A polemical account of Australian philosophy up to 2003, emphasising its unique aspects (such as commitment to realism) and the connections between philosophers' views and their lives. Topics include early idealism, the dominance of John Anderson in Sydney, the Orr case, Catholic scholasticism, Melbourne Wittgensteinianism, philosophy of science, the Sydney disturbances of the 1970s, Francofeminism, environmental philosophy, the philosophy of law and Mabo, ethics and Peter Singer. Realist theories especially praised are David Armstrong's on universals, David Stove's on logical probability (...) and the ethical realism of Rai Gaita and Catholic philosophers. In addition to strict philosophy, the book treats non-religious moral traditions to train virtue, such as Freemasonry, civics education and the Greek and Roman classics. (shrink)

By using the concept of a uniformity, the Structuralists have given us a most useful means of representing approximations. In the second section of this paper, I have made use of this technique to show how we can deal with errors of measurement — imprecise explananda — in the context of theoretical explanation. As well as (I hope) providing further demonstration of the power of the Structuralist approach, this also serves to support the ontic conception of explanation by showing that (...) it can help us resolve substantial problems in the theory of explanation. (shrink)