A History of Australasian Philosophy
1. Aims and Background of Project
Philosophy in both Australia and New Zealand has been thriving over the last three decades, exercising an influence in the international arena that is disproportionate to the population of the two countries (let alone the size of the respective philosophical communities indeed, in 2004 New Zealand's active academic philosophers numbered an all-time high of about fifty individuals!). The signs of this remarkable increase in influence and esteem are many. One could, for example, point to the relatively high proportion of papers authored by Australasian philosophers that find their way into the most prestigious philosophy journals (e.g., since 1984 Australian philosophers have had the highest acceptance rate at Mind, arguably the world's leading philosophy journal). Or one could point to the considerable influence, both in the Antipodes and in the northern hemisphere, exerted by such Australasian philosophers as Arthur Prior, David Armstrong, J.J.C. Smart, Frank Jackson, Peter Singer, and Genevieve Lloyd. One could also point to the consistently high performance levels sustained across Australasian philosophy departments, as evidenced by a 2003 performance-based study which found that the highest scoring research discipline in New Zealand is Philosophy (see http://www.otago.ac.nz/philosophy/history.html ). Or, finally, one might simply listen to the testimony of various distinguished overseas philosophers who regularly visit Australasia's shores. Consider, for example, the words of Cambridge University's 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.
(Quoted on the home page of the Australasian Association of Philosophy:http://www.uq.edu.au/hprc/aap/)The rise of philosophy in Australasia has led to the development of several distinctive research programs and schools of thought in the region. Philosophy, to be sure, is often considered to be a 'cosmopolitan subject' (Donagan 1969:19), that is to say, the kind of enterprise for which the influence of location and the surrounding culture are, or at least should be, insignificant. But this is a dubious assumption, one which takes for granted that philosophy is merely a finished product of a certain sort (a set of propositions or a creed, for instance), and not a process of production also, where the input of the place and the people involved is crucially important. Further, as Richard Sylvan (1985:193) has noted, 'if the product is like a work of art, like a piece of literature, and not just theorems and arguments assembled in an internationally-approved format, then again the historical setting matters, since philosophy, no more than literature, does not emerge in a vacuum.'
Indeed, a distinctive and innovative style of philosophy has emerged over the last few decades in Australia (and, to a lesser extent, in New Zealand). In broad outlines, Australian philosophy may be characterised (in the words of one its greatest practitioners, John Passmore) as 'direct, clear, forceful, blunt, naturalist, 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' (1992:13). To elaborate further, philosophy in Australia, and Australasia generally, has come to be closely associated with the following research programs:
Australian materialism. This program, perhaps the most distinctive aspect of Australian philosophy, seeks to understand and explicate reality solely within the framework of the natural sciences. An important part of this program has been a version of materialism about the mind, the now widely accepted mind-brain identity theory (the view that the mind just is the brain), which was initially developed by U.T. Place (1956) and J.J.C. Smart (1959) in Adelaide before being taken up by D.M. Armstrong in Sydney in the late 1960s (see, in particular, Armstrong 1968).
Australian realism. Philosophers in Australia, from John Anderson in the 1930s onwards, have tended to be resolutely "realist' in their ontologies. In recent times, this realism has often been expressed as the view that the entities described in scientific theories (e.g., quarks, mesons, double-helix molecules) really exist, as opposed to being socially constructed. The prevalence of realism has been variously explained as a reflection of the down-to-earth Australian culture (Sylvan 1985:198) or as rooted in climatic and geographic conditions David Armstrong, for example, once suggested, half-seriously, that 'the strong sunlight and harsh brown landscape of Australia force reality upon us' (quoted in Devitt 1984:vii). (There have been, however, notable exceptions to this tradition of realism; indeed, until the 1920s idealism was the dominant philosophical outlook in Australia, and the trend continued with the so-called "Melbourne Wittgensteinians' in the 1940s see Coady 1998.)
Consequentialist ethics. Moral philosophy in Australia has been dominated in the latter part of the twentieth-century by consequentialism (or utilitarianism), the thesis, roughly put, that we ought always to do whatever has the best consequences. Here the influence of J.J.C. Smart (1961, 1987) is again strong, but it is the work of Peter Singer (poached in 1998 by Princeton, where he is a member of its Centre for Human Values) that has attracted the greatest attention. Indeed, Singer's Animal Liberation (1976) and Practical Ethics (1979), in which the principles of consequentialism are applied to such topics as animal rights and euthanasia, have become classics in the field, reaching audiences well beyond academia.
Applied philosophy and public ethics. Philosophers in Australia have recently made a significant impact in the areas of applied philosophy and public ethics, where the tools of philosophy are brought to bear on contentious practical and moral issues. Leading the charge here has been CAPPE (the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics), established in 2000 and funded by the ARC (Australian Research Council) as a Special Research Centre in applied philosophy. Operating from divisions at theUniversity of Melbourne, Charles Sturt University and the Australian National University, philosophers at CAPPE regularly contribute through academic and public forums to a diverse range of issues of public concern, including police corruption, business ethics, cloning and contemporary terrorism.
Non-standard logics. Australasian philosophers have been at the forefront in the development of various iconoclastic forms of logic. In New Zealand, relatively new forms of logic (especially tense logic and modal logic) were vigorously explored by Arthur Prior (1957, 1967 1968), George Hughes, and Max Creswell (see, in particular, the widely-used introductory text, Hughes & Creswell 1968). Another New Zealander, Richard Routley (who later changed his name to Richard Sylvan), investigated various non-classical logics as illustrated in his monumental tome, Exploring Meinong's Jungle and Beyond (1980) and helped transform the Australian National University in the 1970s into a major world centre in the study of "relevance logic' (see, e.g., Routley et al. 1982). Innovative research in logic continues to be carried out in most philosophy departments in Australasia, with the work of Melbourne University's Graham Priest (on paraconsistent logic: Priest 1987, 1995) and Monash's Lloyd Humberstone (on modal logic: Humberstone 2002, 2004) being prime examples.
As this indicates, philosophy in Australia and New Zealand has been experiencing, for some time now, something of a "golden age'. This is not to overlook, however, the rich philosophical past of Australasia, which although heavily indebted to overseas trends managed to produce much distinctive and highly original work, particularly at the hands of Sydney's charismatic philosopher, John Anderson (1962). These developments in the recent and distant past only serve to highlight the importance of documenting Australasia's great contribution to philosophy, and it is this we hope to undertake in the present project. Accordingly, the project has three overall aims:
(1) To investigate the historical development and current state of philosophy in Australia and New Zealand;
(2) To provide a comprehensive written record of the history of Australasian philosophy; and
(3) To engage the non-philosophical academic community as well as the general public, drawing their attention to the distinctive and internationally recognised contributions Australasian philosophers have made to their discipline over the last few decades.
The project will be carried out over a four-year period, beginning in January 2006 and concluding at the end of 2009.