The First Hundred Years of (The) Australasian Journal of Philosophy

ABSTRACT

A (not the) history of the Australasian Journal of Philosophy is presented in a series of snapshots, some of them with 360° angles, taken at ten-year intervals from the time of its foundation to the time of writing. Attention is paid to influences on the AJP ranging from the social and political to the individual, from the financial to the technical, from the historical to the geographical, and to how these influences are (or are not) reflected in its contents and appearance.

KEYWORDS:

• Australasian Journal of Philosophy
• history of philosophy
• journal centenary
• Australasian philosophy

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Grave [1984: 100] has ‘1922’. Presumably, this is the year in which the substantive work was done.

2 As observed below, The Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy became The Australasian Journal of Philosophy in 1947. There remained some uncertainty in the title, however, not only because both old and new appear in the archive of the 1947 issues (see note 8), but also because of wavering over the initial definite article. Records are incomplete, and the binding process common to library journal collections usually results in the removal of the original issue covers, while digitization generally loses everything but the content of the papers and reviews themselves, so that it is, at the time of writing, difficult to gain precise information. It is clear that ‘The’ disappeared from the front cover at some time between 1945 and 1955, but remained on the title pages. In 1968, the Journal’s title began (again) to appear on the opening page of each article, and in this location it was given as Australasian Journal of Philosophy. This truncated form spread to the title pages from Volume 51, No.1, May 1973. The full title, however, remained on the cover spines (but only the spines) of the unbound issues until, with a new cover design, it was eliminated even in this vestigial form with Volume 59, No.1, March 1981. It is hard to think of this process of attrition as much more than a series of contingencies, with decisions likely to have been made more by page designers than by any clear conception of what the title should be, even at the editorial level, let alone the Associational. In particular, the persistence of the full title on the spine until 1980 is more likely to be the result of an oversight than of any decision at all. I have reserved ‘The’ for pre-1947 issues.

3 One illustrative example [Leonhard 2018: 837]:

In Russia, despite its formal end, the interstate war was giving way to civil war by the end of 1917—a conflict that would last into the early 1920s and in which far more Russians would be killed than in the fighting of the world war.

4 ‘The Australian Imperial Force would be commanded by British generals until the last year of the war … The Royal Australian Navy, similarly, was placed under control of the Royal Navy from the beginning of the war’ [Macintyre 2009: 158]. See also Leonhard [2018: 449].

5 This is not to ignore the enormous contributions from other parts of the British Empire, such as India.

6 Indeed, in the 1880s and 1890s, ‘the term “Australasia”, once commonly used to refer collectively to both countries, fell into disfavour’ [Sinclair 1980: 232]. Its presence in the AJP’s title still causes trouble: the non-existent Australian Journal of Philosophy continues to feature regularly in bibliographies.

7 From now on, the capitalized expressions ‘the Journal’ and ‘the Association’ are to be taken to refer to Australasian Journal of Philosophy and the Australasian Association of Philosophy unless otherwise indicated.

8 Robert Young [2010] has ‘1948’. The records are confusing, even muddled: downloads from the Archive for 1947 appear under the old title, but page 1 of G.H. Stout [1947], inter alia, displays the new one. Whatever the degree of wobbling in the production process, the indented quote at the end of section 3 below seems firm as to the intention.

9 Macintyre [2009: 71] identifies the nineteenth century’s anti-transportation movement as fostering ‘the pejorative British attitudes towards the Australian colonies [which] possibly contributed to a lingering condescension’. Notice that ‘possibly’ here concerns the source, not the undeniable fact, of the condescension to whose persistence into the late twentieth century many on its receiving end could attest.

10 See, for example, Sinclair [1980: 199–200] on New Zealand’s ‘export of brains’, its inability to ‘feel competent to estimate their worth’, and ‘the usual colonial sense of inferiority’. This need for overseas recognition before one could be accepted in one’s own region characterized antipodean cultural life in general, and produced an intellectual and artistic export industry. It is, in contrast, hard to believe that the title The New England Journal of Medicine would look vaguely provincial to a professor at Harvard.

11 At one point, Australia Post introduced a promising new method of postage, ‘Surface Air Lifted’, cheaper than air mail but faster than surface mail. SAL-stamped mail was sent by air to the nearest airport in the destination country, and thereafter proceeded by the local surface method. This worked well for submissions to the UK, a small country with a (then) efficient postal system. It turned out not to work well at all for North America, where, as far as one could tell, a typescript would arrive promptly into, say, Los Angeles and then disappear into the dark maw of the notoriously slow US and Canadian postal systems. A typescript sent by SAL to, say, an east-coast destination in North America, could, and did, take many, many weeks to arrive. The SAL system did not survive for long.

12 See, e.g., ‘Philosophy’, The Queenslander, 23 September 1922, p. 3 (http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article27439184);‘Journal of Psychology and Philosophy’, Western Mail, 22 March 1923, p. 39 (http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article44759788); and, more routinely, ‘Company News’, Sydney Morning Herald, 14 October 1924, p. 11 (http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article28070384).

13 ‘Earth’: it is embedded in the initial (unsigned) editorial [Anderson 1923]. Dorothea Mackellar, eventually awarded the OBE shortly before her death in 1968, is the author of the famous poem ‘My Country’.

14 The author was President of the South Australian Industrial Board.

15 The author was indeed a Presbyterian minister, who served as a voluntary chaplain at Gallipoli in 1915—from which he was invalided home with malaria—and again on the Western Front in 1918.

16 Anderson was born in 1858 and graduated MA in 1883.

17 Grave [1984: 101) conjectures that this emphasis on psychoanalysis is owing to the influence of Tasman Lovell, one of the Journal’s founders, whose expertise in this area ‘was much beyond the routine knowledge of psychologists of the time’.

18 It was not until 1982 that the Journal could be said to have seriously made up for this, with the publication of the remarkable monograph The Metaphysics of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus [Goddard and Judge 1982].

19 Like a number of the Journal’s early articles, Gisborne’s three AJP papers seem to be neither philosophy nor psychology. Although learned, well written, and forcefully argued, they are mostly political polemic. His biographer describes him as a ‘conservative ideologue’ [Roe 2005]. This seems an understatement; but it is worth noting that, at this time, eugenics was quite popular on the political left, too.

20 This is R. Lawson, not Henry Lawson. There is a further poem by Lawson in Volume 10/4 (1932).

21 Anderson’s influence is ably described by Aubrey Townsend [2010], but is much discussed in many other places. Franklin [2003] is a useful source.

22 Beginning in 1934, Partridge published six papers in AJP in the 1930s, and three in the 1940s.

23 Writing as J.A. Passmore, and beginning in 1935, Passmore published four articles in the 1930s, seven in the 1940s, and four in the 1950s. The AJP also has two later papers by him, under ‘John Passmore’.

24 Most visibly in Douglas Gasking’s [1940] ingenious ‘Mathematics and the World’ and in J.N. Findlay’s [1940, 1941] strikingly sympathetic ‘Some Reactions to Recent Cambridge Philosophy’. Later, in 1951, the death of Wittgenstein was marked with an Obituary by D.A.T.G and A.C.J. (Douglas Gasking and Cameron Jackson) [29/2: 73–80]. This, published two years before the appearance of Philosophical Investigations, paints a vivid picture of its subject in perplexing action.

25 See Passmore [1943, 1944, 1948].

26 H. Kaulla seems to have been the Helmut Kaulla whose obituary appeared in The Canberra Times on 29^th May 1981 (http://nla.gov.au/nla.news-article125637325). Of Jewish descent, he studied engineering and philosophy at Munich before fleeing Germany in 1934. From 1938 to 1944 he held a position in the Department of Psychology at The University of Western Australia, before moving to the Australian Patent Office in 1944 as an examiner. In the 1960s he was teaching Science German at the ANU, where he had started out as a part-time lecturer when it was Canberra University College. In 1975 he published Philosophische Aspekte der Maschinentechnik, an Hegelian synthesis of his interests in his two major disciplines.

27 How did this news get into Issue 1 of the Journal for that year? That issue had been greatly delayed because the Editor had himself been heavily involved in public controversy over freedom of discussion, although not with fatal results.

28 The book (Leibniz: der Philosoph der universalen Harmonie) was published in 1951 and is still available through WorldCat.

29 John Mackie subsequently published also as J.L. Mackie, There are, in total, sixteen contributions to the AJP by Mackie (including some that are co-authored).

30 Prior styled himself as ‘Arthur N. Prior’ in the Journal up to the end of 1951; thereafter, he appeared as A.N. Prior.

31 A notable exception was Gilbert Ryle, who contributed a single paper [1950].

32 Or large parts of it did. The Korean War lasted from 1950 until an armistice in July 1953 (and is, at the time of writing, still technically unfinished). Troops from Australia and New Zealand (and from many other countries) were committed to it, but the war was relatively uncontroversial in Australasia and had little discernible impact on philosophers.

33 This change is well summarized by Robert Young [2010].

34 Until 1955, the AJP did not routinely display authorial affiliations. This attribution is inferred.

35 There are no records to let us be sure of how much this happened, but, to my personal knowledge, R.F. Holland’s ‘Religious Discourse and Theological Discourse’ [1956] was an invited paper. Holland was one of the first cohort from Ryle’s newly minted Oxford B.Phil. The AJP’s Editor at the time, Alan Stout, was, like his father, and Jonathan Harrison too, an Oxford man.

36 But, as yet, nothing from outside those three regions—language barriers and differing philosophical traditions are sufficient explanation—and, a fortiori, nothing from beyond the Iron Curtain, where the stagnation imposed by the Cold War would not have encouraged the submission of philosophy articles to Western journals.

37 Ellis went on to edit the Journal from 1978 to 1989. Also appearing in AJP for 1955 are sole papers by Stephen Toulmin and Bernard Mayo, plus the first of several by the eventually highly influential C.B. Martin.

38 After moving back to Europe in the 1950s, and to the University of Cambridge, Buchdahl went on

to transform the history and philosophy of science at Cambridge: from a team of two to a teaching and research staff of ten or so; from a library for which a bare forty-three books had been purchased in the five years before his appointment to the first-ever comprehensive collection of the discipline; from an unstaffed repository of scientific instruments to a properly curated and displayed museum; from a handful of research students to a hive of scholarly pursuits; in sum, into a, if not the, world centre in the history and philosophy of science <https://www.hps.cam.ac.uk/news-events/news-archive/gerd-buchdahl>.

39 This lack of imperial clothing was wittily exposed by Bill Lycan [2009] in a 2007 AAP conference paper, subsequently published in AJP. A measured history of the Identity Theory (to give it perhaps its most common title) is provided by Daniel Stoljar [2010].

40 James Franklin [2003: ch. 11] provides a vivid account of the notorious events at the University of Sydney. Grave [1984: ch. 11] is determinedly non-partisan.

41 According to Nerlich’s recollection, submissions during his Editorship numbered about 100 per year. Including a substantial proportion of Discussions, as well as Critical Notices, the Journal at this time was publishing about 30 articles each year.

42 ‘Officially designated’? In 1982, David Lewis’s cat, Bruce, submitted from his home in Princeton a sharp-clawed criticism of some of Lewis’s work [Le Catt 1982].

43 For the conjecture that Sylvan’s article was not readily accepted, see its final footnote.

44 AJP has an informed and appreciative review of a book on the work of Sylvan and Plumwood [Beall 2015].

45 Robert Eliot [1989] preceded Grey in tackling environmental ethics in AJP’s pages. The development of environmental ethics as a subject of interest in Australasia is ably described by Freya Mathews [2010].

46 Oddly, this editorial introduction too is not individually indexed in the on-line version of the Journal.

47 Not in 2005, as Robert Young inadvertently has it [2010: 63].

48 The actual figures for referees in mid-2008 were USA 525, Rest of World in toto 397.

49 Winner of the AJP Best Paper Award for that year.

50 It is instructive to compare this article with an early (and rare) article on another aspect of Asian (in this case, Japanese) philosophy [Singer 1947]. For all its learning (Singer taught at Tokyo Imperial University from 1931 to 1935), the older paper displays the assumptions of its period, and it is hard to miss the tone of condescension in its final paragraph.

51 Readers who might have missed the long-drawn-out and ill-tempered Hypatia debate can find a well-documented retrospective account at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypatia_transracialism_controversy (accessed 24/11/2020). The more recent row at Philosophical Psychology has yet to find its historian. One source is https://dailynous.com/2020/06/24/controversy-philosophical-psychology-leads-editors-resignation/ (accessed 24/11/2020).

52 The author wishes to acknowledge the efforts of four readers for this Journal, which have led to many corrections and improvements. In addition, the AJP’s current Editor, Stephen Hetherington, and four previous Editors, Graham Nerlich, Brian Ellis, Robert Young, and Fred d’Agostino, have been generous with their time in providing information, as also have Graham Oppy, Tim Oakley, and Lindsay Yeates.