Preface: to J. Franklin, Corrupting the Youth

Does life have a meaning, and if so what is it? Why are the established truths of my tribe better than the primitive superstitions of your tribe? What can I be certain of, and how should I act when I am not certain? Why should I do as I’m told? These are questions it is easy to avoid, in the rush to acquire a water frontage. Even for many of a more serious outlook, they are easy to dismiss with excuses like "it’s all a matter of opinion" or "let’s get on with practical matters" or "they’re too hard." They are questions that may be dismissed, but they do not go away.

A small proportion of the population pursue the answers to these questions through philosophy. Philosophy doubts whether rushing ahead with practical matters is a good idea, in advance of deciding which practical matters are important, and which is the forward direction for practical changes. It believes that some opinions are better than others, and that it is possible to say why logically. It inquires as to the value of water frontages, vis à vis the range of other goods proper to human nature.

Those who cultivate philosophy fall into two groups. They are the youth, and philosophers.

In the small window between the end of unquestioning childhood and the onset of the terminal busyness of working life, the inquiring young are prepared for a year or two to examine their fundamental assumptions, and perhaps take on new ones. Their search may be ill-directed or incompetent, but can be intense for a time, and adults with philosophical or religious opinions on offer find a ready audience. In the normal course of psychological development, some world view, or lack of it, is found serviceable and workaday reality supervenes. But a few discover in themselves a special aptitude for the way of ideas, and become professional philosophers. They become the teachers and writers who provide the next generation with its smorgasbord of options.

The emotional charge of the questions makes the relationship between philosophy teachers and their students a powerful one, irrespective of whether the teachers are any good (or good). When the citizens of Athens condemned Socrates to death in 399 BC on a charge of corrupting the youth, they recognised the power of ideas to change what the rising generation might believe, and how they might act. When the New South Wales Parliament in 1943 condemned Professor John Anderson’s statements on religion and education as "calculated to undermine the principles which constitute a Christian State", they were well aware that the state’s future schoolteachers had access to philosophical ideas almost entirely through him. When German disabled persons in wheelchairs prevented the Australian philosophy professor Peter Singer from speaking in 1991, it was because they feared his views on the permissibility of killing babies might come to be accepted – and with some reason, since his book Practical Ethics is widely used in university courses.

This is the story of Australian philosophers, both in their thinking and how their thought and action influenced their students. It is a story of some remarkable achievements, of insights and arguments that truly advanced understanding of perennially difficult questions. David Armstrong’s work on laws of nature, and Rai Gaita’s on the foundations of ethics in the preciousness of human life, are among permanent contributions to understanding reality at the most abstract level.

Not all is sweetness and light, however. Because philosophy deals with fundamentals, to which the human mind is not very well adapted either through evolution or education, there is always disagreement about what counts as good philosophy and what as bad. Philosophy is peculiarly susceptible to an illusion like white-out in the Antarctic, where the horizon seems to be just beyond what one can see. Consequently, almost everyone who has heard of philosophical questions thinks he can judge philosophy. So philosophical reputations are often decided by popular vote, for example by totalling the adulation of undergraduates. The book contains, therefore, some fast talking charlatans and some gullible disciples, and between the two, an extraordinary quantity of overheated air. Some of the more colourfully meaningless of this gaseous matter will be found in the sections on recent postmodernist and feminist philosophies.

But philosophy does not exist only in the classroom and adjoining offices, conference rooms and cloisters. Many of those who come into contact with philosophers in their youth take away fundamental reorientations about what is important, and follow life courses that are to one degree or another implementations of philosophical ideas. The libertarian excesses of the celebrated Sydney ‘Push’ were a living out of at least one interpretation of the ethical views of their teacher, John Anderson. An opposite ethical plan, that of Catholic natural law philosophy, inspired the High Court judges in the Mabo case to draw from the ethical underpinning of the law a reason for overturning the doctrine of terra nullius. Argument over euthanasia still turns more on essential philosophical disagreements than on differing estimates of the practical consequences of changing the law.

Fundamentals are dangerous, in that changes in them have consequences that reach far into the depths of thought and conduct, and far into the future. That is why philosophy matters, and why knowledge of a country’s philosophical past is the surest guide to where it is going.