A History of Australasian Philosophy
2. Significance and Innovation
This project is of great national significance. It will provide students, academics, and the wider community in Australia and New Zealand with a deeper appreciation of their country's philosophical heritage. The publications produced should also attract great international interest, as they promise to provide the most comprehensive historical record to date of the development of philosophy in Australasia.
Attempts to document philosophical developments in Australia and New Zealand are not new. Previous attempts, however, have fallen far short of the aims and vision we have in place. For example, Brown & Rollins (1969) merely consists of a collection of essays by leading Australian philosophers on a diversity of philosophical issues; Eddy (1961) and Pybus (1993) only look at a specific episode in the history of Australian philosophy in this instance, the notorious dismissal of Sydney Sparkes Orr as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tasmania in 1956; Baker (1986), Kennedy (1995), and Davies (2003) each concentrate on the life and thought of an individual Australian philosopher; in Ardley (1983) and Franklin (2003) the focus is almost exclusively on philosophy in Auckland and Sydney, respectively; while Srzednicki & Wood (1992) and Dowe et al. (1996) have simply collated a number of essays on prominent trends and themes in Australian philosophy. Selwyn Grave's A History of Philosophy in Australia remains the most authoritative source on the subject, but it omits any reference to developments in New Zealand, and having been published in 1984 it is now sorely out-of-date, containing little indication of the recent transformation in Australasian philosophy.
Indeed, Frank Jackson, in a recent review of Franklin (2003), noted with some justification that 'the major exercise in the history of ideas to chart the story of Australia's major contribution to philosophy remains to be written' (2004:653). We hope to provide this much-needed historical record of philosophy in Australasia through a number of publications, as detailed below.
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