Getting the Wrong Anderson? A Short and Opinionated History of New Zealand Philosophy Charles R. Pigden 1. Definitions and Distinctions: The History of Philosophy 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 Feyerabend2). 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 professionalized age, I mean primarily someone employed to teach or to 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, ! ! 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 See Motterlini (1999: 276-77), Ardley (1983: 38). 2 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 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)3; 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' 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 ! ! 3 Hume (1978: 469.-70), Tarski (1983), Pigden (2010). 3 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 criticize them too with the aid of the same tools. Thus is it perfectly proper to do as Popper did and expound and criticize works of Marx (written in the 1860s) with the aid of a philosophy of science developed in the 1930s.4 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.5) 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.6 The crimes of politicians can be catastrophic in their consequences, whilst the follies of generals condemn brave men to unnecessary deaths. Crimes against logic7 tend to be bloodless, and if people die because of the follies of philosophers at least they ! ! 4 Marx (1990), Popper (1966, vol. 2). 5 Popper (1972b: 170-90). 6 Gibbon (1995: ch. 3, p. 102). 7 Perhaps it is worth pointing out that the author of the excellent Crimes against Logic, the philosopher-journalist Jamie Whyte, is in fact a New Zealander. 4 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, perhaps the only English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the unbeliever Gibbon."8 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.9 ! 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 ! ! 8 Quoted in Swain (1966: 70). 9 See Gibbon (1995: esp. ch. 21). 5 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.10 The two best books on the Anglo-Dutch philosopher Bernard Mandeville (1670-1733) were written by New ! ! 10 See Bennett (2001) and Baier (1991). 6 Zealanders, one an emigrant and the other an immigrant.11 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).12 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 (1952) (another book about a British Moralist) and Hume's Intentions (1953), 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, and even more in his introduction in which he explains that ! ! 11 Monro (1975) and Goldsmith (1985). 12 Monro (1953) and Locke (1980). 7 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 Equality13 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, 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. 2. 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 ! ! 13 Waldron (2002). 8 Experiment (1997).14 15 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)16 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.17 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.18 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. ! ! 14 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. 15 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. 16 Sinclair, however, acknowledges the influence of Popper on his own writing in his autobiography. See Sinclair (1993: 179). 17 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. 18 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. 9 ! 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.19 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, came out four years before King's history.20 Elsie Locke, the well known activist and children's writer, rates a mention in 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 ! ! 19 See Mulgan (2001), (2006) and (2007). 20 See Hursthouse (1999). 10 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)? 3. 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)21 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 ! ! 21 Baier (2008: 281). 11 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 US (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 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 twopart 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? ! ! 12 ! 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 co-author 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. 4. 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.22 (Though Karl Popper, who did some of his best work here, merited a massive two-volume set.23) 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.) For Finnish philosophers, like New Zealand philosophers, are big in areas ! ! 22 Schilpp and Hahn (1989), and Auxier and Hahn (2006). 23 See Schilpp (1974). 13 which don't 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 Musgrave24, Robert Nola25, and Kim Sterelny26). 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.27 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 ! ! 24 See Musgrave (1993, 1999, and 2009). 25 Nola and Sankey (2007), and Nola (2003) 26 Sterelny and Griffiths (1999), Sterelny (2001, 2003), and Maclaurin and Sterelny (2008). 27 For an interesting example of this, see below, §9. 14 finite set of observations can conclusively confirm a generalization like 'All As are B-s', 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.28 ! 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, 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.29 ! 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 Virgina Woolf to a friend in 1940.30 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 ! ! 28 See Prior (1949) and Prior's 1960 article "The Autonomy of Ethics", reprinted in Pigden (2010). 29 See Waldron (1993, 2002). It is a mark of Waldron's achievement that in 1993 Cambridge University Press decided to published a volume of his collected papers when he was only forty. 30 Quoted in Baldwin (1990: xiii). 15 the object of the moral life is to maximize 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.31 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'.32 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",33 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."34 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 ! ! 31 See Keynes' essay "My Early Beliefs" in Keynes (1972). 32 See O'Hear (1998). 33 A.N Prior in an essay in Landfall from 1952, quoted in Franklin (2003: 35). 34 David Stove, quoted in Franklin (2003: 48). 16 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 programme 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."35 Anderson would have none of this. He was a systematic thinker with an answer to everything and that answer was 'No'.36 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 obligations? No. His views were summed up by the British philosopher Gilbert Ryle as: "There are only brass tacks."37 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.38 You could ! ! 35 See Franklin (2003: ch. 6) and Stove (1991: chs 5 and 6), and, for a more sober account, Passmore (1966: chs 3 and 4). 36 See Bogdan (1984: 6-7). Armstrong is quoting the Australian poet James McAuley. 37 Quoted in Franklin (2003: 35). 38 See Franklin (2003: ch. 8). 17 not do a decent history of Australia in the twentieth century and leave John Anderson out of it39. ! 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 prose dreadfully hard going, whereas some New Zealand philosophers (particularly Prior and Musgrave) are a delight to read.40 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? 5. 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"41). In fact, he was a sound man in every way, an adherent of idealism which he continued to maintain long after it had ! ! 39 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). 40 For Anderson's essays, see Anderson (1962). For Musgrave's, see Musgrave (1993, 1999, and 2009). 41 Sinclair (1993: 119). 18 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 34-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. Beeby42, and polemicized against them with a ferocity that rivalled his brother's. Luckily, these polemics had little or no effect. He was perhaps more effective 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.43 ! 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? 6. 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 ! ! 42 Beeby, in a speech drafted for Fraser, summarized 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. 43 Sinclair (1983: 132). 19 don't like classes that talk back,"44 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."45 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.46 ! 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, ! ! 44 Franklin (2003: 46). 45 Quoted in Franklin (2003: 48). 46 See "Obituary: George Hughes" (1994). 20 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 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 ! ! 21 lead."47 (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. 7. 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 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 ! ! 47 O'Sullivan (2003: 50-51). 22 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.48 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 Routley49 (later Sylvan), 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 ! ! 48 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 1935-49, led, successively, by Savage and Fraser, which was busy 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). 49 See Routley, Plumwood Meyer and Brady (1982). 23 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 recognized 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.50 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. 8. 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) co-edited 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 Tichy51, arguing, with perverse brilliance, for the thesis that the Treaty of Waitangi is a Hobbesian ! ! 50 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. 51 Jindra Tichy, once a refugee from the Soviet counter-revolution 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 recognizably similar to real-life Otago philosophers. 24 social contract.52 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",53 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. 9. 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 skeptical 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 ! ! 52 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. 53 The maggots the protagonist wished to see were those consuming the corpse of his enemy. 25 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 this 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 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 organized 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 ! ! 26 Findlay, appointed in 1931, a South African who had studied at Graz and Oxford. A once and future Hegelian, he had been 'de-idealized' 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), worked on another (eventually published as Values and Intentions) 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 who 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."54 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 Philosophy55, 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 ! ! 54 Findlay (1972). 55 Passmore (1966). The preface for the first edition of 1957 is datelined "Dunedin – Oxford – Canberra", and one of the three people thanked by name is Passmore's Otago colleague Bob Durrant. 27 the present incumbent, Alan Musgrave56, who is about to retire after forty years in the post, is noted for his defences of scientific realism and the rationality of science, and famous as far as Wall Street for his critique of the economic methodology of Milton Friedman.57 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.58 ! 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. ! ! 56 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'. 57 See "Unreal Assumptions in Economic Theory: The F-Twist Untwisted" in Musgrave (1999: ch. 7). 58 See Svoboda, Jespersen and Cheyne (2004: 25). 28 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 specialization and is vulnerable to takeover bids from neighbouring disciplines. Neither beleaguered lecturers nor busy multiprofessors 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 1946-58). 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, 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 characterized 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 or since.59 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. ! ! 59 King (2003: 417). 29 ! Prior was primarily a logician though very much alive to the philosophical implications of logic (witness his book Logic and the Basis of Ethics). 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 formalizes 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 behavior 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, some of the most important work on modal logic in the late fifties and early sixties – featuring the elusive concept of an 'accessibility relation' was done by 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 ! ! 30 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).60 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."61 To be sure, these are the reactions of a life-long 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.62) Under Shorter, the Department continued to grow (though it acquired a distinctly Oxonian tinge) and when Shorter himself 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 The Philosophical Writings of Descartes.63 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 ! ! 60 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 in Prior (2003). 61 Email 1 August 2007. 62 See Pigden (2010). 63 Descartes (1985). 31 on the Cambridge mathematician Alan Turing; and Denis Dutton64, 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,65 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 programme 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 ! ! 64 Sadly Denis has died since I wrote this in 2009, 65 Dutton (2010). To call this book an international smash-hit would be an understatement. Not many philosophy books lead to dinners with Bill Gates and guest appearances with John Cleese. 32 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 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 characterized 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), ! ! 33 Steve Davies (philosophy of music), Robert Nola (philosophy of science), Julian Young (Nietzsche, Heidegger, Schopenhauer), 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. 10. 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,66 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 ! ! 66 See Franklin (2003: ch. 8), though Baker is extensively cited throughout. 34 philosopher' at Sussex67, 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 constant for over a decade. Tracy Bowell is the co-author of Critical Thinking: A Concise Guide, 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.68 ! 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 cost-cutting 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 programme 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 ! ! 67 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. 68 It is also the most feminized philosophy programme in New Zealand. Five out of the seven teaching staff are women. 35 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 extra-mural education in New Zealand. This is hard work for the teaching staff. Marking has to be far more informative for extra-mural than for intra-mural students since you can't say "See me" when you run out of red ink or intellectual energy. And when you do meet the extra-murals 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 school. Bestor, Battye, Patterson and Perrett all resigned or retired, sometimes ! ! 36 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 economize 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. ! ! 37 As noted already, the PBRF is the New Zealand equivalent of the British RAE. It ranks and rewards universities (and other 'Tertiary Education Organizations') 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.69 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 research-invisible." 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 Organization' 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 low-scoring members of the College of Business to the subject area of philosophy, 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: ! ! 69 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'. 38 We were dismayed to learn that Massey University had attempted to assign a significant number of nonphilosophers 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.70 ! 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. ! ! 70 Press release from AAP (NZ Division). 39 ! 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.71 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 inspiration (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 compelled 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 ! ! 71 This is, as they say, an ongoing problem. See Geach's account of his time at Birmingham in Lewis (1991). 40 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 female72, can seem horribly uncouth. We use the f-word ('false'), 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 ! ! 72 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. 41 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 them unpopular. There is a saying, "those how 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 criticize the managerialist fads of university bureaucrats (which can be dangerous enough in itself), we also criticize the sentimental leftism that is so popular in academic circles (the kind that confines itself to an ideological sympathy with the oppressed without ! ! 42 proposing or promoting policies that might actually make things better).73 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.74 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.75 We can make people look silly and they tend not to like it. 11. 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%) are native New Zealanders; at Victoria, three out of thirteen (23%). Thus 38% of staff at the two departments are native New Zealanders. At Otago ! ! 73 And I may add the kind of sentimental leftism that often allows itself to be co-opted to managerialist agendas. 74 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. 75 See Plato's Apology in Plato (1981). Whether this was really the cause of Socrates' unpopularity is a moot point. See Stone (1988). 43 three out of eight (37%) are originally British; at Victoria, none. Thus 14% 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%). Thus 23% of staff at the two universities are from North America. At Otago, one out of eight (12.5% ) is from Australia; at Victoria, three out of thirteen (23%), in each case including one of the professors. Thus 19% of staff at the two universities are from Australia. At Otago, two out of eight (25%) have Oxbridge degrees (one being a Rhodes Scholar); at Victoria, one out of thirteen (7.6%). That's 14% of the two departments. At Otago, four out of eight (50%) have Australian PhDs: at Victoria, two out of thirteen (15%). That is just under 29% 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%). Thus 42% 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%) have New Zealand PhDs; at Victoria, two out of thirteen (15%) – that is 19% 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 ! ! 44 the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome in the other). There is only one nonnative 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 and 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 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. 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