 Hello, I'm J.J. Wakian and welcome to Philosophy and What Matters, where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Today, we will explore continental philosophy. Now contemporary Western philosophy is often divided into two main traditions. On the one hand, you have the Anglo-Analytic tradition, which just characterizes the more scientific way of doing philosophy. On the other hand, you have continental tradition, which emphasizes the more human way of doing philosophy. Now compared to analytic philosophers, however, continental philosophers are caricatured as obscure and systematic and unregious. Now is this characterization justified? This is the analytic continental divide even makes sense. Now to discuss what continental philosophy is and why it matters, we have all our pattern. Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of South Wales, Professor of Philosophy at Yuan University and Flinders University. Hello, Professor Patan, welcome to Philosophy and What Matters. Hello, J.J. It's a pleasure to be here. So before getting into our main topic, let's first discuss your philosophical background. How did you get into philosophy? So I started studying philosophy as an undergraduate at the University of Sydney in the end of the 1960s, beginning of the 1970s. And I ended up doing an honours year in philosophy. The department of philosophy at Sydney at that time was entirely an analytic philosophy department. There was almost, there was no continental philosophy and very little history of philosophy. So I had teachers like David Armstrong in first year, Keith Campbell and others. There was also an intensely political period in universities in Australia, as indeed elsewhere. It was the time of protests against the Vietnam War, the emergence of feminism and other things. So it was a highly politicised environment. And in that context, it was, it was Marx and Marxism that became a focus of my interest. Really that through, through reading contemporary Marxist philosophy that I discovered continental traditions. And it was that in particular in Sydney, a group of us became very involved in reading the structural Marxism of Louis Althusser and his collaborators. I had that interest, in fact, that led me to France in the mid 1970s. I stayed there and completed a PhD at the University of Paris 8 and discovered a whole range of French philosophers other than Althusser and the Althusserians that I had learned about in Sydney. People like Foucault and particularly Gilles Deleuze, who I subsequently translated and wrote a lot about the work of Jacques Derrida and others. Okay, so your point of the split in the University of Sydney. I lived through the split as a student and as a graduate student and I think I had an interesting relation to that. I think I was probably the first graduate of the Department of General Philosophy, the so-called radical department. And then I took out a master's degree in 1975 before going to Paris. And then I was back working at Sydney through the decade of the 1990s. So I also had the good fortune of being a member of the department when that unification. So in the University of Paris, you met some people. So who influenced you to pursue an academic career in philosophy? Yeah, well, I think that decision had probably already been taken when I accepted a postgraduate research scholarship at the University of Sydney. And that's what enabled me to complete a master's degree. I was enrolled in a PhD, but then went to Paris and realized I couldn't apply there. I got a scholarship from the French government and stayed on and finished a PhD in French, which having done that, of course, yeah, then I was both committed to a career in philosophy and a career in continental philosophy. So why did you specialize in continental philosophy, given that you started with Armstrong philosophy gamble and so on? Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the political context that I mentioned, the social and political atmosphere at the time, and my interest was political philosophy, which was what led me to Marxism. And certainly much later that I have become quite interested in and involved in more analytic political philosophy and that's been a focus of my work in recent years. But it was that interest in politics that really took me to French Marxism and to France. And I guess the thinkers that I was interested in, ones who are if not Marxist, you know, similarly, historicists and political thinkers. Now, incidentally, that time is also the cultural revolution in France, right? So the revolts of the student revolts. So it's the aftermath. What was supply made light in France then? It was, it was fascinating. So, yes, and I arrived there in 1975 and started going to classes at Paris 8 van Sen. And that was the university campus that was established by the French government in response to a lot of the French student protests of 1968. And part of that was part of the protest was about the structure of higher education in France, the centralization of universities around the Sorbonne and so on. And in response to that and complaints about the curriculum, they established what was called an experimental university at Vincent. And it was also, from a political point of view, a place to relocate many of the radical and otherwise troubled French philosophers. So the philosophy department, I mean, this was true of Vincent in general, but the philosophy department was established by Foucault. I wanted to set up that department and it included an extraordinary group of people, including Deleuze, including Jean-François Lyotard, including Alan Badu, Jacques Ranciere. These are all people who have become much more famous since that time, but it was a, it was quite a stellar collection of French philosophers. So what was it like to be in the presence of these great French philosophers? Well, that was also, it was a very, you know, a very different experience from what I'd been used to in Sydney. So it was a, I mean, many of those people were trained in the older style of French philosophy. What was called the Core Magistral, which was the method of teaching by distinguished philosophers that was simply a matter of them, you know, talking to students, very little interaction. That was the sort of basic format, but then at Vincent, you know, there was a whole democratization of the educational process movement. You know, those Core Magistral people like Deleuze were regularly interrupted, they were challenged, they were criticized. So it was a fascinating environment to be in. Isn't it like the general philosophy curriculum in Sydney? It was, it was, I was going to say more radical in some ways. I mean, one of the things that distinguished the French, the experiment at Vincent was that they abolished progressivity in courses. So it was pretty much a free for all anyone could enroll in any, in any course that they were interested in. I mean, that was true to some extent at Sydney, but much lesser and the range, you know, the range of topics that were taught at Vincent was extremely wide. So there were, you know, there were people, for example, giving courses on Chinese philosophy, there were courses on particular topics in social philosophy and political philosophy. There were, you know, standard classical courses on the history of philosophy. So the period that I was there and I discovered Deleuze at Vincent was the period in which he and his collaborator, Felix Guattari, were writing the book called A Thousand Plateaus, which was a self-described philosophical experiment. And that, yeah, that was unlike anything I had encountered before at Sydney or any other institution. Okay, so let's get into our main topic. Let's discuss the analytic continental divide first, because I think they're a living testimony of that divide. So for you, what is this divide all about? I mean, I think it's real in the sense that it's something that affects the views and the careers of young philosophers today. It's taken seriously, particularly in the English-speaking philosophical profession. I think it's taken less seriously outside that framework. Simon Critchley in a little book on analytic, the analytic continental philosophy divide says, you know, it's a little bit like ordering a continental breakfast in Paris or Madrid. People will just look at you strangely and wonder what you were saying, so which is a way of saying that it's a very Anglo-centered and Anglo-centric characterization that doesn't always make a lot of sense outside the Anglo sphere. But nevertheless, you know, within the profession, it's real and it has consequences. It's much more difficult to try and give an intellectual explanation and justification of the divides. You know, people try to make sense of it. I mean, in geographic terms, it doesn't make sense because there is plenty of so-called analytic philosophy in continental Europe. Increasingly, it doesn't make sense either in terms of the origins or training of the people concerned. Partly because so-called continental philosophy has become a significant approach or series of approaches in the English-speaking world in North America and Britain, Australia and elsewhere. So it's hard to pin down. So then it comes down to particular traditions, I guess, in the history of philosophy and the history of analytic philosophy itself is quite specific in that regard. You know, it's a movement that emerged in the earlier 20th century, focused around Vienna initially, Cambridge and Oxford at later periods. So, and it was a distinct, I mean, it was both an embrace of formal logic, logic and science as the model and the methodological inspiration for philosophy and a deliberate reaction against some forms of phenomenological thought, the work of Heidegger in particular. So, you know, one can tell the story in those terms of how these distinct traditions emerged and how they hardened. And I think that's one of the things that I learned most from the experience of the division, the departmental split at Sydney is that once these divisions become established in a profession, in a discipline, they become self-reinforcing and self-reproducing. And that, I think, is an unfortunate consequence to those things, particularly unfortunate from an intellectual point of view. So, I guess my final comment is that I don't take it seriously as an intellectual divide. And I think there are many signs that that's increasingly the case that analytically trained philosophers come to read so-called continental thinkers, you know, bring more analytic approaches to the reading of continental thinkers. And I think there are a number of spheres we can talk about some of these later in contemporary philosophy that are the product of this kind of, you know, cross-fictional approach and collaboration. Okay, so what, where did we get this notion, this divide in the first place? What's the history behind it? Well, I mean, part of it is that there is that history that I alluded to of the Vienna circle and its impacts in English-speaking philosophy in the early 20th century, particularly in the period after the First World War. And I think, I mean, that had a lot to do with the success of the analytic movement, the work of Bertrand Russell, of A.J. Ayer and others in Britain in that period. And that was, you know, very self-consciously an attempt by a new generation of British philosophers to distinguish themselves from their more Hegelian and idealistic predecessors in Britain at the time. So, you know, I mean, one part of the story is that that familiar phenomenon of a new generation of philosophers seeking to distinguish themselves from their predecessors. But I think it's a complicated genealogy that gets overlaid with a number of other things. One of them is the kind of cultural stereotypes that come into play in the difference between British Anglophone culture and so-called continental European. And that was undoubtedly affected by the antagonisms provoked by the First and then the Second World War. So, you know, much of the familiar commonplace ways in which the analytic-continental philosophy divide is talked about, like, you know, the clarity and rigor of analytic philosophy as opposed to the woolly-headed abstraction of continental philosophy. I mean, this is straightforward cultural stereotype that has a longer history. And I guess the final thing that I would draw attention to in that history is the intensification of that division in the period after the Second World War. And in that context, it was also caught up with the cultural politics of the Cold War. And again, that I think particularly played out in the animus against political philosophy and against philosophy concerned with political and more broadly existential questions about life and the nature of life. So that effort, and again, this has been written about the transformation of philosophy into a technical discipline modeled on the natural sciences. And that was very much an enterprise of post-war and especially North American philosophy. So, do you think that this kind of divide, the analytic-continental divide is still useful in today's academic-atmospheric philosophical scene? No. I mean, I think that it is fundamentally an anti-intellectual division that is not good for philosophy or for students of philosophy. I think it has no particular intellectual basis or justification. One can't identify any particular methodological feature that would neatly divide analytic from continental philosophy that wouldn't be reproduced on either side of that division. And I think it's broadly, it's a hindrance to thought and I think it's not helpful. In fact, you know, more strongly, it's unhelpful. And again, I would turn into what I suggested a while ago, some of the more interesting developments in philosophy in recent years have been precisely brought about by the kind of fertilization across those two traditions. And I think that's true in a number of areas. Okay, so let's get dig deeper into continental philosophy. Now, you mentioned about Heidegger, Jusserl, and your French philosophers, your French teachers from Paul, Derrida, and so on. And a host of other philosophers who are classified as continental philosophers. But given the variety of philosophical discussions, does it even make sense to bundle them into one super category of continental philosophy? Again, in intellectual terms, I think it doesn't make a lot of sense. And that's what I was alluding to earlier and saying, but it's a bound up with cultural stereotypes. From the Anglo-centric attitude to non Anglophone philosophy. But just as, as analytic philosophy is an extremely broad church with many different approaches, different currents, you know, antagonism within it. The fate of Wittgenstein and the work of the later Wittgenstein, which has been enormously influential, but for some is anathema and not philosophy. This is within the analytic count. I think the same is also true in in so-called continental philosophy that it's a very broad church. There are a number of quite distinct traditions, genealogies approaches to philosophy. Within that, I mean, the, the broadly phenomenological and existential tradition that goes from perhaps Hegel to Husserl Heidegger. Contemporaries like Devinas and Jean-Paul Sartre. That's a tradition that's very different save from the the structuralist tradition that developed in France in the 1960s. There is as Foucault was fond of pointing out, you know, even within French philosophy, there are divisions between those who were based on or developed out of that phenomenological tradition on the one hand, and a tradition of of philosophy of science of the history and philosophy of science that Foucault and Foucault's mentor George Conguyem were very much a part of. So it's, yeah, I mean, all of which is to say I think that continental philosophy is an extremely varied field and it's not, it's not an intellectually helpful category by itself. Okay, so you mentioned about different schools of thought here. So the phenomenological existential tradition stemming from Hegel perhaps down to Heidegger, Sartre and so on. And also the French school, the structuralist, structuralist school of Foucault and so on. But are there other schools of thought here? The Althusser line, what is that line of philosophy say? Althusser, did you say? Yeah. Yes. Yes, there are. So and as I'm sure you know there are many ways of carving up the history of philosophy. So one of the divisions coming from Marxism is materialism versus idealism. So there are within that 19th century tradition that I alluded to, I mean, there is the tradition of German idealism. And there is another series of so-called materialist thinkers beginning with Feuerbach, with Marx. Some would include Nietzsche in that tradition through to 20th century thinkers. So that's one way of dividing it up. Another is in terms of what are sometimes called philosophers of eminence as opposed to philosophers of transcendence. Transcendent being the Christian God and theological tradition plays an important role here. And this is getting back to Althusser. There is a tradition of so-called non-transcendent or iminentist thinkers that include Spinoza, for example, for whom God and nature are one and the same. And Althusser was very much a follower of that tradition. He was also called iminentist thinkers, so he explicitly invoked Spinoza in relation to his reformulation of Marxist philosophy. Nietzsche is another thinker who adopted Spinoza as his predecessor in the history of philosophy, even though he never wrote about nor indeed read much of Spinoza's work. Nietzsche is often aligned with that tradition and again to jump forward to some of the other French thinkers, Foucault de Luz, in particular, are often associated with that tradition of iminentist as opposed to transcendent thought. So yes, there are a number of other traditions and there are others that I haven't mentioned at all. I've talked about 19th century German idealism, talked a little bit about the phenomenological and existential tradition that was often taken to include Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and others. So there is the tradition of so-called hermeneutic philosophy that developed in the late 19th century, and that is still quite strong in some areas today. I've talked a little bit about Marx, but then there are a whole series of varieties of European Marxism. The German tradition of so-called critical thoughts based around the Frankfurt School of Adorno and Hawkeimer in the early 20th century. And again, these are quite distinct and flourishing traditions in their own right. So what are these schools of thought? Can you give us a bird's eye view of the main ideas of these different contemporary continental philosophies? It's very hard to summarize the main ideas. I mean, I've been talking about them in terms of genealogies or traditions, I suppose. For example, what's the main idea of a deity and philosopher or a follower of the auteur or those philosophers? So what's their agenda, their philosophical agenda? Yeah, okay. So that's easier to do in the case of particular thinkers. So Derrida is an interesting case. So Derrida described himself throughout his career as a phenomenologist. His early work, decades of his early career was spent working on Husserl and Heidegger and that tradition. And that is a tradition focused very much on human consciousness, on the foundational elements of human consciousness and how they determine our thought. But in Derrida, obviously, developed a project, a program of his own, which was, I mean, I guess one way to summarize it would be to say that what Derrida was concerned about was uncertainty or ambiguity or to use the term that he popularized aporia. Philosophy is often particularly analytic philosophy is concerned to dissolve contradictions, to deal to resolve or dissolve contradictions to deal with aporia. Derrida's approach is the inverse. You know, it is about exploring developing aporia in a variety of ways. And this is, you know, what has led to criticisms of Derrida that this is a philosophy of impotence. It's a philosophy of fundamental values like truth. Whereas, you know, others would say, and defendants would say, well, Derrida is not opposed to truth. He doesn't deny the existence of truth. But what he's interested in is what it means and how our understandings of truth have developed, you know, what are the basic conditions of distinguishing truth from untruth. And, you know, he's someone who, in his own terms, is very much concerned with pursuing these questions, these fundamental questions of the basis and the limits of philosophy. So, you know, what is it that distinguishes philosophical inquiry from, let's say, literary or artistic thought. All of which, you know, makes him, I mean, I think both an extraordinarily rigorous philosopher because in much of his work, which is, you know, the detail very close reading and analysis of texts from the history of philosophy. He is an extraordinarily analytical thinker. But one who never reaches a determinant conclusion. So, I mean, the repeated upshot of his analysis is drawing attention to the contradictions, the aporia of a particular thinker, a particular text, or a particular set of ideas. And this, yeah, this sometimes frustrates and irritates other people. Right. That's why that's why coin and others were against his honorary degree, right. That's an episode. I mean, I think it's one of the more unfortunate and shameful episodes of recent analytic philosophy. And one that I know quite a bit about, because I was at Sydney at the time, along with some of the signatories like Keith Campbell. And it's quite clear that these people had not read any Derrida. I mean, they simply took it on face value on the reports of others that, you know, that he was guilty of the things that they charged him with. And, you know, it's unfortunate because it's unsustainable. I mean, it's an unphilosophical attitude to condemn someone on the basis of complete ignorance of their writings. So there's a recent biography of Derrida. It's just been published in the UK that I was reading about. And the author, it's called an event, perhaps published by versa. And the author points out that the one of the, you know, the expressions referred to in that letter, that Cambridge letter, they talked about logical fallacies. No, it's rather than policy. This was never a phrase that Derrida used. So who knows where it came from. So yeah, look, it's unfortunate. And there I think we go, you know, we go back to the kind of cultural stereotypes that I was talking about at the beginning. And, and the fact that as others, Simon Glendining, for example, who's also written on this divide suggests that the term continental philosophy just becomes a kind of marker, a term of abuse and an excuse that provides an excuse for not reading particular thinkers. So it's a deeply unphilosophical attitude, it seems to me. Okay, so we talked about Derrida. How about football? So what is football's main agenda? What's the project here? So that's a very interesting question to raise. So Foucault is often described as a genealogist, a philosopher whose work undertakes genealogies of a certain kind. And in that regard, he interviews and places often aligns his own work with that of Nietzsche, so the Nietzsche of the genealogy of morality as it's now translated. Foucault became best known for works that were genealogies of institutions and ways of thinking. So the book that was initially published as madness and civilization abbreviated form in English now fully translated. This is Foucault's thesis for the state doctorate. It's a massive book and it's a genealogy if you like of insanity or madness that encompasses both the history of ways of understanding madness or unreason or irrationality in European culture from the Middle Ages up to the 20th century, but also a genealogy of the institution of the asylum itself and the various ways of dealing with and treating the insane. And that that's a very interesting book in itself that is both a history of discourses about madness. It's a history of the institutions, the ways of dealing with and it encapsulates much of Foucault's later work. Similar genealogies of the hospital in a book called The Birth of the Clinic, a genealogy of the prison and forms of punishment in discipline and punish. There is that kind of institutional genealogy, but there's also the intellectual genealogy in Foucault's work and that has involved him to write studies of the history and prehistory of particular bodies of knowledge. So the book called The Order of Things talks about the different forms of knowledge of life, language and labour. Again, in Europe, very much in the early modern period, I mean his field, his historical field for a long time was very much from the end of the Middle Ages up to modernity, if you like, to the 19th century. And he did, you know, the history of particular sciences in that period. In later years, he came to this project of a history of sexuality, which again was intended to be a genealogy of modern sexuality. And it's an interesting and complicated question just what he meant there by sexuality. And again, he meant both the bodies of knowledge, the ways of understanding human sexuality, but also the ways of dealing with it, the forms of treatment, medical, psychiatric and others. And, you know, one of the threads of that project was arguably a genealogy of modern psychiatry and indeed Freudian understandings of human nature. So, just to conclude on Foucault's project, I mean, it's a genealogical project in that sense. And it's, as he later describes it, you know, it's a way of trying to understand our presence, understand who we are, what kind of, what kinds of subject, what kinds of institutions, what kinds of knowledge define us, but also, you know, with a critical dimension with a view to identify the points of fragility, the points at which those modern forms of human self understanding can be changed, can be transformed. Okay, let's turn to some other schools of thought in continental philosophy, like the Habermas tradition or the Frankfurt school. So what is that all about? What is the main agenda of that philosophical tradition? Again, I would say it's, that's a tradition that has developed in a much closer relation to Marx and Marxism and the tradition of thought that was its origin. And again, I would say that it's, its principle concern is this question of understanding the present. So understanding the nature of modernity, if you like, and the very much bound up with Marxist understanding of capitalism as the defining economic condition of modern life, but then the Frankfurt school in particular is concerned, was concerned with how that extends into other areas of culture, I mean how, in the case of Habermas himself, I mean that was his, his point of departure. I mean Habermas is again someone who's developed a quite distinct intellectual project and in his case, a focus of that was the effort to develop non metaphysical, but nonetheless, universal ways of understanding the human condition. And for him, a focus of that was communication, the fact that humans are language using animals, and his concern, his, his discourse philosophy or philosophy of communication was an attempt to identify the the universal presuppositions of human language use. And that, that was a focus of his project became the basis of his attempt to develop a political philosophy on, on, again, on the basis of these non metaphysical but nonetheless universal conditions of possibility of human communication. So there's a strong Kantian dimension to, to Habermas's project. Yeah. Yeah, interesting because in the history of 20th century philosophy there's an interaction between Habermas and John Rawls. And, and Davidson, to some extent, and Popko and this guy Chomsky. Yeah. Yeah, there's a, that interaction, but it's not really a knowledge in some of our discourses that there's this interaction between analytic philosophers on the one hand and continental philosophers. Yes. Yes, there is. And again, the examples you point to a pertinent. I mean, the Habermas Rawls exchange has been the subject of a couple of recent books, one published just recently by, by Finlayson is a detailed discussion of that encounter as a defining moment in 20th century political philosophy. And, you know, I think, beneath it, there are, you know, deeper and more wide ranging engagements between so-called analytic and continental political philosophy in Rawls' work. So now that Rawls' lectures on the history of philosophy, his lectures on political philosophy are published, it's possible to see, for example, the degree to which Rawls' paradigmatic analytic political philosophy was a careful and, you know, deep reader, not only Marx and Hegel, but figures like Rousseau. So there is good reason to see Rawls' work, particularly Rawls' later political philosophy is as deeply influenced by elements of the continental tradition. And the other example you mentioned to go back to Foucault is an interesting one that I was going to talk about. I mean, I think there are, apart from these kind of well-known staged confrontations between particular thinkers like the Rawls Habermas Debate or the Foucault Chomsky Debate, some of the more interesting developments in contemporary philosophy have taken up, you know, aspects of the approach of either. And one of these is genealogy. I mean, it's quite striking to me how much the question of genealogy and genealogical approaches to knowledge, to morality, to a variety of things have become issues in otherwise analytic philosophy. The question of genealogical explanation is now a serious topic of debate. There are those who defend it. And of course, you know, there are different ways of approaching genealogy. One of the, I've talked a little bit about Foucault and the acknowledgement of Nietzsche's influence on his way of doing genealogy. But that's not the only way in the history of philosophy. There is also Hume. There is the tradition of so-called vindicatory genealogy from David Hume, and that is developed, say, in the work of Bernard Williams. And a number of contemporary thinkers have taken up this approach, tried to develop its links to pragmatism. So I think, and this is to go back to something I said earlier, I think it's one of the ways in which some of the most interesting areas in contemporary philosophy, you know, the cross tradition as it were in terms of the analytic conmetal divide. So actually, the interaction between Paul Ricker, Gadamer, and some analytic philosophers of the self, like Derek Horowitz, and so on. So there's a huge interaction there as well. But how about your professor, Gilles Deleuze, what's the main project, what's the main agenda of this philosophy? So Deleuze is one of those French thinkers, you know, trained in the history of philosophy. And I guess if I was talking earlier about the opposition that sometimes drawn particularly in the French tradition between the thinkers of immanence and the thinkers of transcendence and I think Deleuze is very much in that tradition of the thinkers of immanence. And he wrote a large book, one of his thesis texts was a large book on Spinoza, and he also wrote a book on Nietzsche. He is very much in that tradition of philosophies of immanence. The other thinker that he was deeply influenced by is Bergson. And I mean Deleuze is difficult to sum up in terms of a project, just because his own self conception was that of a, as he said, famously said in an interview with Claire Panet, he wasn't a philosopher who had a project, a single project. He wrote, I mean, he exaggerating, he said every time he started a new book, he started again from ground zero, you know, no, no intellectual history, no intellectual capital. That's clearly hyperbole, but I think there is something to the point that, you know, he undertook different projects at different periods. The most interesting project in Deleuze's work is the explicitly experimental project in 1000 plateaus and this is a work of philosophy that he later described, he wrote a kind of reflective book on that project, and his exceptional philosophy called philosophy with Quattari published not long before his death in 1995, it was published in 1992 in French. And there in that book he describes philosophy, very simply philosophy is creating concepts he says that's what philosophy is, that's what philosophy does. That's, you know, he gives some examples from the history of philosophy and the ways in which, you know, the canonical history of European philosophy can be thought about in those terms. But what he and Quattari tried to do in world's philosophy was to create new concepts or concepts of a new kind. And I think this is one of the intriguing things. I mean, concepts in philosophy are widely understood as stable, you know, they are fixed and well defined ways of making sense of the world. And one of the things that Deleuze and Quattari were trying to do in what his philosophy is to, to think about concepts differently and to think about what they called mobile concepts or concepts that are subject to fluctuation and change. They're fluid concepts. Exactly. And this is where partly the Berksonian influence in Deleuze's thinking, but so, you know, that book 1000 plateaus is this kind of profusion proliferation of concepts. You know, machining assemblages, you know, machines of desire. State machines, all kinds of things that they define and modify as it were over the course of the book 1000 plateaus and it's quite explicitly a book that has no particular beginning and no end, you know, it's in the middle of a process that can continue in a variety of ways. So it's a, I think it's an intriguing and fascinating project that has not really been understood. I mean, it hasn't really been written about or thought about in relation to that kind of philosophical project. A lot of the focus has been on the surface, as it were, the kinds of examples they use things like nomads and nomadology and stuff, but actually coming to terms with it as an experiment, the philosophical experiment as Deleuze understood it, I think, has yet to happen. Okay, so we barely touched on a lot of topics in continental philosophy, so we have not touched on Heidegger's philosophy and Sartre's philosophy and so on. But could you tell us something about your recent work on political philosophy, especially your work on the rights of indigenous people. I reckon that you draw a lot of insights from continental sources and animated as well. Yeah, no, you're right. Just beginning. There's a lot of traditions we haven't talked about, you know, we haven't talked much about about so-called continental feminist philosophy, which again is a large field influenced by a variety of these thinkers from to students of Derrida, like Ihegari, to others like Michel Le Duf and so on, but so there is a lot that we haven't covered. But in terms of my own work, which has been increasingly focused, I mentioned earlier on political philosophy and it was only in the last two or three decades that I started to read more widely in analytic political philosophy, and particularly the work of Rawls and others in the Rawls in tradition. And it's in that context that I, and because of developments in Australia around the rights of Aboriginal people to land, to culture, and particularly Jewish provincial developments in relation to, to so-called native title Aboriginal title that I've started to write, I began to write a lot about these issues, but here too my resources in doing it were not exclusively continental. The thinkers who wrote about these issues in English language political philosophy were initially mainly Canadian, they were biggest like Will Kimlicka, James Tully, both of whom exclusively as it were analytically trained, Tully more in the history of political thought, but Kimlicka very much in the Rawls in, post Rawls in tradition and the critical thought. So, you know, these were some of the starting points in thinking about rights and Aboriginal rights. I think, and it led me to a number of things. I mean, there are certainly elements of continental thought that that I found useful in that one of them is not so much to lose, but Derrida, and this is to go back to that question of a poria. The problem that became apparent in Australian law, Australian jurisprudence, is this, this very straightforward a poria of a colonised Indigenous people seeking to reassert rights in the legal system, the legal framework of the colonising power. So, you know, there is this, this a poria at the heart of the notion of Aboriginal rights that I found Derrida useful to think about and just more generally in thinking about justice. And literally, political philosophies approach the justice has been largely focused on distributive justice. But when, and that's important, and has direct application to the situation of colonised Indigenous people who are always amongst the most disadvantaged peoples of the, the countries established on their territories, whether it's in North America, Australia or elsewhere. But there's this other dimension to the, the problem of colonisation and decolonisation, which is very much a problem about the relationship, the relationship of a European derived people and culture to an Indigenous people in culture. And this, I think, you know, is a relation of a particular culture to an other or to its other, and how that how that other should be understand and how the relationship to others should be approached how it should be dealt with. And here, again, others like Levin asked for whom the focus of ethical and political thought is this relation to the other. I found this helpful in thinking about about the problems of colonisation and colonised Indigenous people. And the final comment I would make is that this thinking about this has led me to think about other issues in political philosophy like the very notion of rights, you know, what is a right and how do we come to have rights. And here, there are ways of thinking about this in the analytic philosophy of rights, which is extremely ahistorical, you know, that rights are derived from some, some given feature of human nature, sentience, for example, or the fact that human beings, you know, make projects, that they project living animals and rights are to be understood in relation to that. But what I have found more useful and more helpful, again, is the historicism of Foucault and the genealogical approach. And I defended the view which is very unpopular that that rights are a product of historical circumstance. So take seriously the idea that Indigenous peoples in Australia and elsewhere nowadays do have rights, they have rights to land, they have rights to culture and other things. These are contested, but they are nonetheless accepted. In the 19th century, they didn't have those rights, you know, I mean, it makes no sense to say that the rights exist as some, some philosophers, you know, bite the bullet and say, well, yeah, the rights existed, they were just not understood or recognised at the time. I think that's just makes no sense, whatever. The, the history of treatment of institutional treatment of laws and attitudes and other things. I mean, I think it's more interesting to think about how rights come into being and how rights go out of being. You know, there are lots of historical examples of rights think, for example, of the rights of husbands over wives, which were, you know, part of European culture, British law up until the 19th century. These rights no longer exist. They no longer have those rights over their wives and families that they once had. So, you know, rights are historical phenomena and they need to be understood as such so that, you know, that is a way in which I'm thinking about an issue in political philosophy is directly influenced by the continental tradition. Yeah, that's a different way of thinking about the rights, because for example, in the social contract theory, you have natural rights. Yeah. According to your view, the historical coincidence or actually they're more contingent. Yes. Cultural artifacts. So, yeah. Yes, that's right. And I think, you know, again, let's go back to Foucault. I mean, this is in later interviews, you know, in talking about the his conception of philosophy this genealogical approach. One of the things that you focused on was this understanding of presence, present institutions present ways of thinking as contingent and, you know, that that doesn't mean discardable it doesn't mean unimportant. But being aware of those things as contingent, I think does does have consequences. And in the case of rights, I think, you know, it has one of the things it does is to make us aware of the contingency that the rights we take for granted. Yeah. Need to be defended need to be protected. If we want them to continue. Okay, so what lessons could we still learn from continental philosophy. What's the or what's the future of continental philosophy for you. I think, from my point of view, the future is, is not a future of continental philosophy but a future of, you know, the development of new approaches new ways of thinking about particular issues of particular problems. And that the draw on analytic as well as continental traditions in philosophy so I mentioned earlier you know the, the emergence of renewed interest in genealogy and genealogical ways of doing philosophy and I think this is a, an approach to social political and other issues that normative issues generally that can be usefully informed by thinkers on from both analytic and continental traditions. So I'm, I think I'm, you know, more interested in, in that you know the emergence of particular ways of thinking or particular ways of thinking about particular problems that the draw on elements of both analytic and continental philosophy and I think in that respect, you know the divide. I think it's also a historical phenomenon that will probably fade and will probably become as, as quaint to us now as those who insist on, you know, materialism versus idealism as the defining. Okay, so other more personal note, you've been an academic for the longest time. Yeah, you've been a philosopher, professional philosopher. Well, for several years now, several decades. So what's your advice for those who want to get into academic philosophy, professional academic philosophy. Look, I'm fairly standard advice. I mean, I think it is increasingly difficult to, to develop a career in professional philosophy. I mean, to go back to contingency. We've just endured, we've experienced a long period of in Western countries of a support for philosophy in the educational institution so philosophy has been an accepted and enduring part of universities. I'm not sure that one can assume that that will continue, which, again, I don't think means the death of philosophy or the disappearance of philosophy but it does mean that those undertaking career perhaps need to be need to be more open minded more experimental more adventurous about the ways in which they might seek to develop a philosophy career. Recently, interested in the topic of so called field philosophy. I don't know if this is something that you've become aware of but it's a book by a couple of American academics, arguing that philosophy in particular has painted itself into a corner by trying to establish itself as a standalone discipline with no relations to other bodies and in a way that makes it particularly vulnerable in, in the contemporary university and given the increasing insistence on, on engagement with, you know, non intellectual economic activities, business, for example. So, the authors Frodom and, and I forget the other guy's name, developed the notion of what they called field philosophy which is, which is modeled on anthropology if you like it's about philosophers working as embedded thinkers in other projects, whether, whether these are social political projects like environmental activism, or whether they are, you know, commercial or industrial projects. So, you know, this idea of the philosophy is an activity that can and should be carried out in conjunction with other intellectual intellectual and practical activities, I think it's an interesting one. That's all of that just to say that one shouldn't assume that the the current institutional framework of academic philosophy will continue in the same form. And I think anyone starting out today needs to be aware of that. Apart from that, you know, my, my tips would be the standard ones which is to to to publish and publishing in good, good outlets, good journals or good publishers. It would be to to read widely, but also to develop specialisms to building a career in academic philosophy is what requires a certain kind of self development and self marketing and I think one needs to be aware of that as well. It's, you know, there's an older, an idea that I came across a lot in my academic career of philosophers, and from interestingly, both analytic and continental philosophers who had this extraordinary view of the, the value of philosophy, and it's, it's right to be carried out at the taxpayer's expense, you know, regardless of of its outcomes. And it struck me, and it's a view that in increasingly came under challenge, but an extraordinary view and an unworldly view in philosophers. You know, sometimes do make a virtue of their own worldliness. And I think, I think that's increasingly difficult to sustain in the institutional environment, I mean fine if you want to be a private philosopher, I mean, you know, philosopher on your own time and indeed there are many, I know who've done that who sustained an intellectual career in philosophy and publishing and writing philosophy by other means, you know, and again that has a long tradition going on. And I think that's another option, you know, just finding, finding an income earning activity that will leave you time for philosophical reflection. So, yeah, look, I mean, and as for the value of doing it, I mean, again, I defend it enormously. I think, I think whether one becomes a professional philosopher, there is there is a lot of value in learning to think philosophically and learning to and that means both, you know, thinking clearly and logically but it also, I think means thinking reflectively about who and what we are about the activities we engage in about the kinds of societies that we inhabit and so on. And I think, you know, in my stock speech to prospective undergraduate students in philosophy, I always emphasize the value and the virtue of reflexivity of learning to be reflective about oneself and about the world one lives in and for me, I think that is the the single most valuable thing about philosophy and about a career in philosophy. Okay, so would you say that your career as an academic philosophy worth it? Yes, I would. I mean, it's, you know, it prompts the philosophical question, you know, what do you mean by worth it or worth it in what sense hasn't made me wealthy. Nope. That's not one why one would choose a career in philosophy. But again, I've always felt that having an academic position in a discipline like philosophy where it's pretty much possible to pursue your own interests your own intellectual intellectual interests. And to have that as your day job, I think it's just an extraordinary privilege and pleasure, in fact, to be able to do that so to have a, you know, a career that enables you to read and think and read and think about what you like to think about and to write about those things. I mean, yeah, I think it's, it's an extraordinary privilege and one that the philosophers should be very grateful to have experienced. Okay, so on that note, thanks again, Professor for sharing your time with us. Thank you guys. Join me again for another episode of philosophy and what matters where we discuss things that matter from a philosophical point of view. Cheers.