rather antagonistic towards such a view. He was not prepared to accept the qualitative (and ontological) difference between time and space that Bergson insisted upon. And Russell could empirically justify this by pointing to work in physics and mathematics. On a similar basis, J. J. C. Smart, W. V. O. Quine, and many other analytic philosophers have argued that there is no objective ontological difference in kind between the past, the present, and the future, just as there is no ontological difference between here and there. It would be conceded that, ‘Yes, we thank goodness that the pain is there rather than here, and past rather than present, but these differences are subjective, being dependent on our point of view’ (Dowden 2009). It is merely mental perspectives that divide the block into a past part, a present part, and a future part, and that radically distinguish time and space. Partly because of some similar considerations, Russell even felt entitled to proclaim that time was an ‘unimportant and superficial characteristic of reality’ (1986: 42), and yet, for Bergson, time is closer to ultimate reality, a transcendental condition of the spatial, of change, of life, and so forth. An even more famous textual polemic transpired between Heidegger and Carnap in the early 1930s, which was fundamental to the perpetuation of the idea of philosophy being a ‘divided house.’ 5 Carnap used the logical positivist’s verifiability criterion of meaning, which holds that genuine assertions must be verifiable through either experience or observation (a criterion that could not itself be verified), to critique Heidegger’s allegedly nonsensical and metaphysical comment that ‘the nothing nothings’ (see Carnap 1996, and Heidegger 1996). Although this engagement never focused upon the issue of time, it is important to note that Carnap, Reichenbach, and other logical positivists were substantially concerned with the philosophical implications of the theory of relativity, especially in regard to space and time. Carnap wrote a thesis setting out an axiomatic theory of space and time, and Reichenbach became a well-known philosopher of science who wrote many books on the relationship between logical positivism and Einsteinian physics.

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Both became major figures in the United States in the 1930s, and instrumental to the rise of analytic philosophy there, after they fled Europe due to the threat of Nazism. On the other hand, Heidegger’s Being and Time gave almost no consideration to Einsteinian physics despite being written in 1927. His later work indicates that he felt that Einsteinian physics (like Newtonian physics, which is addressed in Being and Time) continued to treat time as an entity (a thing), rather than the condition of possibility of our experience of things, thus covering over what he called the ontico-ontological difference. 6 While logical positivism as a program has been almost entirely abandoned in analytic philosophy, some of the crucial differences that were apparent at this stage (and earlier in the Bergson-Russell debate) have recurred throughout the twentieth century as the analytic-Continental divide has become increasingly institutionalised and specialised. On my view, three such enduring features include: (1) The respect (or otherwise) accorded to transcendental arguments generally and about time specifically; (2) The proximity (or otherwise) of the relationship between the philosopher and the physicist/mathematician/logician; and (3) The fact that contemporary fourdimensionalists and eternalists partake in the ideal language aspirations of early logical positivism in maintaining that tensed talk (e.g., ‘I will finish this paper’) can ultimately be replaced by tenseless talk (e.g., ‘at time t2 I finish this paper, which happens after the time of this utterance’). Now I don’t want to deny that on all three of these points change has occurred in the history of analytic philosophy in the twentieth century, nor do I want to allege that at any given synchronic time there has been consensus on these issues. However, it is difficult to deny that the vast majority of contemporary analytic philosophers harbour reservations about transcendental philosophy and are involved in a relationship of deference to the best findings of the ‘hard’ sciences indexed to the present, with the vast majority of Continental philosophers typically using transcendental arguments, critically and creatively (i.e., non-deferentially) engaging with science, and showing little interest in the so-called hard sciences, or even being comparatively ignorant of developments in this area. 7 What this means for the philosophy of time is well captured by Keith Ansell-Pearson’s summary of the Russell-Bergson debate: ‘The physicist gives us space-time in which time has no independent meaning; but the philosopher holds that space-time is really spatialised time and not time at all. The physicist then retorts that the time of the philosopher is merely phenomenological or psychological’ (Ansell-Pearson 1997: 44). As would be clear, I think that Ansell-Pearson’s ‘physicist’ here can be seen to stand in for most analytic philosophers, including Russell, Carnap, Reichenbach, and myriad recent four-dimensionalists. If this characterisation is valid, it seems plausible to maintain that in regard to the philosophy of time something like what Lyotard calls a differend—a case of conflict between two parties that does not allow for the possibility of a rule or criterion (or even a linguistic vocabulary 8) by which the dispute may be fairly decided (see Woodward 2006 and Lyotard 1989)—continues to bedevil analytic and Continental philosophy. Since Heidegger, Continental philosophy has been wary of forms of temporal presentism (including references to immediacy, intuitions, any postulation of an undivided ‘now’) in a manner that is radically distinct from the analytic metaphysical privileging of it (presentism) or indif-

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ference concerning it (four-dimensionalism). Moreover, for most if not all Continental philosophers the very possibility of philosophising, questioning, and thinking requires that one consider the relationship between time and ‘subjectivity,’ 9 whereas the majority of analytic philosophers evince by their practices that this is not the direction to go. This divide only gets reinforced when metaphysical or transcendental reflections on time become associated with socio-political critique, as happens with Marxist philosophers and, in a different way, in the poststructuralist guise of Continental philosophy that we will now consider. TIME AND POLITICS Many of the most famous Continental philosophers have seen an intimate relation between philosophies of time and socio-political issues, including Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger. How might we explain or argue for this connection? From a sociological and psychological perspective, one might point to the manner in which capitalism and urban life has caused many of us to feel that time has sped up and accelerated. Many of us feel that we have a kind of time-sickness—that is, the belief that time is running away from us, making us impatient, and so on, and that we need more of it, as if it were something that could be added to all of the other things we need more of, like money, goods, love, and so forth. In his popular book, In Praise of Slow (2004), Carl Honoré suggests that ‘the clock is the operating system of modern capitalism, the thing that makes everything else possible—meetings, deadlines, contracts, manufacturing processes, schedules, transport, working shifts’ (p. 22). Lawyers may be the most obvious case of the dominance of clock-time in their daily lives, most being required to keep an exceedingly close eye on their time such that six-minute billing blocks can be established. But Honoré details all kinds of societies who have responded to this monitoring of time by staging various kinds of slow movements that embrace a different understanding of time—Austria’s Society for the Deceleration of Time, Japan’s Sloth Club, the Long Now Foundation in the United States. Many have abandoned clocks and radically changed the structure of their working week. These various organisations also point to quite convincing empirical studies that show us that time pressure can lead to tunnel-vision, which, of course, has political and social consequences in the form of bad decision-making. 10 In fact, in this essay I want to claim something similar: that theoretical myopia about time, or to put it another way a reductive or non-pluralistic approach to time, can create philosophical problems and lead to bad methodological decisions which ultimately result in, at best, partial philosophical conclusions. But challenges to this dominant conception of time as involving a series of moments, a linear trajectory that clock-time regulates and subjects to our control, might also be made on philosophical grounds. In fact, to simplify greatly what will follow, it is this understanding of time as about measurement and thus as amenable to calculation, prediction, arithmetical division, and ultimately time-keeping, that all of the different poststructuralist thinkers

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challenge, sometimes on ethico-political grounds but also on philosophical ones. Most frequently, the philosophical reasons rely on various forms of transcendental argument, which are given to explain why linear-clock time (or theoretical ideas of time that are dependent on a clock-like series of moments) are an abstraction from lived time, or are dependent upon the existence of a past that cannot be recalled and a future that cannot be anticipated, and incoherent without them. Methodologically speaking, the prolific use of transcendental arguments within Continental philosophy constitutes a major point of difference with analytic philosophy as we have seen, but to view this as the fundamental metaphilosophical cause of the analytic-Continental divide would be to ignore the fact that many of the other major Continental methods (including genealogy, hermeneutics, ‘intuition’ for Bergson, and phenomenology, especially in its Heideggerian and Merleau-Pontyian inflections) are also bound up with philosophies of time. They are all methods that develop and affirm our essential historicity, as does the conception of reason that is invoked. 11 In more recent times, an emphasis upon the future (and the event) that defies anticipation and hence cannot be understood as ‘soon to be present’ is arguably shared by all of the major thinkers said to be poststructuralist. 12 Derrida and Deleuze certainly emphasise a conception of the future whose significance lies in the way in which it simultaneously interrupts any ‘now’ or present moment and is a condition of possibility for any event worthy of the name. Indeed, they both also invoke Hamlet and maintain that an event can only occur when time is ‘out of joint’ in the way that they associate with futurity; otherwise there is no possibility of the event but merely a preprogrammed or deterministic outcome. They assert that it is this aspect of the radical singularity of any event that needs to be emphasised as a counterbalance to conceptions of time in which the future is treated as known and apprehended according to either the habitual expectations of the present, or the predictions and calculations that are based on what we presently know. On this view, the future is fundamentally not amenable to prediction and calculation, whereas analytic philosophy arguably tacitly endorses the calculative model in relation to the future in the frequent use it makes of logical modelling and probability analyses (cf. Bayesianism), and in its prolific use of thought experiments, which as Bernard Williams (1976: 97) suggests, involve a predictive relationship to the future: the past is only relevant in order to predict the future. But what is wrong with anticipating the future and saying the future will be like this or that? While holding that (1) we cannot avoid anticipating the future, and (2) that we must try to predict and calculate future consequences for any decision that hopes to be responsible (that is to say that we must prepare), Derrida’s work intimates that exclusive adherence to these kind of relations to the future can be dangerous. Certainly if such a relationship to the future, a calculative one, becomes dominant in a given milieu, it can lead to the absolutist violence of fascism and communism in which in the name of this or that future state of affairs individuals silence or kill those who do not believe in such a future. Less dramatically and more frequently they lead to the minor fascisms of everyday life in which no one dies but conceptual and interpersonal violence nevertheless takes place. This means that Derrida will

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not name the future. Democracy and justice must instead be understood as ‘to come’ and unable to ever be actualised in a present situation. This trajectory of Derrida’s thought need not be re-elaborated here, but it is worth emphasising that this futural dimension of time that he refers to has a curious structure in that it intervenes in the time of the present and breaks it open, without ever fully coming to presence, and a similar predicament afflicts our relationship to the past. One cannot, after all, attain to a self-contained present that is inured from the past, and yet this past cannot be presented before us and recognised in its totality. To put this another way, the influence of the past upon our present is largely unspecifiable, despite what some psychoanalysts suggest, and yet they are right in seeing such influence as being pervasive. Borrowing from Levinas, Derrida maintains the thought that there is something akin to an ‘ethical past,’ an immersion in the weight of history that is immemorial. This ethical past cannot be represented or recalled, one cannot assume responsibility for it as a totality, and the trick is hence not to see the past as an origin to which one might return. In contradistinction to any temporal presentism, then, Derrida reminds us of both the future and its radical indeterminability, and also the immemorial past that defies conscious memory and representation but nonetheless subsists in the form of traces. In his analyses of the times of Chronos and Aion in Logic of Sense, Deleuze makes some closely related points. He describes two different aspects of time that he also call the time of sense (and thus, we might say, the time of reason) and the time of nonsense. Chronos is described as the time of the present (sense), of measurement and linear clock-time, and as a worldview that insists that only the present can be truly said to exist. On this view, which is also that of Augustine and contemporary analytic metaphysical presentists, no reality can be ascribed to that which is not. For Deleuze, however, the time of Aion is equally real and is described as the disruptive moment in which any given present is always dividing into both the past and the future, such that there is, in fact, no present. Only the past and future truly subsist in time on this view, and Deleuze hence calls Aion the time of the eternal and the time of the event. The time of Chronos anticipates from this present moment until that present moment (habit) calculates that if A happens then it will be expeditious to respond with B (reflection and representation). But these anticipations and calculations in regard to the past and the future depend upon another immeasurable aspect of time that is both their transcendental condition and also the empirical progenitor of real social transformation, as becomes clearest in Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus (1987: 262). According to Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense, the reversals in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books give us some kind of indication of this second order of time, Aion, and they also help explain the association of this order of time with nonsense. In Carroll’s world, which Deleuze thinks is also ours in a certain sense, characters are punished before having done anything wrong, or they cry before pricking themselves. Now, there may be empirical explanations for such behaviour, of course, but, for Deleuze, these are not of the order of the event. Empirical explanations fail to see that what has occurred is never wounding or traumatising because of any particular actuality, whatever it may be, but that we are wounded because of the prospect of worse ‘to come’ in the future, or because of the relation that any given

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actuality bears to the complex of temporal syntheses that is our past (or, to phrase this more positively, we are likewise inspired and touched by events because of their relation to the time of Aion). As such, it is the future and the past that affect us; they are the time of the event. When we try and explain May 68, likewise, we can proffer historical or empirical conditions that were causally involved in the uprising, but the Event of May 68 cannot be reduced to that. That which made the situation vital and provocative came from elsewhere, from that openness to the future that necessarily resists our calculative entreaties and that immemorial past which cannot be represented as a totality. Another way of putting this point might be to say that if rationality purports to be atemporal, albeit with its claims being expressed in the present tense (inference and verification are of the present tense), 13 then there is something that will always elide such forms of reason. We might say, as Levinas (1987: 103–4) does, that rationality (and he would also say scientific time) involves a synchronisation of the diverse that cannot comprehend diachrony: in this case, the past that subsists and the future that cannot be anticipated but instead disrupts. For all of these philosophers, then, there is an intricate and complicated topology to time, which, if simplified (e.g., treated linearly, spatially, etc.), can degenerate into problematic political positions and to violence. To put the point another way, any such misconstrual of time involves a transcendental violence that is often the progenitor of more empirical instances of violence. David Wood (2005: 22) sums up this tradition by specifically understanding violence as a disease of time, as a ‘chronopathology,’ and he suggests that what Nietzsche diagnoses as ressentiment (a disgust for life that trades in negativity) is fundamentally a taking revenge against the fact that time passes. The major form that this ressentiment consists in is by artificially delimiting time and insisting upon the priority of the present, and this could include the invocation of a self-contained intuitive present, or an ahistorical calculative deduction. Ethico-political problems are in store for us when the living present is understood as self-contained, for example when we jealously seek to preserve some feature of the present (Merleau-Ponty 1964: 110). Problems are also likely when we are nostalgic for the past or seek to return to some origin, and violence is not far away when the future is circumscribed and delimited by the expectations of the present. Institutions and societies are worthy of critique to the extent that any of these above chronopathologies take on a dominant form. Now, this account of time and its relation to ethico-political matters is unlikely to be taken seriously by many analytic philosophers, possibly on account of the charge that such claims remain psychological points buttressed with transcendental claims that never adequately display their necessity. But even assuming that it were, it remains to be seen just what kind of relationship these accounts bear to existing philosophy of time in analytic philosophy. It is to this question that we now turn.

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TIME IN ANALYTIC PHILOSOPHY AND BEYOND While time has been a major area of philosophical inquiry in analytic metaphysics, philosophy of science, and personal identity, no wholesale turn like that which I have associated with Continental philosophy ever takes place. An explicit engagement with time is not a mandatory aspect of any genuinely original philosophy, although the less piecemeal and more systematic projects in analytic philosophy must give philosophy of time serious attention. Moreover, such philosophers often envisage themselves as clarifying the physics, which is ultimately the truth about time, or ‘situating’ it within a framework of other epistemological and metaphysical claims. Most contemporary analytic philosophers are hence four-dimensionalists about time, developing an account of time that supplements post-Einsteinian physics. It would, however, be a simplification to argue that the difference between analytic and Continental philosophies of time is reducible without remainder to the issue of the status of the philosopher’s role in relation to the findings of physics. There are, after all, plenty of analytic metaphysicians of time who do armchair philosophy about time involving conceptual analysis, and who aren’t particularly concerned with the latest developments in physics. In fact, there is a split between the four-dimensionalists who bite the physicist’s bullet and say that the passage of time (and the experience of the ‘now’) is an illusion, and others (like John Bigelow and Arthur Prior) who would claim it is a Moorean fact and not an experiential illusion, a split that can be traced all the way back to the work of McTaggart. Perhaps it is possible to argue for the compatibility of presentism and relativity/four-dimensionalism, as John Bigelow has recently done, 14 but such views are yet to be widely accepted. Both of these dominant trajectories will be considered here, but there is also a further issue that we will address. If time and method are bound up with one another according to Continental philosophers, then, it must be asked: is there an implicit philosophy of time underwriting some of the major methodological practices of analytic philosophy? To put it another way, what do the main philosophical methods presuppose about the analytic philosopher’s time-embeddedness, for want of a better term? Perhaps some of the methodologies that are used are temporally restricted, reliant on the present even while the content of their avowed philosophical positions is generally stridently anti-presentist. This is, in fact, what I will argue in what follows since, prima facie, the main methods associated with Continental philosophy are not deployed in the analytic tradition: genealogy, hermeneutics, deconstruction, and so forth, are not fundamental, and nor, more significantly, is transcendental argumentation. Indeed, we need to note that analytic philosophy’s general scepticism about the value of transcendental arguments (and therefore about forms of ‘first philosophy’ more generally) is certainly operative in the area of philosophy of time. In fact, this methodological wariness partly explains the two main ways in which philosophy of time has been practiced: (1) A deferential relationship to the physicist’s understanding of time; and (2) A pursuit of what might be called minimalist metaphysics without transcendental arguments. As Robin Le Poidevin and Murray McBeath (1993: 16) note, it seems

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that Kant’s antinomies (time has a beginning; time has no beginning) are the source of the analytic feeling that a priori arguments for time having a certain structure or topology are doomed to end in failure. Despite this, Heidegger claimed in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (1997) that it is Kant who in fact made a decisive temporal turn, a turn which Heidegger argues is the turning-point in modern philosophy and one within which his own philosophical project can be situated. 15 In response to this incredulity when it comes to first philosophy and transcendental argumentation, Bill Newton-Smith’s book, The Structure of Time (1980), argues that the structure of time is a matter that can only be settled empirically; physicists alone can determine, for example, whether or not time is bounded. In a related vein, in Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point (1996) Huw Price seeks to reestablish an Archimedean point for knowledge outside of the relativism that seems to be a consequence of the special theory of relativity and our various anthropocentric biases, most particularly the fact that our philosophising and thinking about time is greatly affected by our own finite status as creatures in time. Price adopts the reverse procedure to Heidegger and attempts to dispel rather than dwell on this paradoxical temporal structure by reinstating an objective atemporality, a view from ‘nowhen.’ When analytic philosophers do metaphysics of time, on the other hand, this is not in the sense that one might think. Rather than venturing into what might be termed ‘strong’ necessary conditions of possibility terrain, issues regarding the passage and structure of time are often understood to be answered via logic and an analysis of what makes tensed statements true. There are also many thought experiments in which one is asked to imagine that someone knows all that there is to know about time, history, and dates, but does not know which date is the present one. Swinburne (1990) and Sosa (1983) argue, for example, that this suggests there are temporal subjective facts. Likewise, there are thought experiments like Sidney Shoemaker’s ‘frozen time’ and ongoing analyses of time-travel as philosophers attempt to decide if the asymmetry of causation is related to the asymmetry of before and after. 16 Radical revisions to our common sense understandings of time are countenanced by many of these philosophers. Nowhere does it seem that a chronological, linear understanding of time as a succession of instants is dominant, and yet nowhere is there any kind of reflection like that which Continental philosophers go in for, whether they be phenomenologists or poststructuralists (Continental philosophy is itself a divided house, along these and other lines). Can we even situate the ‘Continental’ perspectives that we have considered in terms of the debate between two views on the nature of temporal reality—presentism and eternalism—that have dominated analytic philosophy? Both seem to fail to capture what is at stake in Continental reflections on time, whether at the beginning of the twentieth century or the end. Continental philosophers since Heidegger want to dispute the philosophical priority of the present, as the majority analytic eternalist camp does, but also to insist (unlike eternalists) on temporal becoming, on ontological distinctions between past, present, and future, as well as between time and space. This conjunction of claims has no equivalent in analytic philosophy, perhaps because it is not readily compatible with physics. Of course, there are some

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analytic philosophers who feel that the eternalism and presentism alternatives are unduly restrictive too, including those (often Wittgensteinians) who maintain that the debate is merely verbal because each side is using the word ‘real’ in a different sense; the presentist uses it in a tensed sense, whereas the eternalist uses it in an untensed sense (see Dowden 2009 and Dolev 2007). 17 Nonetheless, perhaps due to the practice of conditionalisation (maximising inferential connections so dialogue and communal progress can be made) much of the debate revolves around evaluating the pros and cons of two (or at most three) main accounts of time: presentism, eternalism, and to a lesser extent, the ‘growing universe’ theory. None of these frameworks resemble in either methods or conclusions the kind of positions and arguments proffered by Deleuze and Derrida, or for that matter by Husserl and Bergson. Consider, for example, the commonly espoused B-series claim that ‘when we say that the year 1900 has the property of being past, all we really mean is that 1900 is earlier than the time at which we are speaking. On this view, there is no sense in which it is true to say that time really passes, and any appearance to the contrary is merely a result of the way we humans happen to perceive the world’ (Markosian 2008: §5). This idea that the past might become part of an omni-temporal space-time block, rather than retain its own significance, is, I think precisely what the notion of an immemorial past (Derrida), or a virtual past (Bergson and Deleuze), would deny. There is, likewise, a genuine clash between the phenomenological accounts of time and what analytic philosophers are interested in. In one sense, this is perfectly understandable. Phenomenology focuses upon describing our experience of time, which might include the interplay between the three different temporal dimensions as they are differently experienced in, say, boredom, anxiety, or listening to a melody (or even as capitalism impacts upon our experience of each). In addition, phenomenologists delimit some of the non-empirical conditions of possibility for the experience of time. It hence examines subjective experience and the conditions of possibility for that experience, whereas physicists are concerned with objective or physical time (what is ultimately out there in the world). What are we to make of these very different accounts? Can they both be true? It seems we are faced with a dilemma: pluralism or reductionism? We can be pluralists, and say that both are right in their own domain (roughly the subjective vs. the objective, the phenomenological vs. the naturalistic), but this risks a resulting vacuity or lack of philosophical depth, as well as not seeing the ramifications that each view has for the other in that there must be some interrelation between these different philosophies of time—unless we are prepared to countenance a radical dualism, which few analytic or Continental philosophers are prepared to do. Indeed, if physical time and psychological time are two different kinds of time, then extensive commentary is required regarding their relationship to one another, something that is generally not forthcoming in the work of either analytic or Continental philosophers. Moreover the contrast between the subjective and objective domains doesn’t quite capture what is at stake, since it ignores issues to do with transcendental arguments about time that have been the focus of Continental philosophy throughout the twentieth century. Indeed, even phenomenology is seeking to offer an account of subjective experience,

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rather than merely a subjective account of experience (Gallagher and Zahavi 2008: 19). 18 Alternatively, we can be reductive and say that one of these two philosophies of time derives from the other, the latter of which is more fundamental. It seems to me that both analytic and Continental philosophers tend to choose this option far more often than ecumenical pluralism, although the methods and rationale provided for these orders of priority and reductions is very different. How else might we explain the suggestion made by many analytic philosophers that subjective or psychological time is an illusion and that physical time is more fundamental, even though psychological time is discovered first by each of us as we grow out of our childhood, and even though psychological time was discovered first as we human beings evolved from our animal ancestors (Dowden 2009)? How else might we explain the following phenomenological claim from Gallagher and Zahavi’s The Phenomenological Mind (2008)? There is no pure third person perspective, just as there is no view from nowhere. To believe in the existence of such a pure third-person perspective is to succumb to an objectivist illusion. This is, of course, not to say that there is no third-person perspective . . . but it is a perspective founded upon a first-person perspective, or, to be more precise, it emerges out of the encounter between at least two first-person perspectives; that is, it involves inter-subjectivity. (2008: 40)

On such a view, the conditions of subjective time are also the conditions of possibility of inter-subjectivity, which are, in turn, the condition of possibility of the objective time of the physicists. Moreover, for them any account of time that ignores its experiential development in humans, that gives no attention to questions of conditions of possibility of temporal experience, will be one-sided. Indeed, issues pertaining to the genesis of knowledge and its development are important to all Continental philosophers, thus inviting the charge of perpetuating the genetic fallacy in thinking that an analysis of origins has anything to do with the evaluation or justification of present knowledge claims. Sometimes this is perhaps a fair charge, but the reverse is also a risk, what James Williams (2005) has termed the ‘anti-genealogical fallacy,’ an accusation that might be bestowed on any view that thinks that concepts or reason come from nowhere, like manna from heaven, or that we might translate our over-determined and messy language, with its history of associated concepts, into a pure language that overcomes such difficulties. Indeed, contemporary four-dimensionalists are committed to the view that the correct theory of time, the metaphysical truth about time, is ultimately tense-less. 19 Statements like ‘I will finish this paper in the future’ can be replaced by statements that omit the temporal element. Yet, prima facie, our experiences of time and the way we learn about the world is through and through temporally tensed, since we navigate in the world through our bodies and their temporal anticipative capacities. Bodily motility and intentionality simply are temporally tensed. For example, the perception of an object is informed by procedural memory (habits) and it also gives us hitherto undisclosed

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sides, sides that our attention might be directed towards in the future. Of course, a possible rejoinder to this might be that this temporal experience says nothing about whether these subjective phenomena are ultimately real. But, for most Continental philosophers, at least from Husserl, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty on, such experiences are the transcendental condition of our experience of a world at all, from which scientific analyses are based. Analytic philosophers might accept that a condition of the development of the hard sciences is this embodied dimension, but insist that issues to do with the truth (or metaphysical reality) of what is discovered leaves such genetic questions behind. Does this commit many analytic philosophers to positing a view from nowhere as it was criticised by Nagel, or more to the point does it commit them to positing an atemporal view from ‘nowhen,’ as Huw Price has happily accepted in his book Time’s Arrow and Archimedes’ Point (1996)? I cannot adequately resolve this dispute here, but it seems that we have encountered a contretemps that helps to explain the rather pervasive non-engagement between representatives of analytic and Continental philosophy in the twentieth century. There will, no doubt, be many counterexamples to any thesis like this (such as Willfrid Sellars 20), but this chapter has nonetheless begun to show what is distinctive about the philosophy of time of large parts of Continental philosophy and also distinguished this from the philosophy of time that takes places in analytic philosophy. Are we confronted here with incommensurable paradigms or stances that do not admit of criteria that might resolve the dispute in a non-questionbegging way? Perhaps, but it is also possible that a more pluralist methodology can help us here, especially one that can find a place for transcendental arguments. The myriad criticisms raised against such arguments by analytic philosophers cannot be rigorously addressed here, but transcendental arguments ought not be too hastily prohibited on the grounds that they are sometimes, or even frequently, liable to error (i.e., dogmatic claims to necessity, circularity, etc.). Being primarily concerned with error avoidance is a conservative philosophical ambition that does not necessarily coincide with the ambition to seek truth or achieve genuine insight; the risk of error might be eliminated only to be replaced by the risk of banality or obsolescence. 21 But this argument need not depend on one wholeheartedly agreeing that transcendental arguments can be usefully deployed. After all, it is clear that certain philosophical methods focus upon our affirming our historicity (and our exposure to an unknown future) more than others. While no particular method can immunise us against the risk of philosophical failure, there is good reason to prefer the prospects of a more pluralist methodology that can find a place for genealogical, transcendental, and phenomenological analyses, as well as many of the various techniques that have become part and parcel of analytic philosophy. Such a diverse toolbox of methods might ensure that we don’t remain enthralled with one temporal modality at the expense of others and that we don’t preserve the name truth for any single one of those domains. Such a synthesis is improbable and perhaps it is even impossible at least in the foreseeable future, but we must at least confront the prospect of meta-philosophical dialogue and disagreement. Without it, philosophy of all kinds can become insular and all too confident of expertise in a given narrow domain of academic specialisation. Such an attitude is not very philosophi-

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cal. If learning only occurs, as Deleuze (1994) suggests, intermediate between knowledge and non-knowledge, let us hope that philosophers of all varieties can, at least from time to time, leave behind their habitual specialisations and certitudes. As Socrates said, let us know that we do not know, which in the context of this chapter might amount to saying let us hope that more philosophers can become postanalytic and meta-Continental. 22 NOTES 1. Thanks are due to the Australian Research Council for funding this research, as well as to my collaborators on this project, James Chase, James Williams, and Edwin Mares. 2. It also challenges the ‘growing universe’ theory, which holds that both the present and the past are real (the name deriving from the idea that any list of entities that are real necessarily increases over time as things that are present become past), but we cannot consider this position here. 3. Russell published a strongly worded critical review of Bergson’s work (see Russell 1912), and continued to criticise his colleague from the other side of the Channel for years to come. The disparity between their views on time and multiplicity became apparent when they were co-participants at a conference with Einstein in 1922 at the College de France. Bergson also gets a tough time in Russell’s History of Western Philosophy (1946). 4. Bergsonian intuition is understood by Russell to be equivalent with mere instinct, which is not quite true; it develops from instinct, but this does not mean it is reducible to it. And certainly Bergson does not think the instinctive abilities of bats and bees allow them to do metaphysics! Nonetheless, it seems fair to say that there is an anti-intellectualist spirit in the work of Bergson that can be discerned in much of twentieth-century Continental thought that the analytic and Russellian projects do not share. And it is, of course, paradoxical for philosophers to take positions that seem anti-intellectualist, although we should not assume that a disciplining of reason entails irrationalism, and it might also be argued that this is preferable to the opposing alternative, hypostasizing a restricted conception of reason that abstracts itself from the life-world. 5. Michael Friedman also makes its significance clear in A Parting of the Ways (2000). 6. Jeff Malpas pointed out to me that Heidegger’s later work deliberately refers to timespace rather than space-time, thus tacitly reaffirming the distance of his own reflections from Einsteinian physics. 7. This is not to reinstate the account offered by Sokal and Bricmont (1998), and nor is it to deny that Badiou and Deleuze, for example, are well appraised of Zermelo-Frankel set theory and differential calculus respectively. I do think that the deferential relation is not apparent in either of these cases, however, and this is the case with other important Continental philosophers like Gaston Bachelard. Similarly Husserl was thoroughly invested in the sciences and mathematics (non-deferentially), and his and Heidegger’s anthropology and use of the term ‘Lebenswelt’ was influenced by Von Uexkull’s discussions of animals and humans and the notion of ‘unwelt.’ 8. This is perhaps akin to what Miranda Fricker (2003) calls a hermeneutic injustice, where a vocabulary is not even available in which to state a given injustice. 9. Because of its synchronic focus structuralism is difficult to accommodate within such a ‘temporal turn,’ but, as Ashley Woodward has pointed out to me, one might nonetheless resolve this problem by noting that structuralism is not, predominantly, a philosophical movement. With Derrida and the return to Heidegger, and with Deleuze and a future-inflected return to Bergsonian time, we have the philosophy of time again being foregrounded. 10. Hubert Dreyfus (1997) produces some quite compelling empirical research on decisionmaking processes that suggest that it is a spontaneous embodied responsiveness to the environment (which is not a matter of rational calculation) that leads to mastery and expertise in given fields, whether they be basketball, chess, philosophy, or even morality. Constant calculators,

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people who reflect all of the time on the best course of action to take, tend not to make the best decisions and do not often reach the highest levels of expertise in a given field. 11. A certain circularity is also, perhaps, the inevitable result, as Sherah Lee Bloor has pointed out to me. 12. This position owes a lot to Heidegger, but it would be remiss of us to ignore Levinas. While his philosophy of time is more commonly associated with an emphasis upon an irrecuperable past that obliges us to respond to it, even though we cannot represent it or know it, his position on futurity is very similar to that of Deleuze and Derrida. In Time and the Other (1987), for example, Levinas states that ‘anticipation of the future and projection of the future, sanctioned as essential to time from Bergson to Sartre, are but the present of the future and not the authentic future; the future which is not grasped, which befalls us and lays hold of us. The Other is the future’ (pp. 76–77). This is a key aspect of the work of virtually all of the poststructuralists, including Lyotard, Negri (see his Time for Revolution [2005]), and even their sometime critic, Alain Badiou. 13. As John McCumber points out, ‘An assertion must be simultaneous with whatever it is that justifies it, whether that justifying factor is a state of affairs in the world or other assertions from which it follows. . . . The perceptual evidence for the beauty of Cleopatra lies irretrievably in the past; all that can justify belief in it today is the surviving testimony’ (2007: 69). 14. In his talk at the 2008 Australasian Association of Philosophy conference, Bigelow argued that presentism and four-dimensionalism are compatible, at least if relativity theories can be more modest than they usually are and do not claim that they represent the whole truth, the final world on the universe. Relativity theory needs to be cleared of its positivist element and to acknowledge that acceleration, for example, is an entirely non-relative matter. 15. Of course, it is by now a cliché that analytic philosophers tend to read the first critique, while Continental philosophers are more interested in the third. 16. Hugh Mellor, however, deplores thought experiments that use ‘fantasy arguments’ about time. He writes that this kind of argument ‘presumes to show something possible by describing an imaginary world in which we should apparently be inclined to believe the possibility actual’ (quoted in Le Poidevin and MacBeath 1993: 17). For Mellor, though, showing plausibility is not enough to show possibility. 17. Dolev (2007) suggests they both share an ‘ontological assumption,’ and intimates that a return to phenomenology might be worthwhile. 18. In addition, there are some significant differences between phenomenology and poststructuralism that such a formulation would conflate. For Deleuze, transcendental philosophy and Freud allow us to get beyond the time of consciousness and the time of embodied subjectivity. I become a multiplicity of subjects living different temporalities within the same, not so unified being. See Widder (2006): 411. 19. As Dowden (2009) suggests, for eternalism or the block universe theory ‘the futuretensed sentence, “The Lakers will win the basketball game” might be analyzed as, “The Lakers do win at time t, and time t happens after the time of this utterance.” The future tense has been removed, and the new verb phrases “do win” and “happens after” are tenseless logically, although they are grammatically in the present tense.’ 20. As Jim O’Shea pointed out to me, Sellars may be one such case, given his lifelong attempts to reconcile a Kantian, experiential conception of time with the scientific image of time. 21. David Coady reminded me that William James made this point forcefully in The Will to Believe and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (1956). 22. As John McCumber (2007: 33) also suggests.

Chapter Twenty-one

Philosopher Deans and Philosopher Kings: The Contribution of Philosophers to Senior Management in Australian Universities Paul Thom

In the Republic Plato imagines a utopian society whose rulers combine philosophical understanding and political know-how: ‘Until philosophers are kings, or the kings and princes of this world have the spirit and power of philosophy, and political greatness and wisdom meet in one, and those commoner natures who pursue either to the exclusion of the other are compelled to stand aside, cities will never have rest from their evils’ (Republic V, 473c–d, trans. Jowett, in Plato 1960). If this vision has a chance of being realised anywhere, surely it would be in universities. Here, there is no shortage of philosophers, in a broad sense of the word—lovers of wisdom. Here too, there is a constant need, if not for kings and princes, at least for those who can exercise political skills. And here, finally, tradition favours the selection of senior office-holders from among academic ranks. So we have to ask whether Plato’s vision is in fact implemented to any great extent within Australian universities—and indeed whether it ever could be. THE PLATONIC IDEAL Plato’s utopia is fundamentally a just society, where that means a society that is governed with justice. And Plato’s reason for thinking that in such a society good rulers must be philosophers is that the exercise of justice presupposes a knowledge of justice, a knowledge only philosophers possess. 255

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We should remember that Socrates introduces the idea of philosopherrulers with some trepidation. He is sure it will provoke mirth: ‘. . . yet shall the word be spoken, even though the wave break and drown me in laughter and dishonour’ (Republic V, 473c–d). Philosophers have always been figures of fun because of their abstraction from practical affairs. An old Greek story has Thales falling down a well while star-gazing. And Aristophanes represents Socrates as dwelling in the clouds. But Platonic philosophers are not just absent-minded astronomers or dishevelled social critics for whom ‘ideals are a place from which to take pot shots at those in power’ (Armstrong 2007). Rather, they are theorists who claim a special intimacy with higher truths. Plato says: ‘Philosophers only are able to grasp the eternal and unchangeable, and those who wander in the region of the many and variable are not philosophers’ (Republic VI, 484b); and the true philosopher ‘has the gift of a good memory, and is quick to learn, noble, gracious, the friend of truth, justice, courage, temperance, who are his kindred’ (Republic VI, 487a); and ‘the philosopher holding converse with the divine order, becomes orderly and divine, as far as the nature of man allows’ (Republic VI, 500c). But here a problem arises. How could anyone seriously suggest that the lover and kinsman of truth, devoted to what is unchanging and touched by divinity, should be put in charge of governing our ever-changing world where truth and divinity may count for nothing? Surely this kind of philosopher is even less suited to government than the absent-minded scientist or the carping social critic? Cicero had something similar in mind when he wrote: ‘We have to work, not in the Republic of Plato but in the cesspit of Romulus. (‘dicit enim tamquam in Platonis politeiai, non tamquam in Romuli faece sententiam’ (Cicero, Ad Atticum 2.1.8, quoted in Armstrong 2007: 13). A nice antithesis, but what does it really show? Why should we assume that Plato’s Republic, when implemented, will not be beset with the ugly realities of the res publica? Wouldn’t it be fairer to Plato to assume that those realities will come with existence in the material world, to assume that the politician has to deal with them and that the philosopher-politician will deal with them wisely? The theme of the philosopher as being especially ill-suited to political power is raised in a different way by Simon Blackburn in his Plato’s Republic: A Biography. Blackburn uses a football analogy: ‘The move looks set to be a spectacular own-goal. If the philosopher only knows about otherworldly things, he is not likely to be at all adapted to knowing about the day-to-day problems and hand-to-mouth solutions that make up the art of government’ (Blackburn 2006: 92). In the same vein, Trevor Saunders gives the following parody of the philosopher-king’s inaugural speech: Future members of Magnesia: This new state of yours is intended to be a very good one. It will be administered not in the spirit of any current ideology, but in accordance with the truth about the world. After all, you would not wish to conduct your lives in any manner that is not based on truth, would you? Now you may not be aware that philosophy has shown us that the truth is expressed by Forms—abstract ideas of things, very difficult to understand except by intelligent people who have

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put much effort into the job. However, that effort has been made; and you will find that the state you are about to join is run largely by people who have attained some insight into these things, and to a lesser degree by those who have lesser insight, but who have accepted the doctrines taught them by the others. (Saunders 1992: 469–70)

One can only imagine the reception such a speech would get from the citizens of Magnesia, let alone the reception it would get from the staff of an arts faculty. The parody, however, misses Plato’s point—which is not to hand power to philosophers untutored in political skills, but to find people who combine philosophical understanding and political skill (or short of finding such people, to instill that combination in others by means of education). And yet, there is indeed something to be uneasy about in Plato’s ideal of the philosopher-ruler. The problem is not that Plato has naïve beliefs about the world of everyday politics. Nor is it that the philosopher knows nothing but philosophy. The problem is the mind-set of the Platonic philosopher, involving as it does the belief that the Truth exists objectively, that it can be attained by philosophical thinking, and the accomplished philosopher is one who has attained it. As Richard Kraut describes it: [Plato] tells us at one point that when philosophers look to the harmonious arrangement of the Forms, they develop a desire to imitate that harmony in some way or other (500c). . . . So it is clear that when the philosophers rule, they do not stop looking to or imitating the Forms. Rather, their imitative activity is no longer merely contemplative; instead, they start acting in a way that produces a harmony in the city that is a likeness of the harmony of the Forms. (Kraut 1992: 328)

This mind-set recalls that of contemporary Christian evangelists. In both cases, we would hesitate to hand our government over to people who think like this. And we would be right to hesitate, precisely because neither the evangelist nor the Platonic philosopher is likely to be capable of combining their commitment to the Truth with the political skills that they would need in real-world governance. Faith in abiding supra-sensible realities, along with a commitment to bring an imperfect world into conformity with those realities—these attributes do not sit comfortably with the capacity for negotiation and compromise that are commonly thought to be necessary in politics. Of course, there are non-Platonic philosophers who don’t think there are such things as Platonic Forms. And while they might like to improve the world as much as the Platonic philosophers do, they reject the Platonic philosopher’s belief that improvement is simply a matter of stamping an already existing divine pattern onto an ill-formed world. But in Plato’s eyes, the nonPlatonic philosopher lacks the knowledge that a good ruler needs. So if the non-Platonic philosopher is to be a good ruler, it would have to be for reasons other than the ones Plato brings forward. Let’s see if there are such reasons. We’ll consider an historical example of someone has been proposed as a model philosopher-king. Then we’ll look at some recent examples of philos-

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opher-deans in the Australian context. Finally, we’ll examine a non-Platonic ideal of the philosopher-dean. AN HISTORICAL EXAMPLE Sir William Mitchell (1861–1962) was professor of English language, literature, and mental and moral philosophy at the University of Adelaide from 1894 to 1922, vice-chancellor from 1916 to 1942, and chancellor from 1942 to 1948. In their history of the University of Adelaide, Duncan and Leonard describe Mitchell as ‘the nearest approach to a philosopher-king the academic world has ever seen’ (Duncan and Leonard 1973: 78). Mitchell has been called ‘Australia’s first significant philosopher’ (Davies 2004: §1). His books include Structure and Growth of the Mind (1907), Nature and Feeling (1929), and The Place of Minds in the World: Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen 1924-26 (1933). In his obituary for Mitchell, the father of Australian materialism, J. J. C. Smart (himself a later occupant of the chair of philosophy at Adelaide) noted the favourable reception, and later influence, of Mitchell’s first book: Kemp Smith, in his notice of it in The Philosophical Review (1908), said of it that it was ‘undoubtedly one of the most important philosophical publications of recent years,’ and Hoernlé, in Mind (1908), remarked that ‘in a book where almost everything is good, it is hard to single out special points for praise.’ In more recent years Brand Blanshard (see his Nature of Thought) was considerably influenced by this book. (Smart 1962: 262)

The obituary omits reference to the unfavourable reviews, of which that in The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Method was typical: Pronouns rarely refer to anything that still lingers in the memory of the reader, so that it is almost invariably necessary to retrace one’s steps and grope for the context. Furthermore, there is no contour or difference of emphasis, so that reading the book is like swimming under water with never a chance to come up and look about. And the style is really regrettable because the book is worth reading. (Perry 1908: 45)

An Adelaide professor of classics at the time is reported as saying that ‘he could never understand Mitchell’s books until he had translated them into Latin’ (Davies 2004: §6). Despite his obscure style, Mitchell was a respected thinker. In 1924 and 1926 he was honoured by an invitation to deliver the Gifford Lectures at the University of Aberdeen. His aim in those lectures was ‘to discover what conclusions about the place and power of minds emerge when due emphasis is laid both upon philosophical and scientific enquiries’ (Acton 1934: 243). That has a very contemporary ring to it, and these days Mitchell is seen by some as a forerunner of developments in contemporary philosophy of mind and cognitive science (Davies 2004: §§3, 5).

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It is noteworthy that two of Mitchell’s books were published while he was vice-chancellor. Remarkably, Mitchell continued in his chair of philosophy between 1916 and 1922 even while holding the office of vice-chancellor. As Smart noted: ‘Even in this period, however, he was working hard at philosophy. He once remarked to me that his duties as Vice-Chancellor took him ten minutes a day’ (Smart 1962: 261). In maintaining his research activity while in office Mitchell was true to Plato’s vision: [The Nocturnal Council’s] membership will be the state’s wisest and most distinguished officials. Its curriculum includes mathematics, astronomy, theology, law and moral theory. Its members are expected to study the problem of the one and the many; they must attempt to look beyond the many dissimilar instances of something pros mian idean, ‘to a single shape/form’; and they must concentrate on the way in which the virtues are individually, distinct, and yet ‘one.’ (Saunders 1992: 467)

Mitchell, in addition to contributing to the academic disciplines of psychology and philosophy of mind, was a philosopher in a broader sense encompassing the study of literature, education, and economics. But he was no Platonic philosopher. The proper introduction to philosophy, he believed, was through empirical psychology, not mathematics. His empiricist streak may have been useful to him in dealing with colleagues who (we may assume) were pretty much like today’s academics, as characterised in a recent article by Sharon Bell (2007): ‘. . . very clever people [who] may turn their very clever minds to negative ends.’ Like Plato, Mitchell devoted his life to education through philosophy in an institutional context. What the Academy was to Plato the University of Adelaide was to Mitchell. Smart observed: ‘More than any other one man he has guided the development of the university’ (Smart 1962: 261). Mitchell was also a successful entrepreneur: ‘obtaining grants for the University; founding the chair of biochemistry; spending large sums on library acquisitions; making many administrative contributions (the neo-Gothic Mitchell Building on North Terrace in Adelaide is named in his honour)’ (Davies 2004: §1). Plato doesn’t tell us much about what sort of person his philosopher-king is. We are only given a list of virtues. By contrast, Smart gives us a very personal portrait of Mitchell: He was a very strong and yet courteous ruler of the university. He practised the virtue of noblesse oblige, for he told me that he did not have a room in the university, but if he wanted to talk to a professor or lecturer he would visit him in his room. . . . He had the capacity to deal with people entirely as man to man, forgetting entirely (indeed it would never have entered his head) any disparity of age and status. There was absolutely no pretentiousness or pomposity about him. (Smart 1962: 262)

Smart refers to ‘his friendliness, his genuine interest in the doings of people and in the affairs of the university, . . . his sense of humour’ (Smart 1962:

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263). Mitchell is supposed to have said his chair was more of a sofa than a chair. This sketch portrays a person of great humanity, one whose passion for understanding the human mind was matched by the respect he showed for individuals in his day-to-day dealings. It also shows Mitchell as a pioneer, trying to find new ways of doing philosophy of mind, and equally trying to find new ways of relating to his academic colleagues as he builds up a tertiary institution at the ends of the earth. In these ways he cuts a figure far removed from Plato’s divinely touched ruler imposing heavenly harmony on his unwitting (and supposedly witless) colleagues. PHILOSOPHER DEANS Long before the Monty Python ‘Philosophers’ Song,’ a portrait of the typical Australian philosopher was sketched by the doyen of Australian historians of philosophy, John Passmore, himself professor of philosophy in the ANU’s Institute of Advanced Studies from 1959 to 1979. The kind of philosophy done in Australia is: ‘direct, clear, forceful, blunt, realist, naturalistic, secular, interested in the world rather than in language and certainly unprepared to identify the two, respectful of science, unwilling to draw a sharp distinction between the conceptual and the empirical, and not conspicuous for its subtlety’ (Passmore 1992: 13). These qualities seem particularly appropriate to the varieties of hardheaded science-based philosophy for which Australia is best known internationally—Australian materialism, Australian realism, and consequentialist ethics. They seem particularly ill-suited to the job of dean. A good dean surely needs highly developed linguistic skills and a modicum of subtlety. As it turns out, the philosophers who have actually occupied positions of management in Australian universities in recent times have ill fitted Passmore’s sketch; nor, with two notable exceptions, have they specialised in those areas of the subject for which Australia is best-known. Frank Jackson is one of the exceptions. Jackson served as director of the Institute of Advanced Studies at ANU (1998–2001) and deputy vice-chancellor (research) (2001). In 2004 he was appointed director of the Research School of Social Sciences. His books include Perception: A Representative Theory (1977), Conditionals (1987), From Metaphysics to Ethics (1997), and The Philosophy of Mind and Cognition (1996) with David Braddon-Mitchell. His years at ANU are recognised for his nurturing what became known as the national elite of analytic philosophers working in philosophy of mind, political philosophy, and ethics. The other notable exception is the recently deceased Robert Pargetter, who was dean of arts (1989–1993) and then deputy vice-chancellor (1991–1996) at Monash University. Pargetter collaborated with several Australian philosophers specialising in the ‘hard-headed’ areas, including Jackson. Together with John Bigelow he authored Science and Necessity (1991). Bigelow recalls: ‘During his time as DVC, Pargetter went on teaching the compulsory first-year course in logic, ‘Arguments,’ and he went on support-

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ing both the analytic Philosophy program and the Continental program in Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies, and the teaching of History and Philosophy of Science as a bonding between the Arts and the Sciences’ (private communication). Recent Australian philosopher-managers have generally specialised in the ‘softer’ (linguistically and culturally oriented) areas of philosophy. In this respect, they don’t fit Passmore’s paradigm of the Aussie philosopher, and by the same token (I would say) they are better suited to the role of Dean. Raoul Mortley—vice-chancellor of the University of Newcastle, then dean of humanities and social sciences and pro vice-chancellor (quality) at Bond University—specialises in history of philosophy, including contemporary European philosophy. His books include From Word to Silence (1986) on the history of Greek philosophical and religious thought, and French Philosophers in Conversation (1991). Paul Crittenden—former dean of arts at the University of Sydney—has worked in the area of moral development, publishing Learning to Be Moral: Philosophical Thoughts about Moral Development in 1990. Richard Campbell—former dean of arts, chair of academic board, and pro vice-chancellor at ANU—brought out his major book Truth and Historicity in 1992. The book, described by Edward Craig as ‘a grand tour and a grand tour de force’ (Craig 1993: 528), is a large-scale contribution to history of philosophy, including philosophy of religion. Robert Elliot—dean of arts and social sciences, then pro vice-chancellor (international relations and development) at the University of the Sunshine Coast—specialises in environmental philosophy. His major book Faking Nature came out in 1997. I was dean of arts for ten years, first at ANU, then at Southern Cross University. During that time three of my books appeared, all on historical or cultural subjects. The last, The Musician as Interpreter, was published in 2007. Christina Slade—dean of humanities at Macquarie University—brought out her book The Real Thing: Doing Philosophy with the Media in 2002. She specialises in philosophy of language and communications theory. As dean she has continued as professor of media theory at the Institute of Media and Re/presentation, Faculty of Arts, University of Utrecht. Philosophers such as these, who have a bent for studying broader humanities and cultural subjects, are apt to see their task as a project of interpretation, a task that deals not with a fixed reality but with a field of possibilities—a field which, moreover, is constantly shifting in response to one’s interventions with it. Such a mind-set is, I think, one that is eminently suited to taking on the management of a human organisation. It is also striking that the topics on which many of these philosophermanagers wrote have been interdisciplinary. Mitchell was as much a psychologist as a philosopher. Mortley and Campbell’s work is as much history as philosophy. Mitchell and Crittenden’s work would be impossible without a good knowledge of psychology. Slade’s is deeply enmeshed in communication theory. My own work is as much musicology as logic. Campbell points to the value of interdisciplinary sympathies:

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Engaging with different disciplines: Here is where being a philosopher was the most helpful. Because ours is such a multi-faceted discipline, it was not difficult to find points of common interest. I could not pretend to understand all that was involved in the various disciplines represented in the Faculty—even less so, all those represented in The Faculties—but I did not feel that they were entirely alien. This was especially useful when serving on, or chairing, selection committees—indeed, having a window through which I could look in on all those other disciplines was one of the more interesting aspects of those jobs. And having some understanding of at least the theoretical issues being debated in the various disciplines helped when I had to think strategically about what might be constructive lines of development for those disciplines, or for the Faculty as a whole. (private communication)

Another striking feature of some recent Australian philosopher-deans is that, unlike most academics, they have not been life-long denizens of the university. Slade commented to me: ‘an understanding of the world outside academia may be a bit thin among our more successful philosophical colleagues. I myself think training as an adjunct to a diplomat has helped my ability to manage (in many senses)’ (private communication). Pargetter left Monash to become principal of Haileybury College (in Melbourne) in 1999. Crittenden had previous experience as a priest. Campbell had experience in the ACT Schools Authority. I had experience in the performing arts. Since 1997 Mortley has been a consultant to higher education and business; he has worked for the Commonwealth Government and the World Bank/IFC, and his clients have included biotech companies and engineering companies. Mortley summarises the value of having experience outside the university: I’ve thought about it on-and-off quite a lot over the years, in particular in the early days at Bond University when the Board was intent on appointing a non-academic Vice Chancellor on the assumption that academics were incapable of the financial management necessary at what was a difficult time. I was acting Vice-Chancellor at the time and attempted to defend the principle of an academic Vice-Chancellor whilst at the same time trying to avoid the charge that I was feathering my own nest. On many occasions I’ve been made to feel that my academic training was a weakness. I don’t use the term ‘professor’ on my business cards (i.e. non-university business) so as not to be written-off. . . . I still believe that academic leadership is the best, provided the person involved has had an opportunity to learn some real skills in management, as opposed to simply appearing to be a sound member of a number of committees. There are too many deep cultural and values issues in the knowledge game for outsiders to be able to adapt, or to be accepted as legitimate. Learning on the street is OK: indeed it’s the best. It’s what happened to me: I was told to close the Science School, fire the staff, sell the equipment, and pay for the redundancies with the monies from the sale. I learnt real quick. (private communication)

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A NON-PLATONIC IDEAL It’s true that one mustn’t forget the importance of financial management. Faculties of arts are vulnerable in the university context. All too often, vicechancellors regard humanities subjects as little more than the personal hobbies of financially unproductive academics lacking in a corporate spirit. The slightest hint of financial mismanagement can be used as an excuse for downsizing. That view of the humanities is grossly ill-informed. In fact, one could base a (non-Platonic) ideal of the philosopher-dean on the civilising power of the humanities, as suggested by some remarks of Melbourne philosopher John Armstrong: ‘To put it in grand terms: the telos, or proper goal, of power is civilisation. Civilisation doesn’t just depend upon material prosperity— although that is a very important factor. Civilisation also depends, crucially, upon spiritual prosperity: upon what we care about, on what we admire, what sorts of ideals and hopes we have’ (Armstrong 2007: 13). He goes on: ‘There’s an important lesson in all this for universities, and particularly for the humanities. . . . The reservoir of intelligence about life that’s located in literature, visual art, philosophy and history has to flow into the practical business of government’ (Armstrong 2007: 13). Mortley elaborates on this theme: Philosophical training can make a real contribution, probably much more than management training, which leads to an approach which is very demeaning to people, and works on the assumption that everybody responds to cheap tricks like teambuilding exercises and awards of various sorts. People appear to accept this because it’s part of the Zeitgeist, but underneath they remain what they are, and the result is a deep cynicism which eats away at an institution. The plain truth, clearly and cogently presented, is a much more healthy diet. So I would pit philosophy against management training. I think ‘management’ produces a deep disconnect between what people say is their view of an organisation and what they really think: underneath they remain surly and unconvinced. It’s a form of postmodern decadence. The most important issue is to discover how philosophy can transition into practical wisdom, which I guess we don’t teach in our philosophy departments, though Aristotle was concerned about it. I guess I’m saying that the philosopher can be a great asset as a Dean provided he or she knows how to take action at the practical time and in an appropriate way. All roads don’t have to lead to hemlock. (private communication)

Paul Crittenden said to me that he thinks of the role of university managers as a political and ethical one, one that combines theory and practice. He emphasised the administrative component of that role. Good administration, he said, is what the ancient Greeks called a technē—a practical skill underpinned by theoretical knowledge. He described good administration as ‘philosophy in action,’ maintaining that ‘the art of administration is grounded in the humanities’ (private communication). In his farewell to the deanship, Crittenden recounted the torments of a protracted faculty restructure, commenting: ‘Undoubtedly, the best thing about the position is the opportunity it gives one to do something to build up the University as a place of learning

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and inquiry in precisely those studies which are at the heart of human understanding and humane values. In present conditions, this is a struggle, but it is worth all the effort’ (Crittenden 1996). The struggle continues, and continues to be worthwhile. I know there is a significant group of academics who have actively resisted invitations to apply for the type of promotion that is seen as a necessary preliminary step to a deanship. They do so consciously in order to avoid the kind of administrative work which they see deans being burdened with. All the same, I believe that philosophers (as well as historians and students of human culture generally) have much to contribute to the civilizing management of universities—especially if they come with knowledge of several disciplines and experience from outside the university. Sir William Mitchell stands as an example of what can be achieved, through his entrepreneurship, his care for his academic colleagues, and his ability to remain grounded in teaching and research—if not in the lucidity of his prose.

Chapter Twenty-two

Becoming Slow: Philosophy, Reading, and the Essay Michelle Boulous Walker

Philosophy involves the patient work of thought. It is, first and foremost, the patience involved in ‘sitting with’ the world—or at least this is what I would like to suggest. This patience goes hand-in-hand with slowness—a space and time that allows thought to emerge and respectfully engage with the world. In some significant ways, this kind of philosophical work resembles serious works of art. Art, too, takes time and patience. For example, we see evidence of this slow, patient work in the photography of Alfred Stieglitz, an artist who understands the importance of a meditative relation with his work. Stieglitz’s art can be seen as a slow and repeated return to the world, one that quite literally takes its own time. In his perceptive essay on Stieglitz’s Lake George years, Peter Conrad captures this well: The art he [Stieglitz] practiced was meditative, a prolonged reverie, not the quick seizure of instants. He was happy to spend 20 years photographing the same stand of poplars, the same configurations of clouds overhead or the same barn. . . . In 1925, he told novelist Sherwood Anderson, ‘I have been looking for years—50 upwards— at a particular skyline of simple hills. . . . I’d love to get down what “that” line has done for me—maybe I have—somewhat—in those snapshots I’ve been doing the past few years.’ (Conrad 2010: 68)

I think of Stieglitz’s art—his patient ‘looking’—as a kind of reading, a slow and meditative reading that shares affinity with the kind of reading that underpins the slow philosophy I am interested in exploring. So, what follows are a serious of preliminary thoughts on how to frame the work on ethics and reading that I am elsewhere undertaking (2006, 2010). These early and yetto-be-developed ideas announce my interest in what I hope, over time, will emerge as a discussion of meditative reading, a reading that comfortably returns, time and time again, to the same terrain—the same book, the same passage, the same title—to ponder its significance with all the benefit of 265

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time, the passage of time, and the silence and space this time affords. I think of this reading as an unfinished reading, an inconclusive reading, a reading that prevaricates, a wondrous reading that manages—despite these returns— to remain open and engaged (present) with what it reads, ready for the possibility of surprise and even revelation. My interest in the pace of this reading—with what it means to do philosophy slowly and patiently—sits rather uncomfortably with what it means for many of us to do philosophy today; that is, to undertake philosophy within an institutional context of speed and haste. What are the implications of this institutional practice for how we read? Does the institution impact on our ability to read well? One way of thinking about these questions is to turn to the definition of philosophy and philosophical practice that emerges in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. 1 In Wittgenstein’s writing we touch upon philosophy as a slow way of life; he writes: ‘[the] slow cure is all important’ (1967: 69). In his lectures on the foundation of mathematics he writes: ‘I am trying to recommend a certain sort of investigation. . . . [T]his investigation is immensely important and very much against the grain of some of you’ (1976: 103). Wittgenstein’s investigation is, above all, protracted. His philosophy is essentially a slow process—one in which the philosopher comes ‘by degrees to a new understanding of the nature of the problems that trouble him [or her]’ (McGinn 1997: 23). 2 Wittgenstein’s ‘therapeutic’ philosophy celebrates a slow and engaged mode of thinking. Indeed, we need to appreciate this point in order to better appreciate why it is that he writes in the ways that he does. Wittgenstein’s later challenge to strictly argumentative modes of thought is part of the ‘protracted’ nature of his project. In Über Gewissheit (On Certainty) he writes: ‘Meine Sätze sind alle langsam zu lessen’ (1984: 531), and this calls us to read his work in a very particular way. Not only does this philosophy need time to emerge, but it must be received slowly as well. ‘Meine Sätze sind alle langsam zu lessen’—‘My sentences are to be read slowly’—we must read Wittgenstein slowly if ‘philosophy’ is to be done. One of the major starting points for my inquiry into reading—and reading well—has been the work of the Lithuanian-born philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. Levinas’ work in and on philosophy is carried out in the context of his broader examination of ethical responsibility and obligation, and it is this context that encourages me to keep the question of ethics at the centre of any investigation of what we philosophers do. In his work, Levinas suggests that what characterises a dominant practice in philosophy is a tendency to all too quickly reduce the world to its own preexisting categories or understandings. Now, this has implications for how philosophers read, and I shall endeavour to point out what these are as I go. To begin with, Levinas suggests that in the production of philosophical knowledge there appears: the notion of an intellectual activity or of a reasoning will—a way of doing something which consists precisely of thinking through knowing, of seizing something and making it one’s own . . . an activity which appropriates and grasps the otherness of the known. A certain grasp. . . . Knowledge as perception, concept, comprehension, refers back to an act of grasping. The metaphor should be taken literally:

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even before any technical application of knowledge, it expresses the principle rather than the result of the future technological and industrial order of which every civilization bears at least the seed . . . that unit of knowledge in which Auffassen (understanding) is also, and always has been, a Fassen (gripping). The mode of thought known as knowledge involves man’s concrete existence in the world he inhabits, in which he moves and works and possesses. (1989: 76) 3

For Levinas, philosophy has ways of doing things, and its dominant mode— the reasoning will—cultivates a kind of understanding that readily grips or grasps what it encounters. 4 We can both see and hear the direct connection between this theoretical understanding and the literal act of gripping in the German language, where fassen (gripping) provides the base and ground for Auffassen (understanding). 5 Levinas’s point here is not minor. He implicates certain philosophical modes of understanding in acts of seizure. The philosopher seizes or grasps the world and this has the effect of containing experience, in effect leaving little to no trace of what has been encountered. Philosophy grasps and contains the world, through the force of conceptual or logical argument, reducing the world to what can already be understood. And the motivation for this kind of containment? The certainty and security of knowledge—of (absolute) comprehension, the certainty and security of the ground of the reasoning will. While we can argue that this is something of a caricature of philosophical practice, I want to suggest that a great deal of what we academic philosophers do is motivated by a need or anxiety to know, and to know fully (in the manner of the neurotic), 6 and that this need finds expression in a certain way of going about reading. I like to think of the reading that accompanies this anxiety as a grasping or containing that results in a kind of stand-over technique. This mode of philosophical reading intimidates by reduction, by demanding that what is read deliver up, yield, or surrender its goods in such a way that ‘knowledge’ is subsequently confirmed. We might say that this mode of reading is a form of containment via assimilation. Simon Critchley, ever the careful reader of Levinas, picks up on this in his following comment: For Levinas, the ontological event which defines and distinguishes the entire philosophical tradition from Parmenides to Heidegger, consists in suppressing all forms of otherness [L’Autrui—the singular other] and transmuting alterity into the Same (le Même). Philosophy is the assimilation of the other into the Same, where the other’s otherness is assimilated and digested like food and drink. (Critchley 1989: 100) 7

Here the other (or text) is hastily consumed, appropriated, and assimilated back to ourselves and our own existing understanding. If the grasp of assimilation and containment in the reasoning will is as problematic as Levinas suggests, what other ways are left open for philosophy? What other ways are there to read? And what might mark such other readings as ethical? Again, Levinas offers us a way of engaging with these questions, at least indirectly, in the sense that he distinguishes between a dominant philosophical approach that imagines that it can finalise and complete a topic (le Dit—the Said), and

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another philosophical response, one that touches upon a theme in such a way as to leave the terrain of understanding both open and open-ended (le Dire— the Saying) (Levinas 1969). 8 This second approach involves an attitude of respect that recognizes the openness of what is there to be read. It involves encounter and engagement, rather than containment and finality; it reorients the philosopher towards what he or she reads, rather than positioning him or her over and above it (Levinas 1998: 142–43). Now, I am glossing Levinas a little here, as what he has to say speaks more directly to an alternative approach to writing philosophy, but this can—and ought, I think—allow us to think, as well, of reading in new and challenging ways. The kind of reading I am hinting at here involves the risk of exposure to the other that Levinas equates with sincerity. And this exposure is precisely ethics. It is an attitude of openness, or we might even say goodness, that occurs despite oneself. Over and above a philosophy that presents itself as finished and complete, ‘impervious to critique,’ I think that a reading influenced by Levinas’s approach would offer ‘the sort of talk that enters into genuine sociality by opening itself to the critique and justification of others’ (Smith 1986: 64). My point is that we can reorient what Levinas has to say about this other way of doing philosophy quite directly towards our question of reading. By doing so, we can say that the very act of reading opens the possibility of an ethical space or encounter. It opens and exposes the one who reads. Indeed, this exposure or encounter would challenge a reading that all too hastily grasps and contains, that finalises and neatly settles a matter. Such a reading would be characterised by a slowness, a preparedness to return to the text and to re-read, not prematurely to have done with the text and finalise it in a reading (or a definitive interpretation). 9 Such a reading would remain open to the text. Such a reading opens philosophy—and thought—to an indeterminate space from which the ethics of a ‘receptive attitude’ or ‘patient attention to the other’ may emerge. As such, philosophy can be enticed to relax its anxiety to know fully, and come that bit closer to being an open, slow, and wondrous engagement with life. But what has all this to do with the form of writing known as the essay? Why, in my title, do I link the question of reading with the essay? Before going on to say something more directly about this, I want to take my time— a kind of philosophical detour, if you like—to say something about the benefits of reading slowly. And in case this detour provokes anxiety in the hearts of some of you, I promise that an exploration of what it means to read slowly will lead us, one way or another, back to the question of the essay. In order to place the story that we have seen Levinas tell about what philosophy is and what philosophers do in context, I want to suggest that alongside a dominating, aggressive, hasty, and anxious mode of philosophy, we can find traces of other paths, other insights, other ways of doing philosophy. There are a whole series of philosophers who have left traces hinting in the direction of reading slowly, tentatively, and in good grace. Of these, Friedrich Nietzsche is perhaps the most vocal, and certainly the best known. Throughout his work one finds memorable passages, such as the following, where he extols the virtues of becoming slow:

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That venerable art which demands of its votaries one thing above all: to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow. . . . But for precisely this reason it is more necessary than ever today . . . in the midst of an age of ‘work,’ that is to say, of hurry, of indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to get ‘everything done’ at once . . . this art does not so easily get anything done, it teaches to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers. (Nietzsche 1982: Preface §5) 10

I find Nietzsche’s description of a reading ‘with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers’ a marvellous counter to the anxiety of a philosophy (world?) that needs ‘to get “everything done” at once,’ a philosophy (world?) that seeks comprehension and certainty with ‘indecent haste.’ It is a counter, too, to a way of doing philosophy that reduces reading to a kind of conflict or struggle—a battle where the text is to be ultimately contained and determined. As Nietzsche himself reminds us, ‘the worst readers are those who behave like plundering troops: they take away a few things they can use, dirty and confound the remainder, and revile the whole’ (1996: 137). 11 Nietzsche’s call ‘to become still, to become slow’—to take time—opens reading to expansive possibilities. 12 Elsewhere, Nietzsche provides a more immediately striking image, when he states: ‘I admit that you need one thing above all in order to practice the requisite art of reading . . . you almost need to be a cow for this one thing and certainly not a ‘modern man’: [and what is this thing?] it is rumination’ (1965: 9–11). We find traces of Nietzsche’s ‘call to slow’ in the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard’s later work on indeterminate judgment. Now I am reading slowly and carefully between the lines when I say this, as Lyotard’s work does not outline what I am suggesting in any straightforward or obvious manner. When Lyotard introduces his notion of an indeterminate judgment he is referring to situations or events where something occurs, with the result that our preexisting ways of understanding are radically disrupted— leaving us with no obvious way to think through what has happened. In such a context, Lyotard urges us to experiment with new ways of engaging with the event, ways that imaginatively open us to what has happened, rather than prematurely resolving and thus containing and ultimately losing the event. Indeterminate judgment involves inventing new ways of understanding, and this process of experimentation and invention takes time. Here, the philosopher engages slowly, so as to avoid a hasty and reductive conceptualisation. This ‘paralogical experimentation’ (Readings 1991: 123) resists the lure of a judgment that both limits and contains. 13 As it moves it hesitates, ever careful not to resolve the event in some convenient and finished form. 14 Imagination takes the place of conceptualisation here, and I think this is what connects Lyotard’s indeterminate judgment with reading. Judgment—in an indeterminate manner—is ongoing. It is a reading, and a slow one at that. The philosophical and political—not to mention juridical—implications of Lyotard’s very important work on indeterminate judgment bring us, if we continue with the imaginary genealogy I am proposing, to the equally significant work of the Brazilian intellectual, Luiz Costa Lima. Costa Lima’s (1996) work on ‘criticity’—a questioning that does not lead directly to judgment—evokes a similarly slow and open engagement that requires imagina-

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tion in the place of conceptual rigor. 15 His point—that the ‘reasonable’ quality of (philosophical or theoretical) thought too often threatens to drown the voice of imagination, to tame it in order to better control and regulate it—sits nicely alongside the concerns that Lyotard has for judgment in general. Costa Lima’s work, more obviously oriented towards questions of reading than Lyotard’s, highlights the fate of imagination and its links with fiction (broadly interpreted) in modern times. Throughout his many works, Costa Lima explores the mechanisms of control that work to institutionalise both reading and thought, and in doing so he gestures towards other possibilities—other ways of reading and engaging that promise to salvage the great potential of thought. 16 Costa Lima’s work is particularly important reading for those of us institutionally based, as it challenges us to think through the implications of a specialised academic reading or critique that departs from reading perhaps more commonly practiced (Lamb 2008). And while he does not say it himself, the reading that Costa Lima both gestures towards and performs in his own work is slow, precisely in the sense of Nietzsche’s reading ‘with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers.’ This slow reading finds quite another inflection in the work of the FrenchBelgian philosopher Luce Irigaray. Irigaray’s (1993) readings of some of the major philosophical texts of the Western tradition provide us with models of engaged and ethical encounter. 17 Indeed, her encounter with Descartes’Passions of the Soul provides us with a reading that offsets the dangers of speed and haste with the slowness of a wonder that constantly stops to ponder what is different. 18 (Nietzsche surfaces momentarily, in Irigaray’s essay, as a luminous guide whose own thought inspires a patient return to wonder. 19) Wonder, the first of the passions, stops us, stills and quietens us long enough to face the other, to slowly engage the other, rather than hurriedly moving on. Wonder opens us to the element of surprise, exposing us to the other’s uniqueness and difference, suspending us between flux and certitude. Wonder provides an open and optimistic engagement with the other—‘doors left open . . . delicate eyes and fingers.’ No anxious search for certainty and containment, but rather an infinite response that patiently reaches out time and time again. The implications for an open and engaged reading seem clear to me here (see Walker 1998c, 2009). I have suggested that Nietzsche’s call to read slowly, to become slow, to avoid haste, to read ‘with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers’ finds sympathetic expression in the work of writers as diverse as Wittgenstein, Lyotard, Costa Lima, and Irigaray. 20 I have spoken briefly—all too briefly in a chapter savouring the delights of slow reading—on how I see this to be the case, and I have re-oriented their work in order to emphasise the links I see with Nietzsche’s call. But what precisely is the nature of this call? What is it in Nietzsche’s work that separates him from the haste of a largely modern philosophy? One way of exploring these questions is to think, at the same time, about Pierre Hadot’s suggestion that in the modern era only a few rare exceptions challenge the legacy of the scholastic tradition by returning to something of the ancients. 21 Hadot writes: The idea of philosophy reduced to its conceptual content has survived to our own time. . . . We encounter it every day in our university courses and in textbooks at

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every level; one could say that it is the classical, scholastic, university conception of philosophy. Consciously or unconsciously, our universities are still heirs of the ‘School’—in other words, of the Scholastic tradition. (2002: 258)

And in an earlier work: From now on, with few rare exceptions like Schopenhauer or Nietzsche, philosophy would be indissolubly linked to the university. . . . This fact is not without its importance. Philosophy—reduced, as we have seen, to philosophical discourse— develops from this point on in a different atmosphere and environment from that of ancient philosophy. In modern university philosophy, philosophy is obviously no longer a way of life or a form of life—unless it be the form of life of a professor of philosophy . . . modern philosophy is first and foremost a discourse developed in the classroom, and then consigned to books. (1995: 271) 22

Hadot is concerned to distinguish ancient philosophy from the discoursebound tradition of scholasticism—to distinguish philosophy as a way of life from philosophy simply as a written discourse. Philosophy ‘today,’ he claims, emerges out of a scholasticism that abstracts itself from life: ‘philosophy in the Middle Ages had become a purely theoretical and abstract reality. It was no longer a way of life’ (Hadot 1995: 270). Elsewhere, Hadot states: If ancient philosophy established an intimate link between philosophical discourse and the form of life, why is it that today, given the way the history of philosophy is usually taught, philosophy is presented as above all a discourse, which may be theoretical and systematic, or critical, but in any case lacks a direct relationship to the philosopher’s way of life? (2002: 253)

Hadot charts stages in what he sees as this gradual de-formation of philosophy, and he concludes this with a discussion of Descartes—a philosopher he sees as best embodying this ‘new’ philosophy that dis-engages with life. 23 The fact that Hadot identifies Nietzsche in this context is interesting. interesting because it suggests that Nietzsche manages to escape the stranglehold of scholasticism by retaining ties (complex as these may be) to an ancient philosophy that remains above all a way of life. 24 Might pace have something to do with the invisible thread that connects Nietzsche back to the ancients? While Hadot’s understanding of the problem is the focus on discourse that emerges from scholasticism on, we might suggest that contemplation and the slow pace required for contemplation to occur are also at issue here. If so, then we need to ask whether there is something in the scholastic tradition that works against a slow practice of philosophy—one that ties us back to the world. Does the abstraction of scholasticism ultimately undermine contemplation of one’s place in the world? Does scholasticism initiate a way of doing philosophy—a methodology—that separates us from philosophy practiced as a way of life? Another way of thinking about this is to separate slow reading from close reading. Slow reading might be distinguished from close reading in the fol-

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lowing ways. Slow reading follows an anti-systematic trajectory and has questioning as its major motivation. It is an open-ended reading that has ethics as its core. In close reading the temporality of slow reading is replaced with a spatiality of proximity. Close reading (or explication de texte) is systematic and formal; it draws its inspiration from the needs of the system— to read systematically and thoroughly. All too often it works to contain what it reads by producing a systematic commentary. Close reading interprets and attributes meaning, while slow reading takes the opportunity to engage in open-ended thought. In this sense, scholasticism—and its modern institutional counterpart—embodies a close reading, one ultimately devoid of contact with the world or the philosopher’s life. This abstract, disengaged reading fails to return us to the world. If philosophy is to regain something of the weight or gravity of ancient practice, we may need to reinstate a pace that permits it to become, once again, a way of life. 25 In light of this, we might return to a practice of reading that would be both slow and meditative; a careful and concerned practice that patiently connects us both to what we read and to how we live. It would be a slow and meditative engagement—a slow, meditative practice that remains attentive to the world. 26, 27 This slow and meditative attention brings us to the work of the German philosopher Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno. In turning to Adorno, I make good on my earlier promise to return to the question of the essay, thus making explicit the links I see between slow reading and the essay form. Adorno’s important essay, ‘The Essay as Form,’ provides an ideal site to begin this exploration. Without ‘hastily’ giving too much away, I will begin by observing that Adorno wakens us to the openness of the essay, the open and uncertain path that the essay takes. What is significant about this openness and uncertainty is the total lack of anxiety that accompanies it. In this we can begin to imagine the links between the essay and reading slowly, links that speak to the potential of philosophy to remain open, receptive and patiently attentive to what it encounters. Written in 1958, ‘The Essay as Form’ can be seen as one of Adorno’s many important contributions to the question of how we might do philosophy differently—hints towards a future philosophy, if you like (both in content and in form). Here, he calls for an alternative approach, one that imagines new ways of writing philosophy and new ways of honouring thought. Paradoxically, this approach is characterised by a form that resists form. Adorno claims that the essay resists all attempts to pre-structure and pre-determine thought, to orient and domesticate it towards pre-determined ends. By refusing to rely on criteria established prior to writing, the essay celebrates an open inquiry—an open-endedness—not often found in traditional philosophical work. This open inquiry is expressed in the very heart of the essay—the slow and persistent questioning that propels inquiry on. Now, for Adorno, I think this questioning is the essay—and it is this questioning that positions writing and thought outside of any systematic demands. 28 The essay form— nowadays seen as a non-academic mode of writing—is concerned more with raising questions than with answering them. It is perhaps concerned with questions that we can only wonder at.

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Of course, Adorno is working with a very particular—we might even say idiosyncratic—idea of what the essay is, 29 and we see this in his claim that the essay refrains from reduction to a principle, and that it does so, in part, by exploring the fragmentary and partial rather than the (imaginary and closed) whole—it deals with what remains unfinished, incomplete. The essay ‘does not strive for closed, deductive or inductive, construction. It revolts above all against the doctrine—deeply rooted since Plato—that the changing and ephemeral is unworthy of philosophy’ (Adorno 2000: 98). Free from the violence of dogma, the essay is deaf to the usual reproach that the fragmentary, the ephemeral, and the random lie somehow outside of legitimate thought. By embracing the fragmentary and the inconclusive, the essay suspends traditional philosophical method in favour of a meandering thought that pursues a path or paths always largely undetermined. This openness ‘takes the anti-systematic impulse into its own procedure’ (2000: 100), and recognises as delusion ‘the longing for strict definitions’ that promises to eliminate ‘the irritating and dangerous elements of things that live within concepts’ (2000: 101). For Adorno, the essay is evidence that ‘thought does not advance in a single direction,’ but rather that ‘aspects of the argument interweave as in a carpet’ (2000: 101). This interweaving or ‘density of texture’ speaks to the layering inherent in the essay—the careful return to a theme in order to texture it again and again. Never quite done, the essay celebrates patiently, attentively the demands of thought. ‘In the essay discreetly separated elements enter into a readable context; it erects no scaffolding, no edifice. Through their own movement the elements crystallize into a configuration’ (2000: 102). 30 Above all, the essay resists the rule-bound tradition of philosophy that Adorno sees inaugurated in 1637 with Descartes’ Discourse on Method. Here, absolute certainty guides the earliest gestures of modern Western theory and science, setting the tone for a method of inquiry that comes to resemble an exhaustive quest for the final word. Philosophy, henceforth, will be the certainty that nothing is omitted. (It is interesting to note the importance both Hadot and Adorno place on Descartes in their respective analyses. 31) As an antidote to this quest, Adorno sees the essay as a kind of anti-methodology that resists the demand (and delusion) of completeness. ‘The essay . . . does not permit its domain to be prescribed . . . it says what is at issue and stops where it feels itself complete—not where nothing is left to say. Therefore it is classed among the oddities. Its concepts are neither deduced from any first principle nor do they come full circle and arrive at a final principle’ (2000: 93). Due to its experimental and open nature the essay is without ground and without security, ‘it must pay for its affinity with open intellectual experience by the lack of security, a lack which the norm of established thought fears like death’ (Adorno 2000: 101). This insecurity is, at least in part, presumed in Adorno’s notion of the configuration. Here the structure, hierarchy, and organisation of the traditional philosophical mode (of conceptuality) is challenged by the essay’s open weave. The configuration marks the work of the essay, or we might even say of thought. The insecurity that is constitutive of the essay and its configuration is, Adorno says, melded to a kind of positive

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guilt—a guilt that arises from the essay’s refusal to conclude, to speak definitively. 32 We can think of this refusal as the essay’s open-endedness, its interest in ‘establishing internal cross-connections’ (2000: 108–9), of coordinating elements ‘rather than subordinating them’ (2000: 109). In practice, these combine to fuel the ongoing work of thought. towards the close of his essay, Adorno cautions that in an age of technological rationality the essay’s time is uncertain: The relevance of the essay is that of anachronism. The hour is more unfavourable to it than ever. It is being crushed between an organized science, on one side, in which everyone presumes to control everyone and everything else—and on the other side, by a philosophy that makes do with the empty and abstract residues left aside by the scientific apparatus—. The essay, however, has to do with that which is blind in its objects—. Therefore the law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy. By transgressing the orthodoxy of thought, something becomes visible in the object which it is orthodoxy’s secret purpose to keep invisible. (Adorno 2000: 110)

According to Adorno, it is precisely the essay’s unfashionable or untimely nature that speaks to its urgency. In an age of increasing technocracy our need for the essay and its anti-systematic resistance is ever more crucial. The essay resists thought’s reduction to what Adorno elsewhere refers to as an instrumental rationality (Adorno and Horkheimer 1979). The law of the innermost form of the essay is heresy and this heresy lies (paradoxically) in the attitude of respect that the essay demonstrates towards thought. By refusing too hurriedly to seize the world, to understand it by containing it, to speak definitively, to summarise, or assimilate it, the essay offers us a future philosophy—one that holds out the hope for a slow engagement with the complexity and ambiguity of the world. 33 Now, all that Adorno has to say here relates to the essay as a kind of writing, but I think we can extend the radical nature of Adorno’s insights considerably if we stretch ourselves to think of the essay in terms of reading. Reading essayistically—or in the mode of the essay—would be a kind of slow, open-ended reading subordinated to no agenda other than thought itself. It would be a reading that risks the uncertainty of not knowing where it might lead, of not relying parasitically on a system that limits the imagination. Indeed, reading essayistically would be precisely imagination. It would be a slow, open-ended rumination 34 that takes its time and returns, time and time again, to the matter at hand. Such a reading would thwart our modern preoccupation with speed and haste, and open us to the wondrous space of a slow engagement that welcomes thought, rather than shutting it out. Just as the essay engages its topic in ways that meander luxuriously through time and space, so too would reading essayistically open philosophy—or thought—to an indeterminate space from which the ethics of a ‘receptive attitude’ or ‘patient attention to the other’ may emerge. 35 This receptive attitude announces a kind of passivity that may seem out of place in modern philosophical practice. At this moment, Adorno’s work on the essay merges with ideas on ‘the enlarging concentration,’ ‘the patience for its matter,’ and the ‘long and unforced gaze upon the object,’ and in doing so challenges

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philosophy to be more than activity and mobilisation. 36 What emerges, I think, is a kind of meditative work—the work of thought that sinks into its relation with the world. This idea of meditational work brings us back to philosophy as a slow way of life, philosophy as a slow sinking into the world—a patient engagement that allows thought its time. What attracts me to the essay as a way of thinking about reading is its open and uncertain nature, its anxiety-free exploration that permits—indeed encourages—experimentation and imagination. The essay makes possible the kind of thought carried out ‘with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers.’ It is a slow and sometimes hesitant reading that cannot be otherwise. The essay, anachronistic (and yet all the more necessary) in a time of speed and haste, opens the space of reading to ethics by providing the leisure and time to engage; the opportunity to question and to continue questioning ‘in the midst of an age of “work.”’ To conclude, then, I am calling for a slow and considered reading—an essayistic reading—that treasures what it reads, a reading that is concerned more with raising questions than with fixing answers. 37 A reading that ignores the demands of system and structure for the sheer pleasure of allowing thought its time. Like the essay, this reading would allow us ‘to go aside, to take time, to become still, to become slow’ so that we might resist the hurry of ‘indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to get “everything done” at once.’ Like the essay, this reading would ‘not so readily get anything done’ but rather would ‘teach [us] to read well, that is to say, to read slowly, deeply—with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and fingers.’ NOTES 1. My thanks to Nick Trakakis for bringing my attention to this aspect of Wittgenstein’s work. 2. McGinn writes: ‘Wittgenstein’s method is aimed, not at producing new, stateable conclusions, but at working on us in such a way as to change our whole style of thinking or way of approaching problems. The concept of therapy emphasizes that Wittgenstein’s philosophical method aims to engage the reader in an active process of work on himself’ (1997: 23). McGinn’s observation is supported by what Pierre Hadot earlier says of Wittgenstein’s work: ‘What motivates the Tractatus is the will to lead the reader to a certain kind of life, and a certain attitude, which, moreover, is fully analogous to the existential options of ancient philosophy: “to live within the present,” without regretting, fearing, or hoping for anything’ (2002: 273). 3. And further: ‘In the realm of truth, being, as the other of thought becomes the characteristic property of thought as knowledge’ (1989: 76). 4. Paul Carter (2009) juxtaposes ‘light writing’—writing concerned with reason, conclusions, and straight lines—with ‘dark writing’—an underwriting found in traces connected with sleep, dreams, shadows, and the unconscious. I am curious about the possibility of a ‘dark reading’—one that shuns the ‘light of reason.’ 5. The very concrete or embodied expression of understanding is typical in the German language. Fassen suggests to seize, grasp, take, (lay) hold of, catch, apprehend, and figuratively: to seize (mentally), grasp, conceive, understand. To form or conceive an idea is ‘einen Gedanken fassen,’ while to compose takes the reflexive form ‘sich fassen.’ In English, I think that we hear this fassen as something akin to ‘fashion,’ as in ‘to fashion an argument.’ Auffas-

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sen has the figurative meaning of to conceive (mentally), understand, comprehend, grasp, interpret, construe, and also read! To be quick of understanding is ‘leicht auffassen’ and to be slow (in the uptake) is ‘schwer auffassen’—‘heavy’ or ‘difficult’ understanding, to our ears. In addition, fassen can be linked with das Fass, which refers to a cask, keg, or barrel—something that contains, and die Fassung refers to the frame—another form of containment. The verb einfassen meas to frame. So understanding, with its myriad links to grasping and containment in the German language, would be juxtaposed with reading, in my work, as an open, receptive, and open-ended practice. 6. Anxiety motivates much of the move to reduce, calculate, and know, that is, to diminish the impact, meanings, and possibilities of the text—perhaps even to diminish the troubling ambiguity of life. Philosophy, seen from a psychoanalytic perspective, is something of a neurotic discourse of mastery. In Die Zukunft einer Illusion (1927), Freud characterises philosophy in terms of the neurotic structure of its thought, that is, the neurotic imposition of rationality in order to displace uncertainty or lack of control. The psychoanalytic notion of the ‘unconscious’ challenges any philosophical certainty or truth about the human condition and encourages us to open ‘truth’ to a more open-ended engagement and inquiry. Truths are at best perhaps partial truths, rather than absolute ones. This suggests the validity of partial readings or conditional ones (Freud 1961). 7. For a discussion of knowledge as an act, rather than as food for consumption, see Le Dœuff (2003: 34–39). 8. Steven G. Smith describes le Dit as ‘the structurally coherent text created by language’ and le Dire as ‘the primordially generous, nonthematic upsurge of communication.’ He goes on: ‘“Saying” belongs to the horizon of sociality that is incommensurable with the text of the “Said” but is its origin and presupposition’ (1986: 61). 9. For my discussion of what Robert Bernasconi and Simon Critchley refer to as a Levinasian hermeneutics, ‘defined by its readiness for re-reading,’ see Walker (2006: 225). 10. In the same preface Nietzsche comments on the significance of his own scholarly itinerary, writing: ‘It is not for nothing that one has been a philologist, perhaps one is a philologist still, that is to say, a teacher of slow reading.’ My thanks to Brentyn Ramm for reminding me of this passage. 11. On the question of reading as conflict and battle, I argue that typically ‘combative’ readings in much contemporary philosophical work function to close down possibilities for thought by containing what is being read in simple statements that reduce the complexity and ambiguity at play. Opposing or criticizing a text all too often becomes an excuse to read poorly—or unethically—glossing over inconvenient ambiguities that may impede a neat and tidy resolution. See Walker (2006: 237, n. 58). 12. In her work, Kelly Oliver (1995: 20) argues that there are ‘manly’ implications that need to be considered in relation to Nietzsche’s ‘genealogical’ reading, his ‘reading well’: ‘Genealogy is a way of reading that opens on to the other of the text. Yet within Nietzsche’s genealogy, that other is not permitted to be feminine.’ 13. Readings states: ‘We must try to judge without importing criteria from other genres— such as that of theory’ (1991: 107). 14. For a discussion of how indeterminate judgment links with Lyotard’s notion of injustice and the differend, see Walker (1998b). 15. Lima uses the term ‘criticidade’ (criticity) in order to distinguish the act of questioning from both judging (critique) and criticism (cf. translator’s note in Lima 1996: ix). In The Limits of Voice, Lima follows Georg Lukács’s argument in Soul and Form (1911 [2010]), speaking of a ‘judgment but not a verdict’ (as in the case with a system). The emphasis here is on the process of judgment rather than a final resolution or verdict (Lima 1996: 62). The issue of judgment arises again in Lima (1988: 6). 16. For a recent collection of Costa Lima’s works in English, see (Lamb 2008). 17. Elsewhere, I have discussed the significance of her reading of Diotima’s speech in Plato’s Symposium—also in An Ethics of Sexual Difference—suggesting that its very openness and readiness to return to the text and re-read demonstrates an ethics that we might do well to consider (Walker 2006).

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18. In ‘Wonder: A Reading of Descartes, The Passions of the Soul’ (an essay in Irigaray 1993), Irigaray writes: ‘And doesn’t the machine unceasingly threaten to destroy us through the speed of its acceleration?’ (1993: 74). We might think of this in terms of a juxtaposition of ‘speed reading’ with a ‘wondrous’ or ‘slow’ reading. 19. Irigaray writes: ‘Could Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil signify something of a return to wonder?—Of losing one’s gravity—In which the stake is to wonder again and again without ever stopping. To steer incessantly towards the unpublished. Also to turn over everything that has already been impressed, printed, in order to liberate its impact and find its impetus on this side and beyond’ (1993: 80, 81). 20. To this list we could add Sigmund Freud whose psychoanalytic interpretation—a slow process if ever there was one—gestures towards a reading that admits only partial and openended truths. 21. I thank Matthew Lamb for helping me to make this connection. See Lamb (2010). 22. Hadot suggests that aspects of Montaigne’s, Descartes,’ and Kant’s work remain ‘ancient,’ and how—in certain regards—the work of others might also be included in this list, for example Schopenhauer, Emerson, Thoreau, Kierkegaard, Marx, Nietzsche, Bergson, Wittgenstein, and Merleau-Ponty (1995: 270). ‘Throughout the history of Western philosophy, we note a certain permanence and survival of the ancient notion. From the Middle Ages to today, some philosophers have remained faithful to the vital, existential dimension of ancient philosophy’ (1995: 261). Hadot claims that Montaigne’s Essays ‘show the philosopher trying to practice various modes of life proposed by ancient philosophy: “My trade and my art is living” [Montaigne 1962: 359]’ (1995: 263). 23. However, Hadot qualifies this characterisation of Descartes, pointing to those aspects of the Meditations that retain a link with ancient spiritual practice. See Hadot (2002: 263–65), where he distances himself from Foucault’s claim that Descartes initiates the ‘theoreticizing’ of philosophy. 24. Hadot notes: ‘To use the Stoic model and the Epicurean model—successively or alternately—was a way of achieving a certain balance in life for Nietzsche—’ (2002: 277). In this context, Hadot cites the following passage from Nietzsche: ‘So far as praxis is concerned, I view the various moral schools as experimental laboratories in which a considerable number of recipes for the art of living have been thoroughly practiced and lived to the hilt. The results of all their experiments belong to us, as our legitimate property’ (Nietzsche 1973: 552–53, cited in Hadot 2002: 277). 25. Slow reading is work that is grounded in the body. Here the philosopher takes his or her time, pausing to look up from the page; taking the time to do so, rather than remaining with one’s head buried in the page, as in close reading. See Gumbrecht (2004: 133–52, 2003). 26. This brings to mind Simone Weil’s work on attention, waiting, and grace. Weil writes: ‘Attention consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty—Above all our thought should be empty, waiting, not seeking anything—’ See Weil (1951: 56). My thanks to Carole Ramsey for this passage from Weil. For a discussion of ethics in the work of Weil and Levinas, see Walker (2002). 27. Alongside meditation and attention, we can also place surrender. In a recent book on reading the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, Stephanie Dowrick (2010) speaks of a surrendered reading as an uncluttered, unencumbered reading; a reading that requires us to be both present and still. Poetry demands such a reading, and it is well worth thinking about what benefits such a surrendered reading might bring to philosophy as well. 28. The essay ‘draws the fullest consequences from the critique of the system’ (Adorno 2000: 98). 29. Adorno mentions that in Germany the essay is ‘decried as a hybrid; that it is lacking a convincing tradition—the academic guild only has patience for philosophy that dresses itself up with the nobility of the universal, the everlasting—’ (2000: 92). He goes on to give his own positive description of the essay as something open, unfinished, and contingent, although he acknowledges that historically there exist many examples of failed or journalist essays (2000: 94–95). 30. This image of elements crystallizing into a configuration resonates with Simone Weil’s work on waiting and attention. The slow process of crystallisation (crystal formation) shares

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something with Weil’s attentive, meditative thought, and I think we can borrow this as an image for reading. See note 137 for a brief discussion of Weil’s work. 31. While Hadot’s initial portrayal of Descartes’ work shares something in common with Adorno’s account of the Descartes that emerges in A Discourse on Method, Hadot’s later discussion of the Meditations indicates an entirely different aspect of Descartes as a philosopher—one linking him back to the ancients. Indeed, Hadot finishes this discussion by suggesting that A Discourse on Method has, in part, a recognisably Stoic orientation. He concludes: ‘The extent to which the ancient conception of philosophy is present in Descartes is not always adequately measured’ (2002: 265). 32. Adorno writes: ‘The essay comes to no final conclusions and makes explicit its inability to do so by parodying its own a priori; it is then saddled with the guilt that is actually incurred by those forms that erase every trace of arbitrariness’ (2000: 105). 33. Adorno’s ‘Essay as Form’ can be read alongside Luiz Costa Lima’s (1996) work linking the essay with criticity, and I do so in a forthcoming paper ‘Reading and Control.’ Here I explore Lima’s work on the misfit between ‘reasonable reading’ and ‘criticity’—or ‘imagination.’ 34. Following Nietzsche, we can think of slow reading as a kind of rumination, and this brings to mind the slow digestion and thinking-over of thought. We ruminate and in doing so allow ourselves time to think over what we read. We might think of slow reading in terms of the slow movement generally, which acknowledges that ‘speed has helped to remake our world in ways that are wonderful and liberating’ but that our current addiction to haste is now verging on the catastrophic (Honoré 2004). The Slow Food Movement promotes the very rumination that I am celebrating here, and to juxtapose these two—slow reading with slow food—is to bring reading and eating into an interesting dialogue. Levinas has something indirectly to say about eating in his work on understanding. While he explores metaphors of seizure and grasping, he also talks about the relation of totality characterised by a ‘living from’ or ‘absorption and incorporation of the other.’ Here the ‘bonne conscience’ is something of a ‘bonne vivant,’ eating well and taking the world into itself—incorporating the other. This consumption is at odds with Levinas’s depiction of the relation of infinity or desire, where the other remains at an ethical distance, not digested or assimilated as ‘good soup.’ Levinas writes: ‘The other arrests the rhythm of my life by its ability to disrupt the familiarity of “living from” the world, from nourishing myself and attending to my daily needs.’ Ethics is the distance that stops me from assimilating the world to myself. (For an excellent discussion of Levinas and eating, see Hirst 2004.) 35. These are terms used by Ute Guzzoni in her very useful discussion of Adorno on reason. Here she addresses the ‘character of passivity and receptivity’ that might challenge traditional modes of reason. ‘A reason capable of evading the modern tendency towards calculation and mastery would neither stand over its object, nor try to embody and manifest itself through it. It would instead move with its object, listening to it and remaining open to the other’s speaking and asking; i.e. the receptive attitude of a patient attention and an acceptance of the other’s attitude and action’ (Guzzoni 1997: 33–34). 36. Guzzoni links Adorno’s work here with Peter Sloterdijk’s more Asian-inspired ‘ascendance to silence in force’ and Heidegger’s Gelassenheit. She writes: ‘This passivity is a lettingbe and letting-happen, more exactly a letting-come-forth, a giving-birth and a ‘transgression from a mode of being prepared to do anything to one that is calm and collected, that is gelassen’ (Guzzoni 1997: 37). 37. Following Lukács’s argument on the essay, Costa Lima writes: ‘In the essay—questions burn so brightly that there is no space for them to resolve into form—[Thus the essay] has become the genre of problematization par excellence, its own richness will not allow it to assume a form: it remains protean, formless’ (Lima 1996: 61, 62). Later, in response to Adorno’s work on the essay, Lima proclaims: ‘It is precisely because of its affinity with criticity that the essay is marked more by the forcefulness of its questions than by the unerringness of its answers. That is why the essay is the form that, though not identified with the literary experience, is closest to it. This closeness becomes more visible when we see literature as the discourse that questions what a society considers to be true—that is, when we see literature as the verbal actualization of fictional discourse’ (1996: 63).

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Index

Absolute Idealism, 54 Adorno, T., 272–274, 277, 278 Alexander, Samuel, 4–5, 6, 42 Almond, Philip, 134 Alston, William, 15 analytic philosophy, 159, 190–191, 239, 241–243, 248–252 ancient Greece, 1, 4, 8 Anderson, Elizabeth, 114 Anderson, Francis, 40 Anderson, John, 5, 40, 42, 54–56, 62, 63–64, 177–178, 69, 177, 179, 187, 194. See also Andersonians ; Sydney Push Anderson, William, 178–179, 186 Andersonians, 5 animal liberation, 129, 130 animism, 206, 209 animist materialism, 206 Anschutz, R. P., 174, 178, 179, 186 Anscombe, Elizabeth, 70 Ansell-Pearson, Keith, 243 Anselm, 20, 53 Anstey, Peter, 171 anthropomorphism, 208, 209 Appadurai, Arjun, 26 applied ethics, 77 applied philosophy, 48, 122 Aquinas, Thomas, 111, 214 Arendt, Hannah, 33–35, 165 Aristophanes, 256

Aristotle, 3, 111, 139, 236 Armstrong, David, 3, 5, 6, 46, 50, 54, 64, 73, 179 Armstrong, John, 263 Armstrong, La Touche, 50 art, philosophy of, 129 Asian philosophy: engagement with, 212, 213–214; ethics and compassion, 219–220; key concerns, 214; metaphysics of emptiness, 218–219; origins of Eastern philosophies, 212; overview, 214–217; as philosophy, 212–213 Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal, 146 atheism, 13–14, 54–55, 55–56, 57, 58, 83 Atkins, Kim, 71 Augustine, 16, 111, 214 Australasian Association of the History and Philosophy of Science, 70 Australasian Association for Phenomenology and Social Philosophy, 162 Australasian Association for Phenomenology and Social Science, 162 Australasian Association for Philosophy, New Zealand Division, 189–190 Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy (ASCP), 162, 163 Australian Association for Logic (AAL), 224 299

300

Index

Australian Materialism, 46–49 Australian Realism, 2, 8–9, 10, 46, 187 ‘Australian school of philosophy’, 3, 5 Avicenna, 214 Badiou, Alain, 163 Baier, Annette, 44, 69, 123, 171, 174, 186, 194, 195 Baier, Kurt, 44, 47 Baillie, Patricia, 70 Baker, A. J. (Jim), 187 Baltzly, Dirk, 47 Barclay, Linda, 77 Barison, David, 163 Battye, Jim, 188 Baumann, Zygmunt, 26 Beall, J. C., 233 Beaney, Michael, 241 Beauvoir, Simone de, 74, 75 Beck, Ulrich, 28 Beeby, C. E., 178, 194 Belich, James, 173, 180 Belnap, Nuel, 231, 235 Benjamin, Andrew, 162 Benjamin, Walter, 81 Bennett, Jonathon, 171, 172, 174–175, 185 Benz, Ernest, 209 Bergson, Henri, 162, 239, 240, 241, 249, 253 Bestor, Tim, 188 Bible, the, 15, 16, 17, 18, 23 Bigelow, John, 230, 248, 260, 254 bioethics, 122 bioregionalism, 27 Bishop, John, 186 Blackburn, Simon, 149, 256 Bloomsbury group, 176 body, the, 116–120, 121–122 Boulger, Edward Vaughn, 139 Bowell, Tracy, 187 Bradley, Ray, 186, 231 Brady, Ross, 224 Braidotti, Rosi, 75, 162 Branden, Nathaniel, 92 Brandom, Robert, 164 Brazier, Amos, 50 Brennan, Christopher, 163 Brennan, Gerard, 65 Brien, Alan, 188

British Idealists, 54 British Moralists, 171 Broad, Jacqueline, 110 Brock, Gillian, 122 Brown, Deborah, 129 Bruno, Giordano, 17 Buchdahl, Gerd, 46 Buddhism, 2, 7, 142, 216, 217, 218–219, 219–220 Bunder, Martin, 223 Burchill, Louise, 163 bureaucracy, and the public realm, 32–36 Burns, Lynda, 76 Burstall, Tim, 50 Butler, Judith, 124 Calude, Christian, 223 Campbell, Keith, 46 Campbell, Richard, 53, 261, 262 Carnap, R., 183, 239, 242 Carroll, Lewis, 246 Carter, Paul, 275 Cartesianism, 119 Catholic Worker (magazine), 44, 50 Central State Materialism, 46, 128 Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE), 48, 70 Centre for Philosophy and Public Issues, 48 Chadha, Monima, 70 Chalmers, David, 230 Charlesworth, Max, 44, 45, 49, 50, 53 childhood, 26 Chinese philosophy, 216–217 Chipman, Lachlan, 71 Christensen, Bruin, 163 Christian fundamentalism, 17, 20 Christianity, 1, 214 Cicero, 256 classical logic, 134 Clemens, Justin, 163, 164 Clendinnen, John, 46 Coady, Tony, 68 Coates, Barbara, 70 cognitive science, 143 Colebrook, Claire, 75 Colyvan, Mark, 135, 233 compassion, 219–220 Confucianism, 217

Index Continental philosophy, 49, 159–162, 163–167, 239, 240–243, 244–247, 248 Copeland, Jack, 185 Corcoran, Steven, 163 cosmopolitanism, 28, 34 Crawford, Beryl J., 69 creationism, 204–205 Cresswell, Max, 175, 186, 226 Crick, Francis, 102 Critchley, Simon, 160, 267 Crittenden, Paul, 261, 262, 263 Crogan, Patrick, 163 Crossley, John, 223 Crosthwaite, Jan, 71 Crowell, Steven, 163 Cullity, Garrett, 141, 143 Curthoys, Jean, 72, 73, 75 Cushan, Anna, 71 Daoism, 217 Darwall, Stephen, 148 Darwin, Charles, 17 Davey, Constance M., 69 Davidson, Barbara, 71 Davidson, Donald, 46 Davidson, John (Rev.), 139 Davies, Martin, 229 Davies, Marty, 140 Davies, Steve, 186 Davoren, Jen, 223 Dawkins, Richard, 55, 83, 84, 151 Deakin, Alfred, 40 Deakin University, 45, 49 Deane, William, 65 Deep Ecology, 199 Deep Green Theory, 199 Deism, 15, 23 Deleuze, G., 163, 245, 246, 249, 252 Deloria, Vine, 209 Dennett, Daniel, 83, 106–107, 151, 204 Deranty, Jean-Philippe, 163 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 165, 166, 245, 249 Descartes, R., 107, 111, 119, 202, 273 Deutscher, Max, 162 Deutscher, Penelope, 75 Deveson, Anne, 96 Devitt, Michael, 73 dialetheism, 232–234, 235 Diamond, Jared, 197

301

Diprose, Ros, 74, 121–122, 163, 124 Dix, Anne, 73 Dodds, Sue, 71, 77, 122 Donagan, Alan, 44 Dostoyevsky, F., 86 Dowe, Phil, 135 Dowrick, Stephanie, 277 Dreyfuss, Hubert, 253 Dunn, J. Michael, 231 During, Elizabeth, 71 Dutton, Denis, 185 Dwyer, Luciana, 71 Dyason, Diana Joan, 70 early modern philosophy, 171 Eastern philosophies, 212, 213–214. See also Asian philosophy Easton, Brian, 194 ecoanthropology, 206 ecofeminism, 77 ecohumanities, 198, 209 Edwards, Paul, 44 Einsteinian physics, 239, 242 Elliot, Robert, 130, 261 Ellis, Brian, 4, 5, 45, 46 emergence theory, 4 environmental ethics, 48, 77 environmental philosophy, 2, 129–131, 198, 199–208 epiphenomenalism, 103–108 Escher, M. C., 142 essay, the, 268, 272–274, 277, 278 essentialism, 3–4 ethical realism, 65 ethics, 27–28, 47–48, 65. See also compassion ; justice ethics of engineering, 187 Eucken, Rudolf, 41, 47, 162 Euclid, 13 existentialist feminism, 74 Extreme Demand, 143 Falk, W. D., 44 Feltham, Oliver, 163 feminism, 49, 73–74, 75–76 feminist ethics, 121 feminist philosophy: Australasian contribution, 109–110; critique of history of philosophy, 110–114;

302

Index

critique of social contract theory, 112–114; dangers of male-centredness, 200; and ethics, 121–123; first course taught, 72; gender-based inequality, 114–115; liberal feminism, 114–116; and notion of ‘sexual difference,’ 11.16-11.18, 116; representations of femininity, 120; representations of women’s embodiment, 116–120; sex, gender and essentialism, 116; sex/ gender distinction, 117–118 Feyerabend, P., 169, 186 Findlay, John, 183 Finnish philosophers, 175 Fish, Bill, 188 Fletcher, Michael Scott, 127 Flinders University, 144 Flinn, Isabel M., 69 Flynn, Jim, 171, 173 Foo, Norman, 223 formal logic, 47 Forrest, Peter, 48 Forster, E. M., 107 Foucault, M., 119, 121, 166–167, 198 four-dimensionalism, 7, 243, 248, 251, 254 Fox, John, 3 Franklin, James, 61, 69 Fraser, Peter, 173, 178, 194 free will: and determinism, 100–101; and epiphenomenalism, 103–108; and existence of the self, 102–103; and threats from sciences of the mind, 99 Freud, Sigmund, 85 Fricker, Miranda, 253 Friedman, Michael, 253 Friedman, Milton, 183 Fuhrmann, Andre, 231 Fukuyama, Francis, 26, 34 fundamentalism, 17, 20, 82, 83, 86–87, 154 Gaita, Rai, 44, 47 Galileo, 17 Gallois, André, 129 Gamble, Denise, 73 Gare, Aron, 130 Garner, Bill, 51 Gasking, Douglas, 43, 44, 47, 127–128, 136 Gasking, Elizabeth, 70

Gatens, Moira, 73, 74, 117, 118–119 Gelder, Timothy van, 235 Gibbon, Edward, 170 Gibbs, Benjamin, 187 Gibson, Alexander (‘Sandy’), 41, 42, 44, 45, 47, 50, 70 Gibson, W. R. Boyce, 41–42, 162 Giddens, Anthony, 28 Ginnane, William, 162 Girle, Rod, 131, 132, 224, 231, 235 Gledhill, Bobby, 73 Glendenning, Simon, 160 globalization, 25–28 Goddard, Len, 47, 224 Godlovitch, Glenys, 188 Godlovitch, Stan, 188 Godwin, William, 171 Goldblatt, Rob, 223 Goldsmith, M., 171 Gore, Rajeev, 223 Gosse, Philip, 16 Gray, John, 26, 27, 32 Green, Karen, 71, 110 Greer, Germaine, 64, 68, 177 Grey, William (ne Godfrey-Smith), 130, 131 Griffiths, Paul, 135 Grigg, Russell, 163 Grossman, Joseph, 186, 194 Grosz, Elizabeth, 73, 74, 75, 119–120, 162, 163 growing universe theory, 253 Grubb, Mabel H., 69 Gunn, Alistair, 187 Gunner, Don, 50 Guzzoni, Ute, 278 Hadot, Pierre, 270–271, 273, 277, 278 Hamilton, William, 40 Harré, Laila, 173 Harré, Rom, 173 Hart, Kevin, 162 Harvey, Graham, 206 Harwood, Elsie, 69 Hazen, Allen, 226–227, 235 Hearn, W. E., 39 Hegel, W. H. G., 111, 164, 184, 244 Heidegger, Martin, 101, 239, 240, 242, 244, 249, 253

Index Held, Virginia, 114 Herbst, Peter, 44 Hilpinnin, Risto, 131 Hinckfuss, Ian, 129, 131, 132 Hindu philosophy, 216 Hinduism, 2 history of philosophy, 74, 75, 110–114, 169–172, 173, 176–177, 180 Hitchens, Christopher, 83, 84, 85 Hjorth, Greg, 223 Honoré, Carl, 244 Hughes, George, 175, 179, 186 Hughes, Walter Watson, 139 human nature, and government, 1 human/nature dualism, and reductionism, 201–203 Humberstone, Lloyd, 226–227, 229, 235 Hume, David, 32, 111, 171 Hursthouse, Rosalind, 173, 174, 186 Husserl, Edmund, 162, 239, 240, 249 Hyde, Dominic, 131, 133, 231, 233 idealism, 41–42, 54 identity theory of mind, 128, 140–141, 144 inconsistency theory, 142 indeterminate judgment, 269, 276 Indian philosophical traditions, 216 Indigenous peoples and justice, 77, 123, 165–166, 167, 182 informal logic, 47 Ingold, Tim, 206 Inwagen, Peter van, 15 Irigaray, Luce, 74, 120, 270, 124, 277 Is-Ought question, 169, 176, 185 Islam, 1 Islamic fundamentalism, 17, 20 Islamic philosophy, 214 Jacka, Liz, 72 Jackson, A. C. (‘Camo’), 44, 43, 44, 46, 70 Jackson, Anne, 46, 70 Jackson, Frank, 5, 46, 230, 260 Jackson, Sarah E., 68 Jainism, 216 James, William, 41, 54, 254 Jesus myth, 18, 23 Johnson, Pauline, 75 Johnston, Mark, 44 Jones, Karen, 70, 77, 123

303

Jonson, Elizabeth Prior, 70, 73 Jorgenson, Jenny, 70 Judaism, 1 Judge, Brenda, 76 justice, 77, 115, 122, 165–166, 167, 182 Kamenka, Eugene, 54 Kant, Immanuel, 2, 111, 165, 166, 236, 248 Kelsey, Jane, 173 Kennett, Jeanette, 70, 77, 123 Kerr, John, 64 Keynes, Lord, 176 King, Michael, 173, 175 Kittay, Eva, 114 Knight, Helen, 70 Knopfelmacher, Frank, 72 Knowles, Marion, 70 Kraut, Richard, 257 Kripke, Saul, 185 Kristeva, Julia, 74 Kroon, Fred, 186 Kyle, Marquis, 127, 128 La Caze, Margie, 76 La Trobe University, 45, 48, 71 Lacan, Jacques, 86, 118 Lacey, Hugh, 46 Lacoue-Labarthe, Philippe, 163 Lamb, Roger, 129, 130, 131 Langton, Rae, 70, 122 Langtry, Bruce, 48 Laurie, Henry, 39, 40, 47, 49–50 Le Doeuff, Michele, 160 Leiter Report, 135, 136 Leopold, Aldo, 27 Levinas, E., 165, 166, 245, 266–268, 254, 278 Lewis, David, 5, 6, 40 liberal Catholicism, 50 liberal education, 29–30 liberal equality, 172 liberal feminism, 114–116 liberalism, 176 Libet, Benjamin, 105–106, 108

304

Index

Lima, Luiz Costa, 269, 270, 276, 278 Lincoln University, 188 Lloyd, Genevieve, 71, 74, 75, 110–112, 114, 162 Locke, Don, 171, 173 Locke, Elsie, 173 Locke, John, 172 Locke, Keith, 173 logic, 131–134, 142, 175, 223–224, 235, 235–236. See also modal logic ; NonClassical Logic ; temporal logic logical positivism, and time, 239, 241–243 love: and morality, 92, 94; openendedness, 91; parental love, 94, 95–96; as perception of another as a self like us, 93–94; phenomenology of, 92–94; and psychological visibility, 92; qualities view, 89–91; relational properties, 91; romantic conception, 92; the ‘trading up’ objection, 90 Lycos, Kim, 162 Lyotard, Jean-Francois, 243, 269 McCloskey, H. J. (John), 44, 45, 47, 70 McCloskey, Mary, 69, 70, 72 MacColl, San, 71 MacCulloch, Doris E., 69 McCumber, John, 254 Macdonald, Cynthia, 185 McDowell, John, 164 Mackenzie, Catriona, 70, 71, 74, 123 Mackie, J. L., 54, 55, 57, 57–58, 183 Mackie (née Smart), Alwynne, 71 Macquarie University, 71 McRobbie, Michael, 130, 131, 231 McTaggart, John, 239, 241 Malinas, Gary, 129, 130, 131 Malpas, Jeff, 35, 163, 253 Mandeville, Bernard, 171 Mannison, Don, 128, 129, 130, 144 Mares, Ed, 180, 186, 231, 232, 235 Martin, Charlie, 142 Martin, Errol, 131, 231 Marx, Karl, 84–85, 184, 244 Marxism, 184 Massey University, 188, 189–190 materialism, 62, 63 materialist theory of mind, 6 Mathews, Freya, 27, 48, 71, 77

Mauss, Marcel, 119 Mayo, Elton, 126 meditative reading, 265–266, 268 Medlin, Brian, 128, 131, 144 Melbourne ‘drift’, 50 Mellor, Hugh, 254 ‘Memorial Service’ (Mencken), 11, 152 Mencken, H. L., 11–12, 152 Merleau-Ponty, M., 118, 119, 121 metaphysical naturalism, 23 metaphysics, 1, 2–4, 5–6, 7, 9, 10, 48, 218–219 Meyer, Robert K., 224, 231–232, 235 Miller, Edmund Morris, 40, 50 mind, philosophy of. See philosophy of mind mind/body dualism, 6, 119, 120, 202 Mitchell, Dorothy, 67, 70, 72, 77 Mitchell, William, 39, 40, 68, 126, 139–140, 258–260, 261, 264 modal logic, 131–132, 185, 186, 224–230, 235 modernist reductionism, 202–203 Monash University, 44, 67, 70 Monash University Centre for Bioethics, 48 monotheism: concept of God, 12–13; and Creationism, 209; credibility of theistic gods, 12; existence of God, 14, 18, 20–23, 146–148; Freud on origins of religious belief, 86; and fundamentalism, 87; ‘God the father’ and social law, 86–87; God of revelation, 15–20; links to fundamentalism, 82; moral credentials of God, 19–20. See also Bible, the Monro, D. H. (Hector), 44, 47, 171 Montgomery, Hugh, 186 Moore, Andrew, 182 Moore, G. E., 42, 56, 176 moral psychology, 129 moral theory, 47–48 Morris, Meaghan, 162 Mortensen, Chris, 131, 142, 143, 233 Mortley, Raoul, 261, 262, 263 Mulgan, John, 173, 179 Mulgan, Tim, 173, 174 Murdoch, Doug, 185 Musgrave, Alan, 6, 175, 178, 183, 195

Index Nancy, Jean-Luc, 163 natural law, 65–66 Naturalism, 5, 23 Neander, Karen, 73, 77 neo-liberalism, 25, 28, 32 Nerlich, Graham, 142–143 New Zealand philosophers, 173–186, 192–193, 194 Newman, Cardinal, 29–30, 36, 170 Newman Society, 50 Newton-Smith, Bill, 248 Newtonians, 218 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 268–269, 270, 271, 276 Nola, Robert, 175, 186, 190 Nolan, Daniel, 131 Non-Classical Logic, 224, 230–234, 235 Norris, Christopher, 162 Nozick, Robert, 92, 115 Nussbaum, Martha, 114 O’Brien, Gerard, 143 Oddie, Graham, 182, 183, 185, 188, 195 O’Dwyer, Luciana, 162 Okin, Susan Moller, 115, 171 Oliver, Kelly, 276 Onfray, Michel, 83 Oppy, Graham, 48, 53 Ormond, Paul, 50 Orr case, 45, 76, 51 Orr, Sydney Sparkes, 45 O’Shaughnessy, Brian, 44, 46 O’Sullivan, Vincent, 179 Other, the, 165–166 paraconsistent logic, 133, 232–234, 235 Pargetter, Robert, 260, 262 Parker, Olga, 69 Partridge, P. H., 166, 167 Passmore, John, 54, 57, 129, 171, 183, 199, 260 Pataki, Tamas, 83 Pateman, Carole, 112–114 Patterson, John, 182, 188 Pattison, A. S. Pringle, 40 Patton, Paul, 162, 163 Paul, George A., 43–44 Perrett, Roy, 182, 188, 195 Perszyk, Ken, 192

305

Petherbridge, Danielle, 163 phenomenology, 162 Phillips, James, 163 philosophical animism, 204, 205 philosophical atheism, 55, 57, 58 philosophical practice, Levinas’ view, 266–268 philosophy: impact of Christianity upon, 214; impact of scientific revolution, 215; nature of, 212; and the patient work of thought, 265–266; philosophy of art, 129; philosophy of the body, 119, 121–122; philosophy of mind, 140–141, 230; philosophy of religion, 15, 53, 57, 23; from a psychoanalytic perspective, 276; public influence of, 49–51; as a slow way of life, 266; style of argument, 190–191. See also fundamentalism ; monotheism ; religion ; religious belief philosophy of science, 129, 175 philosophy of time, 239–243 philosophy of video games, 188 Pierce, Charles Sanders, 41 Pigden, Charles, 173, 181, 194 Place, Ullin, 140, 143 Plantinga, Alvin, 15, 56, 57 Plato, 111, 139, 172, 184, 202, 255–257 Plumwood, Val, 27, 71, 77, 117–118 Pnueli, Amir, 185 political philosophy, 47 politics of time, 239, 243, 244–247 Popper, Karl, 6, 127, 136, 170, 172, 173, 175, 176, 180, 183, 184, 194, 195 postmodernism, 190 poststructuralism, 254 pragmatism, in U.S., 40, 41, 42 Presley, C. F., 128, 129 Price, Huw, 248, 251 Priest, Graham, 47, 131, 133, 134, 135, 224, 233–234, 235 Prior, Arthur, 7, 171, 174, 176, 178, 183–185, 226, 235, 248, 195 Public Benefit Research Fund (PBRF, New Zealand), 182, 189, 195 public realm, 33–35 Putnam, Hilary, 239 Pybus, Cassandra, 76

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Quine, W. V. O., 5, 131, 132, 141, 241 Raphael, D. D., 183 Rationalist Society, 50 Rawls, John, 119 Read, Stephen, 231 reading: close reading, 271; as conflict or battle, 276; essayistic reading, 275; slow reading, 270, 271, 272, 276, 277, 278; surrendered reading, 277; and understanding, 275 realism, 62 reason, 32, 74, 75, 83–84, 111–112 Redding, Paul, 163, 164 reductionism, 4, 8, 201–203 reductionist materialism, 202, 205, 208, 209 Reichenbach, Hans, 239, 242 Reid, Thomas, 40 relativity, theory of, 142 relevant logics, 133, 186, 231–232, 235 religion, 48; Abrahamic religions, 86; attacks on, 83; attitude to subject by philosophers, 58; believers’ demands for respect for their religion, 145–146; decline of, 83; incoherence of respecting the non-existent, 146–148; and minimal tolerance, 145, 145–146, 154–157; reason and science, 83–84; and respect, 148–151; and Western philosophy, 212. See also fundamentalism ; philosophy of religion ; spiritualism religious belief: Ataturk’s thesis, 146, 149; content, 152–154; and death of the gods, 11–12; and mental act/state of believing, 152–154, 157; origins and persistence of, 84–85; and philosophy, 84; and respect of rights and liberties, 154–157; sources of, 85–86. See also fundamentalism Rennie, Malcolm, 131, 132, 224 Republic (Plato), 255, 256 respect, 148–154, 156–157 Restall, Greg, 131, 231, 232 Reynolds, Jack, 163 Reynolds, Mark, 223 Rice, Vernon, 50 Riche, Jacques, 231

Rifkin, Jeremy, 239 Rini, A. A., 188 Robinson, Ross, 188 Rose, Deborah Bird, 206 Rosenblum, Vera A., 69 Ross, Alison, 163 Ross, Daniel, 163 Rothfield, Philippa, 70, 71 Rousseau, J.-J., 111 Routley (later Sylvan), Richard, 129, 130, 180, 224, 231–232 Routley, Val. See Plumwood, Val Roxon, Barbara, 67, 70, 74 Royce, Josiah, 39–40 Rundell, John, 163 Rushdie, Salman, 151 Russell, Bertrand, 42, 56, 218–219, 239, 241, 253 Russell, Deborah, 188 Russell, Denise, 73 Ryle, G., 140, 174, 177 Santamaria, B. A., 50 Saunders, Trevor, 256 Savulescu, Julian, 48 Schlesinger, George, 46 Schouls, Peter, 188 Schroeter, Laura, 230 Schweitzer, Albert, 18 science, philosophy of, 129, 175 scientific realism, 5, 83–84, 142 scientific reductionism, 203–204, 205 scientific revolution, 215 Scriven, Mitchell, 44 secularism, 81–82, 82, 84. See also fundamentalism ; spiritualism Segerberg, Krister, 186, 226, 235 self, the, and free will, 102–103 Seligman, Jeremy, 235 Sellars, Wilfrid, 164, 251, 254 Sennett, Richard, 35 sex/gender distinction, 117–118 sexual difference, 114, 116 Shaw, Lucy M., 69 Shearmur, Jeremy, 194 Shoemaker, Sidney, 249 Shorter, Michael, 185 Sinclair, Keith, 173, 178, 194

Index Singer, Peter, 27, 28, 32, 44, 46, 48, 129, 130, 199 Sinnerbrink, Robert, 163 Skyms, Brian, 131 Slade, Christina, 261, 262 Slaney, John, 131, 223, 231 Slow Food Movement, 278 slow movement, 244, 278 slow reading, 277, 278 Smart, J. J. C. (‘Jack’), 5, 6, 46, 55, 57, 128, 131, 140–141, 241, 258, 259 Smith, Adam, 32 Smith, Michael, 32 Smith, Phillippa Mein, 173 Smith, Steven G., 276 Snow, C. P., 159, 160 social contract theory, 112–114 social philosophy, 166 Socrates, 256 Sorenson, Roy, 131 Sosa, E., 249 space-time continuum, 239 Spence, Catherine, 68 Spender, Dale, 68 Spinoza, Benedict de, 110 spiritualism, 82, 87 Stead, C. K., 18 Steigler, Bernard, 163 Sterelny, Kim, 175, 186 Stewart, McKellar, 140 Stich, Stephen, 73 Stieglitz, Alfred, 265 Stocism, 214 Stoljar, Natalie, 124 Stoneman, Ethel T., 69 Stoothoff, Bob, 185 Stove, David, 54, 63, 64, 64–65, 72, 73, 76, 77 structuralism, 253 supernaturalism, concept, 5–6 Surma, Stan, 235 Swanton, Christine, 186 Swinburne, R., 249 Sydney (city), 61, 62, 62–66 Sydney Push, 50, 64, 177, 187 syllogism, 64–65 Sylvan, Richard. See Routley (later Sylvan), Richard

307

Talmud, 18 Tanaka, Koji, 233 Tapper, Marion, 76, 115–116 Tavinor, Grant, 188 Taylor, Charles, 82, 164 Taylor, Dan, 183 Teichmann, Jenny, 44, 70 temporal logic, 185, 226, 235, 248 tense logic, 185 terrorism, and fundamentalism, 87 Theism, 20, 23 theory of relativity, 239 Thistlethwaite, Paul, 231 Thom, Paul, 261, 262 Thompson, Janna, 48, 70, 71, 76, 77, 122 Tichy, Jindra, 182, 195 Tichy, Pavel, 183, 235 time: A-series and B-series, 241, 249; in analytic philosophy, 248–252; and anticipating the future, 245, 254; Bergson-Russell debate, 241, 243, 253; breaking down of time space dichotomy, 6–7; in Continental philosophy, 239, 240–243, 244–247; dominant conception, 244; fourdimensionalism, 243, 248, 251, 254; growing universe theory, 253; Heidegger-Carnap debate, 242; metaphysical concerns, 241; as ‘the Mind of Space’, 4–5; phenomenological accounts, 240, 241, 250; and politics, 244–247; slow movements, 244; space-time continuum, 239; structure of, 248; and violence, 247. See also philosophy of time ; politics of time tolerance, 154–157 Transparent Intensional Logic, 183 Trotter, Chris, 173, 181, 194 Twain, Mark, 23 Tzubka, Tad, 131 Uniake, Sue, 71, 72, 77 universals, realist theory, 64 universities: and the audit society, 30–32; balance between research and teaching, 135; collegiality, 135; contemporary challenges, 25, 29–32, 36, 51; and ‘continuous improvement’, 30; control

308

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over philosophers, 125; corporate model, 126, 134–135; financial management, 262–263; hostility to philosophy, 189–190; and neo-liberal values and thought, 25; philistinism, 31–32; philosopher deans, 260–262, 263–264; and Plato’s utopian society, 255; role, 25, 29, 36; role of university managers, 263; view of humanities, 263 University of Adelaide, 39, 69, 139, 140–142, 143 University of Auckland, 178–179, 182, 186 University of Canterbury, 182, 184–185 University of Melbourne, CAPPE, 48 University of Melbourne, History and Philosophy of Science department, 46, 70 University of Melbourne, philosophy department, 39–44, 46–51, 69, 70, 76 University of Otago, 171, 179, 182–183, 190–191, 192, 195 University of Queensland, 69, 125–126, 126–134, 134–137 University of South Australia, 144 University of Sydney, 62, 66, 69, 70, 72–73 University of Tasmania, 45, 76 University of Victoria (Wellington), 182, 186, 192 University of Waikato, 187 University of Wellington, 179 University of Western Australia, 69 University of Wollongong, 71 utilitarianism, 28, 47, 141 utopianism, 32 Velleman, David, 93–95 Victorian Public Library, 39, 50 video games, philosophy of, 188 Viner, Jacob, 32 Voltaire, 17 Waldron, Jeremy, 172, 176, 194 Walker, Alice Ruth, 67, 69, 70 Walker, Michelle, 74, 129 Walzer, Michael, 115 Ward, David, 192 Ward, Keith, 209

Warren, Olga, 69, 70 Wegner, Daniel, 103–105, 108 Weil, Simone, 277 Weissman, Friedrich, 127, 136 Wellek Library Lectures, 163 Western philosophy, development, 214–215 Whyte, Jamie, 194 Wiesel, Elie, 146 Wilkinson, Ellen, 176 Williams, Bernard, 239 Williams, James, 251 Wisdom, John, 127 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 44, 46, 57, 140, 183, 212, 266, 275 women philosophers: in the 1950s, 70; in the 1960s, 70–72; and applied ethics, 77; and conflicts over philosophical method, 74; contributions to feminist philosophy, 109–110; and environmental ethics, 77; and ethics, 72, 77; exclusion from philosophy, 75, 77; and feminism, 72–77; in first half of twentieth century, 68–69; inclusion in philosophy, 75, 77; and logic, 72, 77; and metaphysics, 77; and moral psychology, 77; in New Zealand, 68, 193, 195; and philosophy of language, 77; and philosophy as a man’s business, 72; and philosophy of mind, 77; and problem of male mentors, 77; sexism, 72, 73, 77; since 1990, 77; status within discipline in Australia, 67–68, 76; under-representation, 109, 124. See also feminist philosophy Women in Philosophy (WIP) group, 76 Wood, David, 247 Woolf, Virginia, 176 Wright, Crispin, 131 Wright, Ronald, 197 Young, Iris Marion, 121 Young, Julian, 186 Young, Robert, 48 Zangwill, Nick, 92 Ziedins, Rudi, 187 Zizek, Slavoj, 81

About the Contributors

John Bigelow is professor of philosophy at Monash University, and has also taught at Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and at La Trobe University. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, and a past president of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. His research interests include metaphysics, semantics, epistemology, history of science, and Platonism, and his publications include The Reality of Numbers: A Physicalist’s Philosophy of Mathematics (Clarendon Press, 1988) and Science and Necessity, with Robert Pargetter (Cambridge University Press, 1990). Raymond D. Bradley was born into a fundamentalist family in Auckland, New Zealand, in 1930. He became a self-taught atheist by age seventeen. He was a part-time student at Auckland University College, graduating MA 1st Class Honours in 1954, and he was awarded a PhD scholarship at Australian National University 1955–1957. He taught at University of New South Wales 1958–1960, Merton College Oxford 1961, and Australian National University 1962–1963, before taking a position as professor and chair of philosophy at the University of Auckland 1964–1969. He held a similar post at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, from 1970–1996. He has also had a successful career in Masters ski racing with over sixty medals in international competitions including winning three world championships. Since retiring in 2001, he has published many atheistic articles on the Internet, primarily on the Secular Web, and in miscellaneous books. Principal academic publications include Possible Worlds: An Introduction to Logic and Its Philosophy (1979) and The Nature of All Being: A Study of Wittgenstein’s Modal Atomism (1990). Andrew Brennan has been professor and chair of philosophy at La Trobe University since 2006, and from 2008 he has also been pro vice-chancellor of graduate research. His recent coauthored books include Logic: Key Concepts (Continuum, 2005) and Understanding Environmental Philosophy (Acumen, 309

310

About the Contributors

2010). Recent published articles discuss suffering, human dignity, the history of science, forgiveness, and the logic of conditionals. C. A. J. (Tony) Coady was Boyce Gibson Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne from 1990 to 1998 and is now vice chancellor’s fellow and professorial fellow in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at that university. He has played a major role in the growth of applied philosophy in Australia. His research areas include epistemology, political violence, and political ethics. His book Testimony: A Philosophical Study (Oxford University Press, 1992) was widely praised internationally and has had a significant impact on developments in contemporary epistemology. His book Morality and Political Violence was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008, and in the same year he published Messy Morality: The Challenge of Politics (Oxford University Press), which extends the Uehiro Lectures on Practical Ethics that he gave by invitation at Oxford University in 2005. Peter Forrest is professor of philosophy at the University of New England. His research interests includes philosophy of physics (see his Quantum Metaphysics, 1988), epistemology (see his The Dynamics of Belief, 1986), the philosophy of religion (see his God without the Supernatural, 1996, and Developmental Theism, 2007), and other issues in metaphysics and epistemology. He is a member of the Academy of Humanities. James Franklin studied mathematics and philosophy at Sydney University in the early 1970s, followed by a PhD in mathematics. He is the author of Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia (2003), The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability Before Pascal (2001), Catholic Values and Australian Realities (2006), and What Science Knows: And How It Knows It (2009). He leads the ‘Sydney School’ in the Aristotelian philosophy of mathematics and the ‘Restraint Project’ on the virtue of temperance. He was awarded the 2005 Eureka Prize for Research in Ethics. He is the literary executor of the Australian philosopher David Stove. Karen Green is associate professor in the School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies at Monash University. She has published widely in philosophy and the history of women’s ideas. Her most recent books are A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), written with Jacqueline Broad; Virtue, Liberty and Toleration: Political Ideas of European Women, 1400–1800 (Springer, 2007), edited with Jacqueline Broad; and a translation and edition of Christine de Pizan’s Book of Peace (Penn State, 2008) with Constant J. Mews and Janice Pinder. She is currently working on a continuation of the book published with Jacqueline Broad covering the history of women’s political thought to 1800. Russell Grigg teaches philosophy at Deakin University and practices psychoanalysis in Melbourne. He has recently published Lacan, Language, and Philosophy (SUNY 2008), and, with Justin Clemens, is the editor of

About the Contributors

311

Jacques Lacan and the Other Side of Psychoanalysis (Duke 2006). He has translated seminars by Jacques Lacan and collaborated on the first complete English edition of Lacan’s Ecrits. Jeanette Kennett is professor of moral psychology in the philosophy department at Macquarie University. After completing her PhD at Monash University in 1994, she spent a further ten years in the philosophy department at Monash as lecturer and then senior lecturer. From 2004 to 2008 she was principal research fellow in the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) at the Australian National University and also at Charles Sturt University (2008–2009). She writes mainly on philosophical and ethical issues relating to moral responsibility and the self, with a focus on mental disorders and addiction. Her book Agency and Responsibility: A CommonSense Moral Psychology was published in 2001 by Clarendon Press. She has also published several papers on friendship and love, and has an edited collection on Fashion and Philosophy forthcoming in the ‘Philosophy for Everyone’ series published by Wiley Blackwell. Neil Levy is head of neuroethics at the Flory Neuroscience Institutes and director of research at Oxford Centre for Neuroethics. He is the author of many papers on applied ethics, free will, philosophy of psychology, and other topics, as well as six books including Hard Luck: How Luck Undermines Free Will (Oxford University Press, 2011). Catriona Mackenzie received her PhD from the Australian National University and is currently professor of philosophy at Macquarie University, Sydney. She has published widely in moral psychology, ethics, applied ethics, and feminist philosophy. Her publications include Relational Autonomy: Feminist Perspectives on Autonomy, Agency and the Social Self (OUP, 2000, with Natalie Stoljar), Practical Identity and Narrative Agency (Routledge, 2008, with Kim Atkins), and Emotions, Imagination, and Moral Reasoning (Psychology Press, forthcoming, with Robyn Langdon). Her work has appeared in a variety of edited collections and journals including Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Hypatia, Journal of Applied Philosophy, Journal of Social Philosophy, and Philosophical Explorations. She was awarded the 2007 Australian Museum Eureka Prize for Research in Ethics. Gary Malinas studied philosophy at Ohio University, Washington University, and Oxford. He was a member of the philosophy department at the University of Queensland from 1970 until his retirement in 2005. Currently he is an honorary research associate in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics. His principal publications have been in the areas of decision theory, practical paradoxes, problems of non-deductive inference, and theories of pictorial representation. His publications include ‘Reflective Coherence and Newcomb’s Problem: A Simple Solution’ (Theory and Decision, 1993), ‘Simpson’s Paradox: A Logically Benign, Empirically Treacherous Hydra’ (Monist, 2002), and ‘A Semantics for Pictures’ (Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 1991). His current research is concerned with the relations between causes, chances, and probabilities.

312

About the Contributors

Chris Mortensen is emeritus professor of philosophy at the University of Adelaide. His current research is on visual paradoxes, such as are found in M. C. Escher. His philosophical interests include exact philosophy, especially including logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of mathematics and science. His publications include Inconsistent Mathematics (Kluwer 1995), Inconsistent Geometry (KCL forthcoming), and over one hundred articles in logic and philosophy journals. Robert Nola is professor of philosophy at the University of Auckland. He works in philosophy of science, metaphysics, and epistemology as well as the sociology of science and science education. His recent books include: with coauthor Gurol Irzik, Philosophy, Science, Education and Culture (Springer, 2005); with coauthor Howard Sankey, Theories of Scientific Method (Acumen Press 2007); and with coeditor David Braddon-Mitchell, Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism (MIT Press, 2009). His current work is on religion, philosophy, and science and includes a forthcoming paper ‘Do Naturalistic Explanations of Religious Beliefs Debunk Religion?’ Paul Patton is professor of philosophy at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Deleuze and the Political (Routledge, 2000) and Deleuzian Concepts: Philosophy, Colonization, Politics (Stanford, 2010). He is editor of Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Blackwell 1996), Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (with Duncan Ivison and Will Sanders, Cambridge, 2000), Between Deleuze and Derrida (with John Protevi, Continuum, 2003), and Deleuze and the Postcolonial (with Simone Bignall, Edinburgh 2010). His publications deal with aspects of French poststructuralist philosophy, Nietzsche, and a variety of topics in contemporary political philosophy. He is ‘Contemporary-Critical Continental’ editor for the Sage Encyclopedia of Political Theory, and a member of the editorial boards of Philosophy Compass (Continental), Deleuze Studies, and Derrida Today. Charles R. Pigden was born in England and studied philosophy at Cambridge (1976–1979), before going on to do a PhD at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia (1980–1985). After a brief stint at Massey (1987–1988) he has taught philosophy at Otago University, Dunedin, New Zealand. He has published on a wide range of topics from conspiracy theories to the reality of numbers, but, if pressed, will admit to being a metaethicist with special interests in Russell, Moore, and Hume. He is one of the very few academics to have published a philosophical dialogue in blank verse (‘Complots of Mischief’). He is the editor of Russell on Ethics (1999), Hume on Motivation and Virtue (2009), and Hume on Is and Ought (2010). Val Plumwood (1939–2008) was Australian Research Council Fellow at the Australian National University. Acclaimed internationally as a leading feminist and environmental philosopher, she published widely in these areas, including the books The Fight for the Forests (published in 1973 under the name Val Routley, with her then partner Richard Routley), Feminism and the

About the Contributors

313

Mastery of Nature (Routledge, 1993), and Environmental Culture (Routledge, 2001). She died in February 2008, aged sixty-eight. Graham Priest is Boyce Gibson Professor of Philosophy at the University of Melbourne, a distinguished professor at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, and Arché Professorial Fellow at the University of St. Andrews. His books include In Contradiction, Beyond the Limits of Thought, Towards Non-Being, Doubt Truth to Be a Liar, and Introduction to NonClassical Logic. Greg Restall is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Melbourne. He received his PhD from the University of Queensland in 1994, and held positions at the Australian National University and Macquarie University before moving to Melbourne. His research focuses on formal logic, philosophy of logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and even a little bit of philosophy of religion. He has published over seventy papers in journals and collections, and is the author of three books, An Introduction to Substructural Logics (Routledge, 2000), Logic (Routledge, 2006), and Logical Pluralism (Oxford University Press, 2006, with J. C. Beall). His research has been funded by the Australian Research Council. Jack Reynolds is senior lecturer in the philosophy department at La Trobe University, and has written three books, Merleau-Ponty and Derrida: Intertwining Embodiment and Alterity (2004), Understanding Existentialism (2006), and Analytic Versus Continental: Arguments on the Methods and Value of Philosophy (2010, with James Chase). He has also coedited three collections, Understanding Derrida (2004), Merleau-Ponty: Key Concepts (2008), and Postanalytic and Metacontinental: Crossing Philosophical Divides (2010), and is currently doing research on the two main areas in which he holds Australian Research Council Discovery grants: methodological comparisons and evaluations between analytic and Continental philosophers. He is also exploring the relationship between ways of conceptualizing time and sociopolitical life, with a forthcoming manuscript titled Chronopathologies: The Politics of Time in Deleuze, Derrida, Analytic Philosophy and Phenomenology. Matthew Sharpe teaches philosophy and psychoanalytic studies at Deakin University. He is the author of books on contemporary Australian politics and modern European ideas, as well as of multiple articles in the fields of psychoanalysis, critical theory, cultural studies, political philosophy, and the history of ideas. Paul Thom is an honorary professor of philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. He was head of the philosophy department in the Faculty of Arts at ANU 1989–1997, Dean of Arts at Australian National University 1998–2000, and executive dean of arts at Southern Cross University 2001–2007. His major publications in the field of aesthetics are For an Audience: A Philosophy of the Performing Arts (1993), Making Sense: A Theory of Interpretation (2000), and The

314

About the Contributors

Musician as Interpreter (2007). He has authored four books on the history of logic: The Syllogism (1981), The Logic of Essentialism: An Interpretation of Aristotle’s Modal Syllogistic (1996), Medieval Modal Systems: Problems and Concepts (2003), and Logic and Ontology in the Syllogistic of Robert Kilwardby (2007). Michelle Boulous Walker is senior lecturer in philosophy in the School of History, Philosophy, Religion, and Classics at the University of Queensland, Australia. She is author of Philosophy and the Maternal Body: Reading Silence (Routledge, 1998) and editor of Performing Sexualities (IMA, 1994). Other publications span the fields of European philosophy, aesthetics, ethics, and feminist philosophy. Her teaching interests include ethics, film, and literature. Her current research focuses on ethics and reading, and she is working on a book entitled Philosophy, Reading, and Love concerned with ethical response and what it means to read philosophically.