My fascination with the local supermarket selling “The TLS”:http://www.the-tls.co.uk/ continues unabated. And this week there’s a great big map of Australia on the cover. So it’s not only the weather over here that reminds me of home. But sadly some of the articles inside concern not a real Australia but a fictional place of the same name.
Take, for instance, David Oderberg’s “review of Jim Franklin’s _Corrupting the Youth_”:http://www.the-tls.co.uk/this_week/story.aspx?story_id=2107506. It’s allegedly a history of philosophy in Australia. But since it says, and from the context of Oderberg’s quote he apparently agrees, that Sydney is no longer a city where a student can find a respectable course of study in philosophy, it’s hard to credit that it is about the city we all know and love.
If this is meant to be a claim about real-world Sydney, it’s one of the adjectival stupidest things I’ve seen written in a long time. Any city that employs David Braddon-Mitchell, Peter Menzies, Huw Price, Caroline West, Stephen Hetherington and many many other fine philosophers is a city where one can find a respectable course of study in philosophy. (To be sure, I’m not confident Huw teaches that much on his current deal, but he is around the department and that often helps as much as actual teaching, especially with the grad students.) Sydney as a philosophical city could be better in many ways, I could be there for instance, but Franklin’s claim reveals a staggering ignorance of the strength of the current generation of philosophers.
On a not quite unrelated point, it’s not clear just how wide a scope a study of Australian philosophy should have. In particular, should it include the diaspora? There are over a million Australians abroad, and many of us are philosophers, and some quite prominent philosophers. Franklin’s book is basically about Sydney so it doesn’t include any reference to the diaspora (from the review it sounds like it barely mentions Canberra, so New York and Edinburgh are out of the question I guess) but I think it probably should have.