Conversations with Australian Philosophers
Daniel Nellor’s book, What Are They Thinking? Conversations with Australian Philosophers (Australian Scholarly Publishing, 2023), features interviews with ten philosophers working in Australian universities today, including SHAPS philosophers Margaret Cameron, Chris Cordner and Dan Halliday. They discuss the nature of philosophy and why it’s valuable, and think through some of the big questions on their minds. Logic, morality and the nature of time; technology, the mind, the environment and the economy: this book is a glimpse into the world of some of Australia’s leading thinkers as they wrestle with the most important questions we can ask. What Are They Thinking? is for anyone who would like to know more about philosophy from the people who practice it.
Dan Halliday sat down with Daniel Nellor to discuss the book and how it was produced.
You’ve written a book of interviews with philosophers. This sort of thing doesn’t get produced very often. Prominent philosophers sometimes get interviewed in popular media. But it’s rare to see them interviewed as a group, in the way you’ve done here. How did you come to embark on this project, and what were you seeking to uncover with it?
My first reason for putting together this book was a selfish one – I wanted an excuse to keep having interesting philosophical conversations after finishing my PhD! But more seriously, it occurred to me that there was a huge resource out there that I could tap into: academic philosophers across Australia doing really interesting work. This work doesn’t always reach the general public partly because, like other experts, philosophers often need to communicate in technical language and work on specific questions that make sense to others in the field but not always to everyone else.
Having studied philosophy, and also having done a lot of writing for general audiences, I thought I might be in a position to be a sort of bridge: grappling with each philosopher’s work and then having a conversation with them, designed to be ‘eavesdropped’ on by the general reader.
I wanted to show how the questions dealt with by philosophers, which can sometimes seem a bit niche, are fascinating and relevant to our lives and our world. Philosophers are doing what we all do as humans – thinking about the world and our place in it – but philosophers try to push this thinking as far as it will go. This book is an opportunity for readers to see what this looks like in practice. It was a great privilege for me not only to be able to read a whole lot of interesting work, but to then have the opportunity to interrogate the people who wrote it.
Tell us a bit about the approach you used in formulating these interviews: Are the interviews close to the raw transcript of a conversation? Or did your interviewees want to make lots of edits until things were finally acceptable to them?
The conversations as they appear in the book are much more than transcripts. They are carefully crafted pieces of writing. We live in a golden age of podcasts today, and there are lots of places you can go to listen to long-form conversations with philosophers and other thinkers (and this is a very good thing). But I wanted this book to be written to be read, not just a collection of transcripts.
The way we worked was that I had a long conversation with each philosopher – around two hours in most cases – and used that material to draft a written dialogue. Each philosopher then had the opportunity to edit their chapter as much or as little as they chose. They had total freedom to change my questions, or their answers, and add points that occurred to them as they went. I took the same liberty and added my own material. Drafts went back and forth and each chapter was only considered finished when we were both happy.
The dialogues, then, really occurred at two levels: in each case there was the dialogue we had on the day, and then a further, different kind of dialogue as we exchanged drafts. In some cases my conversation partners made extensive changes, in others they changed little more than a comma or two! The important thing was that each person was happy with the final result – that they said what they wanted to say. I wrote the book in this way because I wanted people to be able to speak freely, and not worry that everything they said was set in stone. Philosophy, after all, is about going back and thinking again and again, and revising and fine-tuning arguments. I think this approach worked well.
Philosophy is often understood as an adversarial sort of discipline, where people seek to criticise each other’s positions, sometimes as an end in itself. How much truth do you think there is in this claim? And, to the extent that philosophy is about defending a position, how did this bear on the approach you took to interviewing philosophers?
Philosophy can be very adversarial, but I took a different approach. The adversarial approach has its place. It’s a bit like the way science proceeds: someone puts up a hypothesis then does everything they can to disprove it. If it survives then it’s a good hypothesis! Likewise, I can see the value in two philosophers fighting it out to see who has the stronger position.
But this book is different. One of its functions is to introduce the reader to philosophy, and most importantly to the concerns and work of the philosopher in question. I wanted the reader first and foremost to understand what each philosopher was saying, not why what they were saying is better than what anyone else is saying. I don’t necessarily agree with every philosophical position put forward in the book. I saw my role as conducting a conversation for the benefit of the ‘eavesdropping’ reader, not arguing for my own views.
Having said that, in many cases a good way to help explain a position is to test it by offering a question or counter-argument. Sometimes we only understand what a philosopher is saying when we understand what they are not saying. But for the most part, I was not taking the position of a rival philosopher at an academic conference; rather, I was an interested observer, trying to get to the bottom of what a particular philosopher was thinking – hence the title. It’s about what they are thinking, not what I’m thinking.
You’ve got a philosophical background yourself, but have worked as a writer in other domains, such as playwriting. The interview questions you formulated are remarkably free from academic jargon or technicalities, and I think this helped the answers achieve a similar level of accessibility. In what way did you find yourself drawing on your different experiences and skills in this project?
The fact I’ve written plays is probably one of the reasons I was attracted to writing the book in dialogue form. It’s a way of writing (and thinking) that comes naturally to me. But it’s also a form that works particularly well for philosophy. Some of the earliest philosophy we know about in the Western tradition is written in dialogue: Plato tried to capture the encounters between his teacher Socrates and various disciples and opponents. Of course, we don’t know how much of the resulting work is Plato and how much is Socrates, because Plato wasn’t able to send his drafts to Socrates for checking in the way that I did with my philosophers!
Another kind of writing I’ve done is speechwriting. I think this also helped me in trying to write a book for the non-specialist. When you’re helping to draft a speech, the first thing you need to do is make sure you’re capturing exactly what the person giving the speech wants to say – and this was very important for my book, too, as I didn’t want to misrepresent any of my conversation partners. But the second thing you need to do when writing a speech is to make sure it’s right for the audience that will hear it, that they can understand it first go, no matter how complex the subject matter. In the case of a speech, the audience only gets one chance. This is a good discipline for any writer who is trying to communicate difficult ideas to a general audience. I hope the book is accessible, but at the same time I do think it will be challenging at points. That’s part of the fun of philosophy!
Was there anything that surprised you, or was unexpected, about any of the answers you got (or didn’t get!) in these interviews?
Every conversation had its surprises. To take just one example, I really enjoyed hearing from Margaret Cameron about the historical work that needs to be done when dealing with a philosopher from the past – in her case, the medieval philosopher Peter Abelard. You can’t just go to a library and pull his work off the shelf. You have to be a bit like Indiana Jones, searching out original vellum manuscripts from libraries or even medieval monasteries overseas. Then you have to translate the manuscripts from the original Latin – and as Margaret reminds us in her conversation, every translation is at the same time an interpretation.
But what’s particularly exciting is that after you’ve done all that hard historical work, you’re confronted with ideas that are absolutely relevant to the philosophical questions we’re dealing with today. I find it quite moving to think that a human being living hundreds or even thousands of years ago might have been thinking about the very same questions I am thinking about today – and their thinking might be relevant to mine.
And more generally, did the process of putting these interviews together reveal anything interesting to you about how philosophers go about doing the work of their discipline?
One thing that struck me is the care that philosophers take. They don’t want to be misunderstood – not for egotistical reasons, but because fine distinctions become very important when you’re pushing thought to its limits. Often in our conversations I would try to sum up a position for my imagined general reader, only to find myself being gently corrected by my conversation partner, who could see that my way of putting things might send a reader down the wrong track.
To me, the care philosophers take sets philosophy apart from so much public discourse today. Often people use words to tear down their political opponents, or to fudge the truth, or to call attention away from what they don’t want people to see, or to elevate their own interests, or whatever. This is rhetoric in the worst sense: language in the service of power, divorced from truth. Having just admitted to being a speechwriter some might say this is the pot calling the kettle black! I think there is a legitimate kind of political rhetoric, but philosophy at its best has no agenda but the truth.
It was also interesting to observe how my conversation partners, no matter how abstract their philosophical concerns, were able to say how their claims and arguments are relevant to our common life today. There is a bad version of this where philosophy feels it has to serve some agenda or other, but that’s not what I found in these conversations. Philosophy can contribute to public discussions in unexpected ways.
For example, one of the biggest issues in the last few years has been sexual abuse and assault. The concept of ‘consent’ is right at the centre of this issue. In my conversation with Moira Gatens, she explained her attempts to expose the inadequacy of this concept (even though she agrees it is very important). Courts of law have to examine whether consent was present at a particular moment in time. But Gatens encourages us to think more deeply about the whole social, political and cultural environment in which we apply concepts such as consent.
Lastly, as someone who’s taken a bit of a look at the range of topics being studied by philosophers in Australia in 2023, do you think there are any areas of the subject that are under-represented, or could use more attention from us as a discipline?
There’s been a lot of talk recently about Australia’s response to its Indigenous peoples. I would like to know more about how First Nations people have thought over the millennia about the big human questions that we tackle in philosophy. I suspect their approaches will be very different to the approaches of academic philosophy, particularly in the Western tradition. But we’re all trying to work out our common humanity, and I would hope there would be ways of engaging one tradition with another. People may well be doing this, but it’s not in the book, and it’s a gap worth filling – perhaps in the sequel!
What Are They Thinking? features interviews with Margaret Cameron, Christopher Cordner, Bronwyn Finnigan, Moira Gatens, Daniel Halliday, Seth Lazar, Kristie Miller, Dalia Nassar, Greg Restall, and Peter Singer.
Daniel Nellor has worked as a writer in politics, academia and the corporate and not-for-profit sectors. He is currently co-writing a book with the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Divinity, Professor Peter Sherlock, about prominent Australians who have studied theology, and another book with former Human Rights Commissioner Edward Santow on artificial intelligence and human rights. Daniel was awarded his PhD in Philosophy from the University of Melbourne in 2019. His thesis in the area of moral and political philosophy was completed under the supervision of Associate Professor Christopher Cordner, who taught philosophy at Melbourne for several decades before his recent retirement. Daniel is also a playwright.