The History of Ideas

Abstract

Towards the conclusion of his review of Selwyn Grave’s A History of Philosophy in Australia (University of Queensland Press, 1984) for the Sydney journal Critical Philosophy (Vol.2 No.2 1985, pp.108–113), the Sydney philosopher John Burnheim writes that one of the major conflicts still to be treated in the history of philosophy in Australia is that between “those who maintained the traditional quest for atemporal theory and those who sought an explicitly historically-situated understanding of human thinking and practice....” Although Burnheim goes on to claim that the conflict “came to a sharp confrontation only in the University of Sydney”, and in recent years, it is one which may also be relevant to an understanding of the peripheral place given to the History of Ideas in the history of philosophy in Australia by at least some philosophers and departments of philosophy in the past.