This essay seeks to unsettle feminist philosophy through an encounter with Aboriginal artist Tracey Moffatt, whose perspectives on intergenerational relationships between white women and Indigenous women are shaped by her experiences as the Aboriginal child of a white foster mother growing up in Brisbane, Australia during the 1960s. Moffatt's short experimental film Night Cries provides an important glimpse into the violent intersections of gender, race, and power in intimate life and, in so doing, invites us to see how colonial and (...) neocolonial policies are carried out through women's domestic labor. Seeing cross-generational and cross-racial intimacy through Moffatt's lens, I suggest, helps us to unsettle both feminist theories of motherhood and feminist practices of mentoring. (shrink)

The title of this issue, Spinoza Today', takes up a question central to Genevieve Lloyd's substantial oeuvre, whether she is writing about feminist philosophy or historical phi- losophers and movements. That is, how do we draw on past philosophers to address contemporary problems, while also doing justice to the context for which they wrote? More particularly, why be interested today in what Spinoza wrote in the seven teenth century? But also: How do we read so as to be attentive to (...) Spinoza's particular concerns, and without subordinating his insights to neat dichotomies that aid the teaching, if not the thinking, of his philosophy? (shrink)

Although conceptually distinct, ‘ time ’ and ‘community’ are multiply intertwined within a myriad of key debates in both the social sciences and the humanities. Even so, the role of conceptions of time in social practices of inclusion and exclusion has yet to achieve the prominence of other key analytical categories such as identity and space. This article seeks to contribute to the development of this field by highlighting the importance of thinking time and community together through the lens of (...) political apologies. Often ostensibly offered in order to re-articulate both the constitution of ‘the community’ and its future direction, official apologies are prime examples of deliberate attempts to intervene in shared understandings of political community and its temporality. Offering a detailed case study of one of these apologies, I will focus on Australian debates over the removal of indigenous children from their families, known as the Stolen Generations, and examine the temporal dimensions of the different responses offered by former prime ministers John Howard and Kevin Rudd. (shrink)

This paper explores early Australasian philosophy in some detail. Two approaches have dominated Western philosophy in Australia: idealism and materialism. Idealism was prevalent between the 1880s and the 1930s, but dissipated thereafter. Idealism in Australia often reflected Kantian themes, but it also reflected the revival of interest in Hegel through the work of ‘absolute idealists’ such as T. H. Green, F. H. Bradley, and Henry Jones. A number of the early New Zealand philosophers were also educated in the idealist tradition (...) and were influential in their communities, but produced relatively little. In Australia, materialism gained prominence through the work of John Anderson, who arrived in Australia in 1927, and continues to be influential. John Anderson had been a student of Henry Jones, who might therefore be said to have influenced both main strands of Australian philosophical thought. (shrink)