A Personal View of the Development of Deductive Logic in Australia Since 1956

Abstract

When I first arrived in Australia from St. Andrews early in 1956, two illusions were shattered. The first had been evoked by a pamphlet from Australia House which described Armidale, the town in which the University of New England is situated, as a cathedral city, and by a school atlas which seemed to place it in the Blue Mountains. I had visions of Canterbury in the Trossachs. But the reality was that Armidale then, if not now, must have been the paradigm in the mind of the person who defined Australian country towns as identical points separated by infinite distances.

This paper was read at the annual conference of the Australasian Association of Philosophy held in the University of Western Australia, Perth, in May 1988. 1988 was Australia’s bicentenary year and to mark this fact one day of the conference was given over to papers on various aspects of the recent history of philosophy in Australia. This was one of them. It was thus written for a special audience on a special occasion. It is mainly anecdotal, partly autobiographical and represents a very personal view of events which others may have seen quite differently. I have agreed to its publication here simply because I hope it will convey a background flavour to Errol Martin’s more detailed account in this volume of some of the developments I mention. In writing it, I was helped greatly by Richard Routley’s (Sylvan’s) article “Research in Logic in Australia, New Zealand and Oceania: Its Brief History and Its Present State” (Ruch Filozoficzny, Vol. XLI, No.2, 1984, pp. 127–162) and by Selwyn Grave’s book, A History of Philosophy in Australia, University of Queensland Press, 1983. I have also been helped by comments on an earlier draft by Richard Sylvan, Graham Priest, Allen Hazen and Barry Taylor.