 Hello, I'm JJ Joaquin and welcome to Philosophy and What Matters, where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Our topic for this episode is Philosophy of Religion. A typical undergraduate philosophy program offers a course in Philosophy of Religion. Here the students will learn about arguments for the existence of God, the problem of evil, and perhaps some aspects of philosophical theology. A part of the syllabus, of course, is an inquiry into the relationship of science and religion. The rise of science has paved the way to our naturalistic philosophy, a viewpoint that seems to be at odds with religion. But is this opposition a contradictory one? That is, the truth of naturalistic philosophy implied the rejection of religious doctrines. And why do these questions matter anyway? So to share these thoughts on these questions, we have Graeme Opie, Professor of Philosophy at Moa National University, and former CEO of the Australasian Association of Philosophy. And the author of Naturalism and Religion, a Contemporary Philosophical Investigation. Hello Professor Opie, welcome to Philosophy and What Matters. Hi. Okay, so before we get into domain topic, let's first discuss your philosophical background. What led you to study philosophy? Okay, so when I was 16, I think, maybe I was 15, I was given as a birthday present a copy of Bertrand Russell's autobiography, which I read. And I was really impressed. And that was how I got interested in philosophy. And I decided before I left high school that I wanted to be a philosopher, which I think is quite unusual. Lots of people don't make this decision until significantly later in their lives. But that's how I got interested in philosophy. And I started reading stuff that Russell talked about in his autobiography while I was still at school as well. So Russell's autobiography is one of the catalysts of you coming into philosophy. So you also read his Why I Am Not a Christian? Later, yes. I can't remember exactly when I read it. I probably read that one while I was still at school as well, or maybe it was very early in my university career. When I went to university first up, I was enrolled to study medicine. I spent a year reading philosophy books when I was supposed to be studying medicine and decided that really I was in the wrong faculty. Okay, so you shifted from the study of medicine to philosophy. So what brought that aside from Russell's autobiography? It was just a question about my interests. And just monitoring what I was doing, it was clear that the thing that I was really interested in was philosophy. Well, because I was following Russell, I was also very interested in mathematics and physics as well. So I actually did two undergraduate degrees, one in science and one in arts. I hadn't fully made a mind up about whether I'd do maths or philosophy until I'd finished both of those degrees. So you went to philosophy instead of pursuing mathematics. So who were your philosophical heroes? I suppose in some ways Russell and Hume would be as close as it gets. I don't really think of myself as having heroes though. I mean people tend to have good and bad aspects and that was no less true of Hume and Russell than it is of anyone else. I had mentors and that was more important. So at Melbourne Uni when I was an undergraduate, Alan Hazen was a mentor of mine and that made a significant difference to what I ended up doing. After I left Melbourne and went to Princeton, Gil Harman and David Lewis were two very significant mentors as well. They had a lot of influence on what I ended up doing. Okay, so you have Alan Hazen who's a logician, you have Lewis who's a metaphysician and Gil Harman who's about doing everything in philosophy. So what aspects of their philosophy were influenced you? So it's not so much the content of their philosophy. They just taught me how to do philosophy. There are certainly things that I've picked up but from each of them. So Gil Harman's book Change in View is very influential on my thinking about argument and reasoning and things like that. Lewis, the stuff about possible worlds didn't really rub off on me and yet that's really central to his philosophy. But the papers that he wrote in Philosophy of Religion, his paper on Ann Salmon Actuality and his paper on evil for freedom's sake, I think models of good philosophy of religion. And Alan Hazen, just generally, Alan was very generous with his time. I spent many hours talking about all kinds of philosophy and learned a great deal that way. I think that it's quite important if you're a student and you have the opportunity to talk to your teachers that you should. You will learn a great deal if you do that. Oh yeah, so you're a self-professed atheist but you're also working on philosophy of religion. So what led you to atheism and why did you end up specializing in philosophy of religion? Okay, so the atheism is quite early in life. So my family background was Methodist and I went to church and Sunday school and things like that until I was about 13. And then in a fairly short period of time I decided that I didn't believe any of that stuff and things haven't changed since. So that's the, it's not very exciting but that's how I became an atheist. I didn't talk to anybody, there was no particular trigger for it. I just started thinking about the things that I was being taught and thought this is not, to me anyway, this is not believable. So that's that side of it. The other question, how I ended up in philosophy of religion is more complicated. After I became an atheist I loved arguing with people about religion. So right through my school career. I know it's interesting I went to a school reunion last year and various people came up and said that they remembered arguing with me about religion. But I didn't set out to become a philosopher of religion. My PhD was in philosophy of language. By the time I got out of graduate school I had studied one course in philosophy of religion in my entire philosophical career to that point. But I came back to Australia and Richard Campbell who was then heading up the department, what was then the other department at ANU, the teaching faculty, needed someone to teach a course in philosophy of religion and he asked me if I could do it. So I just said yes and then started teaching myself philosophy of religion so that I was a weak head of the students all the way through the semester. But along the way I got enough material to publish a couple of papers so I kind of started to get interested. I then had a couple of jobs in Sydney and Wollongong where I wasn't teaching philosophy of religion and wasn't particularly working on it. I was publishing papers in philosophy of language and aesthetics back then. But an opportunity came up. I decided to apply for an ASC grant. The ASC grant scheme was just kicking off. It was the opportunity to get a three-year postdoc and the project that I picked was to write something about reformed epistemology. And I talked to Frank Jackson at ANU and he said you'll never get this grant. I'll support you. And then I did get it and I went to ANU and I wrote a book about ontological arguments. Which I thought of as the first step in the project between that to be all that I got done. But at that point I then sort of become a philosopher of religion. But I see that as a series of accidents. I was offered some teaching. I just happened to get a grant. If things had gone differently I might have ended up not coming to work in philosophy of religion at all. Yeah but it's an interesting story. So you're not keen on philosophy of religion from the start. You love to argue about religion but not really as a profession. I was specialised on it. So what is your first teaching on philosophy of religion? What does it look like? Okay so what did I do? So I still have this. I wrote extremely detailed notes for each class and then distributed them to the students. And what I thought I would do is a kind of detailed study of the arguments on both sides. On the question about the existence of... Why did I do that? Because the one course that I had previously done which was taught to me by Bruce Langtree at the University of Melbourne had had its main focus on arguments about the existence of God. He didn't try to do what I did which was kind of consider... I had 26 lectures so I kind of looked at 26 different arguments. He looked in more detail at arguments for design and problem of evil. So he sort of had one argument on each side and spent several weeks talking about each. But that was my model. And I think it was the first thing I'd ever taught. And so it was kind of natural that I looked around for a model somewhere else. And that was the thing that was in my experience. So that was why I ended up teaching the course that way. But that kind of settled the research direction. Because for the first decade maybe longer... I suppose actually it's longer than that. First 15 years. My work in philosophy of religion was mostly on arguments about the existence of God. Yeah, so you wrote a book. You wrote many books on philosophy of religion. So yes, from your first work on the ontological argument to your opinionated introduction to the subject. But how should we understand philosophy of religion in the first place? Okay, so let's go back a step. What's philosophy? So I think that you should think of philosophy as a discipline that has an interesting relationship to all the other disciplines. So in the other disciplines there's a core of stuff on which there's expert agreement. That is, claims. So there's a bunch of stuff that say mathematicians or physicists or historians just agree about. And then around that there's a bunch of claims that are currently controversial. But where everybody's kind of certain that so long as we go on using the methods that we've got, we'll arrive at the answers. So we know these are mathematical questions and we're pretty sure that they're going to yield mathematical answers. Or we know these are physical. And then around that you get to this borderline where there are questions. And we don't know the answers. We don't know what the methods are that we should use to try to answer these questions. And we're not even sure whether these questions really appropriately belong in this discipline or not. Well, that's where the philosophy of the discipline comes in. So that's like philosophy of mathematics or philosophy of physics. There are some areas where... So the way that I think about philosophy, the philosophical questions are those questions where there's no expert agreement or consensus on the answers. And there's no expert agreement or consensus on the methods to be used to answer those questions. There are some areas where everything is still like that, like metaphysics or most normative stuff. So value theory. Philosophy of religion then is just, according to me, the study of questions about religion, where there's no agreement on the answers and no agreement on the methods that we should use to try to answer those questions. And there's lots of other disciplines that study religion, sociology of religion, history of religion and so on. But philosophy has its own distinctive place. That's my official story about what your religion is. Okay, so you're talking about philosophy as looking at borderline questions in a specific discipline. So in the philosophy of mathematics, you're asking what are numbers perhaps. In philosophy of physics, you're asking about the status of those virtual entities. But how about in philosophy of religion, what are the borderline questions here? So remember that the questions are going to be any questions where there's disagreement on both the claims and the methods to be used to resolve them. Now, I think if you consider the question where the God exists, it's going to fall into that category. Clearly, there's no agreement about where the God exists. But it's also, there doesn't seem to be any agreement on how we should go about answering that question either. Now, you might disagree about that, but I think that there isn't any agreement on the answer to that question either. And that's enough to make that a question that belongs to the philosophy of religion. Okay, so is this rather like a theology, philosophy of theology, than philosophy of religion per se? No, because that was one example that I picked. But I think that there's lots of questions that philosophy of religion can take up. In my book, you already referred to it, the opinionated introduction to philosophy of religion. I consider some questions that fall into metaphysics, some questions that fall into epistemology and some questions that fall into value theory that are kind of general questions about religion. So there are questions about, there are philosophical questions about religious disagreement, whether, you know, should it bother us that there's disagreement about religion? Should we think that there's only one rational way of thinking about particular religious questions? Or in metaphysics, there's this question about whether we should think that there are entities beyond the entities to which a naturalist will be happy to commit himself. And in value theory, there'll be questions about where values come from, whether they're distinctively religious values and so on. Okay, so, yeah, yeah, so I'm hearing Russell's idea here, because for Bertrand Russell, right? So for him, philosophical questions fall under two categories, metaphysical questions and epistemological questions. And now you're adding the value questions as well. So what would a typical syllabus of the subject apply? What should students expect to learn in philosophy of religion? Right, so I think that's a really hard question before we came on air. I said that when we got to this point, I might struggle to think about what to say. So there are different approaches that you can take depending upon what you care about now. One thing you might think that your students should have is a kind of introduction to questions about religion considered as a global phenomenon. So there are many different religions, and we should be interested in the kinds of questions that emerge when we consider them together. A different approach that you might take is that you might think about the local conditions and about the religious beliefs or the kind of predominant religious beliefs of the people in the class. And you might think about the philosophical questions that arise in connection with those particular beliefs, and you might make that part of the syllabus. What's happened in philosophy of religion in the West in the last 50 years is that it's had a huge focus, not just on Christianity and certain central philosophical questions about Christianity, but a focus on one kind of, I'll call it one kind of Christianity, which is the kind of US evangelical Christianity that's had had a completely disproportionate amount of attention in philosophy of religion. And when, if we go back to my original syllabus about the thing about arguments about the existence of God, that's largely what the literature, where the literature was coming from. Okay, so aside from the topic about the existence of God, what else should be included in the syllabus? Well, I guess what I was suggesting before is that there's not anything that must be in there, because it depends. It depends on what your aims are. I mean, one of the things you wanted, if you've got a syllabus, you want to engage the students, you want to talk to them about things that they think are important. But you also, to balance that, you also want to talk to them about things that you think it's important that they should think about. And so that balance between the local and global is quite tricky to negotiate in philosophy of religion. So, I mean, one way to think about this, think about James in the Will to Believe when he talks about whether hypotheses are live or not. If you're in a particular community, the religious beliefs of, let me pick an example. Okay, so Australian Indigenous beliefs about the rainbow serpent, that might just not be a live topic for you. And so, including that in the syllabus, if you're teaching philosophy of religion and your students are no more interested than you are, it's possibly not going to be a good move. So, I don't think that there's a should here, a normative requirement about what goes into philosophy of religion. You have to make a judgment about, given the class that you've got, what would be appropriate to be talking about. Yeah, so what are the expected outcomes of? Okay, so what will a standard class look like? Yep. Okay, so I have a textbook called Reading Philosophy of Religion, and it divides into five sections. There's one section on arguments about the existence of God. There's one on divine attributes. There's one on the kind of epistemology of religion that looks at a narrow range of things. So Clifford and James and they kind of dispute about the bearing of evidence on religious questions, but in particular the question of God's existence. There's some stuff about religious language, the meaning of religious language. And finally, maybe this is slightly more unusual. There's some stuff on religious pluralism and exclusivism and things like that. But if you look at a syllabus in philosophy of religion over the last 30 or 40 years in a university like Monash or a major American university or major British university, a lot of that stuff is going to be what's in there. Yeah, but the last topic about pluralism, religious pluralism, that's something unusual. So why did you add that in your syllabus? Okay, so this book is co-authored with Michael Scott from the University of Manchester. And he was very keen to have the material on religious pluralism in there. At the time when we wrote the book, so it's been over a decade ago, I had previously included material on religious pluralism in my philosophy of religion classes. But I might not, if he hadn't agitated for it, maybe it wouldn't have ended up in the book. Okay, so this is the same Michael Scott concern about philosophy of religious language, right? Yeah, it's the same guy. So the book starts off with some section on religious language, which he wrote, and ends with section on religious pluralism, which he also wrote. Okay, so let's go back to the basic idea in philosophy of religion, that is the existence of God question. So you have a book about arguments about the existence of God. Are there any good arguments for the existence of God? Okay, so now we have to have a discussion about what makes for a good argument, and this discussion could go on for a while. And you kind of have to fix terms too. So an argument is a list of claims, one of which is the conclusion, the rest of which are the premises. An argument's valid just in case the conclusion's a logical consequence of the premises. An argument's sound just in case it's valid and all the premises are true. So one thought is that a good argument is a sound argument, and often that turns out to be roughly what people are actually assuming. That's not a good account of what an argument is, but it's often what people assume. One way of seeing that it's not really a good account of what makes for a good argument is to think about the difference between asserting a claim and putting forward an argument. So suppose we disagree about whether God exists and you just say God exists. You shouldn't expect me to change my mind just because you've asserted something that I don't believe. So now let's suppose you put forward an argument that goes sort of premise one, premise two, therefore God exists. Suppose I don't accept the premises. You shouldn't expect me to be any more moved by what you're doing than I was when you just said God exists. So when you think about which arguments, we disagree about a whole lot of things. Which arguments are we going to think of sound? Well, only the ones that contain things that we believe. So it looks as though giving me arguments with premises I don't accept is just a waste of time. That suggests to me that the point of giving arguments is going to be something like this. I'm committed to a bunch of claims and you can show that from those claims either something absurd follows. So there's a reductio of my position in which case I better revise my beliefs because my beliefs are inconsistent. And notwithstanding that I might be grand-priest. I like that. Or it might be that there's some unexpected consequence. That is to me, I didn't realise that from my beliefs you could derive this thing. It's not a contradiction, but I've still got to make a decision about whether I'm really comfortable believing it or not. On that account of what it is to be a successful argument, there are no successful arguments about the existence of God in my opinion. None of the big arguments. I mean, individually it might be you consider a particular person, they might have inconsistent beliefs about God, whether they believe or they don't believe. But when you think about the idea that you might show that theism is inconsistent or that atheism is inconsistent, there are no arguments that do that. So I'm my current way of thinking about these things, there are no successful arguments about the existence of God either way. And that's consistent with the kind of position that I defended in the book that you were arguing about God's, the book that I published about 15 years ago. Okay, that's interesting. So I'm hearing Gil Harman's idea in Change and View and what you're seeing. Yeah, correct. That's part of the reason why I mentioned that in particular earlier on. Right. So instead of asking whether here's an argument, is it a sound argument? Therefore it's a good argument. Instead of asking whether that's the case, what you want to do is let's engage in your premises and in your starting beliefs and let's see whether it leads to an inconsistency or maybe it leads to an unexpected conclusion that you need to accept given the premises that you have. Well, at that point, you don't know. Yeah, sort of given the premises you need to accept it, but you have a choice. You always have a choice once you've been shown that something follows from your beliefs, whether to revise your beliefs or accept the thing. Right. So I'm hearing Gil Harman here. So what you mentioned is that it's interesting that it's not just the arguments for the existence of God. This includes the arguments against existence. Sure. So even the problem of evil, you don't think it's a successful argument? That's correct. But I argued that back in arguing about God's. Because the thesis of that book was that there's no successful arguments on either side. And I've got rather more clear views about what makes for a good argument now than I had when I wrote that book. But these ideas were kind of fuzzily in the background when I was writing that book. Okay, so let's go to your, go back to your atheism. So what's your reason for being an atheist? Do you have an argument for it? I don't exactly have an argument. There's another book that I wrote, The Best Argument Against God. And that kind of sets out something like my reasons. But I think that my reasons are clearly controversial. They involve making a huge number of judgments. And our ability to make judgments is fallible. So there could be mistakes in the judgments that I've made. And certainly I can't deny that reasonable people could make judgments different from the ones that I make. Okay, so here's the kind of outline, the framework in which all the judgments fit. I think that naturalism is a simpler view than theism. So it commits you to less. The idea is roughly we're both committed to the natural universe, but theists are also committed to God. So their view is more complicated. I mean, that's a very crude statement of it. And then I think there's a whole lot of things that you might think are evidence that bear on whether God exists or not. And I think that in every case, the explanation that theists can give of that evidence is no better than the explanation that naturalists can give. So at worst there's explanatory parity, but naturalism is simpler. So by my lights, it's the better view. I don't expect everybody else to agree with my assessment. This is the sort of fallible side of it. And it's kind of more than that. I think that you can reasonably disagree with me about that. But that's how I weigh it all up. So that's why I'm a naturalist. And hence, because I think naturalism here is excluding atheism. He's excluding atheism, why I'm an atheist as well. Okay, so let's go to your latest book, naturalism and religion, contemporary philosophical investigation. And one, where you claim or where you argued that naturalism does not involve an apriori rejection of the supernatural. Before we get into that claim, how should we understand naturalism first? Okay, so that's a quite difficult question to answer. My short summary is that what's central to naturalism is the idea that there are none but natural causal entities with none but natural causal powers. So the only causal entities and causal powers that there are are natural ones. That leaves open a whole lot of questions, like, for example, whether they're abstract objects of one kind or another. Because I take it that what's constitutive of being an abstract object is that you're not causal. So some people think that naturalism is inconsistent with their being abstract objects. I don't think that on this sort of minimal definition of naturalism. There's a question about how this relates to science because some people think that naturalism is kind of the claim that the only things you should believe in are things that are particularly well established by science. I think that, as a matter of fact, in a very wide range of cases, if you want to know what are the causal entities and the causal powers, the safest thing to do is to see what the science says. In particular, if there's scientific consensus, you should just follow it. If there isn't scientific consensus, though, and that's often the case, then you've got some freedom to speculate. Depending on the case, you might just want to be agnostic. But in some cases, you might actually kind of take a punt and maybe that won't be unreasonable. Okay, so you're understanding naturalism here, not just as a scientific point of view. It's more of an overall philosophy that everything is natural. Everything is in the physical world. But you mentioned about causal powers. So there's a principle often invoked by philosophers that is the Iliadic principle. So what makes a difference or which has causal powers or are the things that exist? Do you subscribe to that view as well? So can you just say that again? So the idea is that the only things that exist are things with causal powers. So I've left it open whether there are abstract objects, for example, that don't have causal powers. So you might have reasons for thinking that since it's considered the claim that two and three are five, you might think that's true. In order for it to be true, there better be something that makes it true. Maybe what makes it true is that there are the numbers two, three and five and they're related in the way that the claim says that they are. And so you might have a reason for thinking that there are numbers, while nonetheless accepting that they don't have causal powers. I'm not saying that that's my view. I'm just saying that you could be a naturalist and accept that kind of reasoning and lots of people do have reasons, something much like that for believing in numbers, whether or not they're naturalists. But you're saying that this kind of naturalism does not a priori lead to the rejection of the supernatural? No, because it's an a posteriori naturalism. So remember the way that what I said before when I was talking about how I would defend my position, what I would like to do is say compare a range of non-naturalistic worldviews with a naturalistic worldview. A worldview is just a theory of everything. The naturalistic worldview is distinctive. The only worldviews I'm interested in are ones that agree that there's a universe. So I'm going to settle the others aside. So naturalism is minimal in this class because it says there's a universe and that's all. Whereas as far as the causal stuff goes, whereas the other non-naturalistic worldviews have more causal stuff in there. They have some non-natural causal entities. Unless there's some explanatory advantage that you get from postulating those extra entities, then there's a reason, I say, for sticking with naturalism. So that's the kind of general form of the argument. Okay, so you're talking about worldviews, but you're also looking at the big picture. Are you the same here? Yeah, I go backwards and forwards. So worldview is a term that has a certain amount of baggage, historical baggage, whereas big picture is my own term and doesn't. And theory of everything is another term that these days has a bit of baggage because there are lots of physicists who have used it to describe something else. But it's easier to say what I've got in mind than it is to settle on the terminology. Just imagine a theory that gives you a completely accurate description of everything that there is. That would be the true theory of everything. Yeah, so I'm hearing a kind of parsimony argument here. Yeah. So you could think of it as a kind of Occam's razor argument. But it's a very long argument, as I said before. It's got lots of controversial detail in it because if you pick two worldviews, they disagree about lots and lots of things. And it might well be that if you pick a pair of worldviews, even though one of them is simpler, the other one explains some things better and nothing worse. And now we have no principle that tells us how to weigh those worldviews. What I said was distinctive about naturalism, and this is a hugely controversial point, is that it's simpler and nothing does better than it at explaining stuff. And of course, lots of people disagree about that. But it strikes me that that disagreement is one that reasonable people can have. So it won't turn out that you're rationally required to be a naturalist or atheist. It'll be rationally permissible to go either way. Okay. Your interlocutors in the book are people like William Craig and JP Moreland, who are critical of naturalism. So what were their worries about this worldview, and what's your response to them? Well, in one sense, the worry is that my worldview contradicts theirs. That's the worry. They're committed evangelical theists, and there's no room for God in my worldview. Their arguments are often that about other alleged consequences of naturalism. But there, if you've read the introduction to the book and some of the discussion through the book, you'll know that I just disagree with them about what they take to be the consequences of naturalism. They think that naturalism has consequences for metaphysics, epistemology, value theory, and so on, which I take it are not the consequences that it actually has. Just to give an example, it seems to me that my characterization of naturalism is consistent with a huge range of different views that you might take about the nature of morality. You could be consequentialist, deontologist, virtue theorist. All of those are consistent with a view about there only being the causal entities being just natural. Okay, so in your view, where is the philosophy of religion heading, and what are its future prospects? So that's a really hard question to answer. Within the field, there's a split in opinion. There are some people, so you mentioned Craig and Morland. There's a bunch of people in the United States, and there are some of their fellow travelers elsewhere in the world, who think that philosophy of religion is currently in a golden age, that this kind of philosophy of religion hasn't been this good since Aquinas or something like that. And then there's another bunch of people, and maybe I'm more in this other camp, who think that philosophy of religion is in serious trouble because it has this narrow focus that ignores so much that's interesting in the religions of the world, because it's got this exclusive focus on a certain kind of Christianity. And people who take that view would like to see the discipline opened up to be much more inclusive to include conversations about a much wider range of topics. Now, to some extent, there has been some opening up. You might think that there's a bit more discussion of things like pantheism and panentheism, a bit more discussion about Hinduism and Buddhism and so on. But really when you look at what's in the journals, the kind of major, at least the major Anglo-American journals in philosophy of religion, the focus really is very heavily on a certain kind of Christianity. Okay, so what do you think of the latest movement now, analytic theology, that's getting some hype and getting some... So that's a movement from kind of within the establishment, right? A different kind of movement, which you might also say is in some ways maybe related to that, is that Thomism seems to be enjoying quite a considerable resurgence within that part of philosophy of religion. Especially in the last 10 years or so. Whether you're excited about that or not depends to some extent on the view that you take about what philosophy of religion ought to be, whether we really should be thinking about religion as a global phenomenon and considering kind of giving equal attention to questions about Buddhism and the rainbow serpent that we give to Christianity. Okay, but what's your view about that kind of movement? About which kind of movement? About analytic theology. So there's lots of interest in there, particularly if you're, as I have been for a long time, if you're interested in questions about the existence of God and about divine attributes. I'm not sure, I mean, what's tricky is that the kinds of theoretical assumptions I'm inclined to make are rather different from the kinds of theoretical assumptions that people who are pursuing analytic theology are going to make. So if your question is not one about kind of, you know, is this interesting, are there lots of new moves happening and so on, but are we pursuing the most important questions to pursue? Well, obviously the answer to that question depends on whether you share the views about God and so on, that most of the people who are invested in that pursuit have. Okay, so finally, you've been an academic philosopher for most of your life and you've been the top honcho of the EAP, the CEO. You've experienced the ups and downs of this career. So what advice would you give to those starting their academic careers in philosophy? Okay, so this is really tricky. For one thing, there have been hardly any downs in my career. I've been incredibly lucky. But throughout my career, there are lots of other people who were not as lucky as I've been. So the job market has just to take one example. The job market has been terrible in Australia since about 1975. And so that sort of, that colours any advice that you might give. If you're kind of starting out, you shouldn't suppose that it's certain that you'll end up with an academic position. At Monash, about 15% of our graduate students end up becoming academics somewhere around that 10 to 15%. A lot more would like to have been when they started out. So it's important to have kind of realistic goals. There's nothing wrong with wanting to be an academic philosopher. There's nothing wrong with trying hard to do it. But you should make sure that you've got some backup lands if that's the route that you're going down. The other thing that I would say is that, so going now to kind of more detailed advice, assuming that you, this is what you want and you're going to have a serious shot at it, you should make sure that you maintain a balance between a whole lot of different things in the activities that you're pursuing while you're chasing that dream. To be an academic requires typically a whole lot of different things. So to succeed, to actually make it as an academic, you have to be a good teacher. You have to be a good researcher. You have to be a competent administrator and manager. You have to be able to get on well with people. You have to be able to work with a wide range of colleagues and you'll be able to interact with people from a whole lot of different intellectual backgrounds. So I mean people who belong to really different disciplines. So among the things that you need to do is you need to keep a wide range of intellectual interests going. You have to be not just focused very narrowly on the little bit of philosophy that's your research interests. You need to be prepared to teach in a much wider range of areas. You need to be prepared to teach with people from other disciplines. Maybe for example you'll end up teaching with people in the medical faculty or people in the law faculty or whatever. I expect that in the future we'll see lots more of that kind of collaboration in universities but it's been present for a long time. I know, is that? No, that's alright. So be realistic, have a goal and be prepared perhaps. But you've been in the AAP for so long and you just recently stepped down as CEO. So what is it like after being CEO of it? What's life going for you? How's life going for you now? Okay, so I guess in some ways I'm heading towards the tail end of my career, right? That's just thinking about it realistically. So I had a very busy period from 2000. I became Head of Philosophy at Monash. 2004 I became an Associate Dean. So I was Associate Dean Research and Associate Dean Graduate Studies for about four years. Then I went back to being Head of School for another five years or so and somewhere in the middle of that I became the CEO of the AAP. And then I was Director of Graduate Program at Monash while I was the CEO of the AAP. So I had these kind of parallel things going on. The last little while since I stepped back from being the CEO of the AAP there isn't anything in particular that I'm doing. I also was on the Council of the Australian Academy of Humanities and that's something else that I've stepped back from. So what I'm focusing on at the moment is just teaching and research which is after 20 years of doing a wide range of other things. It's kind of nice to be doing that again. But the reason why that's happening is because I'm getting towards the end of my career, I think. Yeah, but you're preparing for the World Congress of Philosophy as well. Yeah, so there is that. And there's lots of dimensions to life and not all of them have ended just because I'm no longer the CEO of the AAP. Okay, so is the career worth it? For me, absolutely. So here's another thing to do is to go and look at the various, I'll call them professional but that's not quite right, blogs about philosophy. So things like Daily News and so on. For many people the struggle to become an academic ends unsuccessfully and then there's this question about whether it was worth it. It's very hard to... Before you start, it's impossible to answer the question, will it be worth it because you don't know how it's going to turn out. What you would like is that you don't end up with regrets if it turns out that you didn't make it. But the judgement about that is really hard to make ahead of time. I felt comfortable with my decision to pursue philosophy. It was slow, right? So I went to Princeton, I did a PhD, I came back. It was about seven years before I got my job at Monash and in that time I had sort of contract positions and casual teaching and things like that. So I guess there would be a question. There's always this question, is it going well enough? Do I want to give up? Once you're in a tended position you probably stop asking yourself those questions unless the working conditions are unbearable, which they can be. If you're in a really unhappy department with lots of colleagues you don't get on with and you can't shift out of there there might still be reasons to give it up. But I've been lucky, my colleagues have been great all the way through. Okay, so thanks again Professor Ubi for sharing your time with us and your expertise in philosophy and religion. So join me again for another episode of Philosophy and What Matters where we talk about things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Cheers.