Australian Philosophy
An article that provides a neat analysis of the recent history of philosophy in Australia.
Australian philosophy
There are more than a few Australians using this forum; some may find it interesting.
Australian philosophy
There are more than a few Australians using this forum; some may find it interesting.
Comments (33)
An Australian style of philosophising that is argumentative but without rhetorical excess.
Realism.
A disdain for the poststructuralist bullshit
Poststructuralism is at this point, by serious observers, an seriously empty vehicle.
Why? It provides no solutions. It only dissolves them. This is fun but not helpful or scientific.
Or what a knife is. There's been some controversy about that in the States.
You just chuck it sideways, right?
I wouldn't know. :(
If Professor Dundee holds knife-X is not a knife because knife-Y is a knife what are we to think of the hypothetical knife-Z? It may well be so much knifeyer as to negate the knifeyness of knife-Y. Ad infinitum. I fear we can never truly know what a knife is.
Rubbish. This is a knife. Therefore we know what a knife is.
Ah, the perennial Bannoian denoument: loud fact and self-ovation. :clap: :clap: :clap:
Corollary: The louder I say it the truer it is.
But tell me where are we to situate Professor Dundee's originary proposition?: "That's not a knife." Had he not, with this overbold commensal sally, undercut his credibility?
???
Are you willing to claim that this is not a knife?
And perhaps more interestingly, does Sue Charlton think it is a knife? Or is she thinking of something else entirely?
As far as we know, he's the only Australian.
Those adolescent memories really insist.
Quoting Banno
No, that's not a knife. Those are pixels.
Sue Charlton has a broader definition of 'knife' than the good professor.
No doubt she's thinking of Dundee's bronzed dong.
Your error here is to do with reference, not knives.
Rubbish.
I didn't know how easy that was to say.
No no no no no.
The article doesn't really say this - in fact it almost says the opposite, that there is indeed 'plenty of enthusiasm' for that kind of thing, after which G-S just opines on his own distaste for it.
After all, if you're involved in the uni systems here, theres a very healthy interest in alot of that stuff in the humanities, and Australia is well known for having some of the best post-structuralist leaning philosophers in the world.
They're outnumbered by Americans here and that seems to frustrate them. It's like when you corner a Tasmanian devil: even if you don't mean any harm, it attacks anyway.
That reminds me of what a wizened Tasmanian told my father, years ago:
"Legend has it that if you dive far enough into the dreamtime, down past the ruins of dusty frontier towns, down past the layers of fossilized megafauna, down farther still, past the belly of ayers rock (which, like an iceberg, bares to topdwellers only its top tenth), down, down, down; down past even Agartha, deeper, into the inky, brilliant pool from whence the australian soul was born - there, as in a dream, you'll see, gleaming, Stove's Gem.
And that'll make you think twice about idealism, diver boy.'
At that very moment, my father dropped his ceramic Hegel mug and became an eliminative materialist ( by that same stroke, eliminating his marriage, and who knows what else; the eliminative faculty, like the magic of the sorcerer's apprentice, betakes itself, once set free, to apply its powers wantonly, bearing indiscriminately on whatsoever object has the misfortune of meeting its truculent, bull-like path.)
(sorry, reading Moby Dick to while away the empty covid hours. doing my best Melville pastiche)
I have a theory on this: Australia, in the American imagination, is more West than our West (& we love our West.) Our West is laconic Clint and ironic (but serious) John Wayne. Croc Dundee has all that masculinity and frontiersmanship + a little flamboyance & charm. Those repressed aspects of the American psyche blocked by Clint & Wayne are let loose with croc dundee, but with enough attendant machismo to make it feel safe (in some ways, though not in others, he prototypes Johnny Depp's Jack Sparrow.)
Or so it was, last generation at least. I think the dundee coin has lost its value now, except in the levelling medium of the meme where dundee's the same as spongebob or Boris Johnson.
(Fun story: an Australian friend in a chat once said something about a black crow, and I feigned surprise about that, and then pretended to remember "oh right your crows are black down there, like the swans", and for a moment had him freaking out that he had just assumed crows everywhere were black but American crows might actually be white and he never realized it).
Love it.
Quoting csalisbury
Nice analysis.