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Philosophy in both Australia and New Zealand has been has been
experiencing, for some time now, something of a 'golden age',
exercising an influence in the global arena that is
disproportionate to the population of the two countries. To capture
the distinctive and internationally recognised contributions
Australasian philosophers have made to their discipline, a series
of public talks by leading Australasian philosophers was convened
at various literary events and festivals across Australia and New
Zealand from 2006 to 2009. These engaging and often entertaining
talks attracted large audiences, and covered diverse themes ranging
from local histories of philosophy (in particular, the fortunes of
philosophy in Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Adelaide, and New
Zealand); to discussions of specific topics (including love, free
will, religion, ecology, feminism, and civilisation), especially as
these have featured in the Australasian philosophy; and to
examinations of the intellectual state of universities in
Australasia at the beginning of the twenty-first century. These
talks are now collected here for the first time, to provide not
only students and scholars, but also the wider community with a
deeper appreciation of the philosophical heritage of Australia and
New Zealand.
If asked what Humeanism could mean today, there is no other
philosopher to turn to whose work covers such a wide range of
topics from a unified Humean perspective as that of David Lewis.
The core of Lewis's many contributions to philosophy, including his
work in philosophical ontology, intensional logic and semantics,
probability and decision theory, topics within philosophy of
science as well as a distinguished philosophy of mind, can be
understood as the development of philosophical position that is
centered around his conception of Humean supervenience. If we
accept the thesis that it is physical science and not philosophical
reasoning that will eventually arrive at the basic constituents of
all matter pertaining to our world, then Humean supervenience is
the assumption that all truths about our world will supervene on
the class of physical truths in the following sense: There are no
truths in any compartment of our world that cannot be accounted for
in terms of differences and similarities among those properties and
external space-time relations that are fundamental to our world
according to physical science.
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