We are happy to welcome Professor Stephen Muecke who will present a lecture on “What do you make of an Indigenous Australian Philosophy?”.

 

Abstract

Asking this question about a discipline that doesn’t quite exist yet means it has to be figured out for present and future conditions.

And the ‘you’ being asked is both the emerging Indigenous philosophers and the ‘Western’ philosophers who may wonder just how relevant their concerns might be for this new field.

This talk is an exploration of a potential research project that will work on three major research questions:

  1. What are the key philosophical concepts in the existing anthropological and historical data?
  2. What are the conceptual structures of traditional languages and the philosophical implications of linguistic pragmatics?
  3. How are Indigenous academics conceiving of the future for Indigenous Australian Philosophy?

 

Bio

Stephen Muecke is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities, Emeritus Professor at the University of New South Wales and Senior Research Fellow in the Nulungu Research Institute of the University of Notre Dame Australia. He has collaborated for many years with the Goolarabooloo people of the Kimberly region in Western Australia. An early result of that collaborative work was the book Reading the Country: Introduction to Nomadology (1984), co-authored with Krim Benterrak and Paddy Roe, which explored the meaning and politics of place through Aboriginal narratives, songs and paintings. More recently, again with Paddy Roe, he published The Children’s Country: Creation of a Goolarabooloo Future in North-West Australia (2021). He is also a creative writer (The Mother’s Day Protest and Other Fictocritical Essays was published in 2016) and has translated several books from French into English, notably Another Science is Possible (2018), by Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers, The Wandering Souls (2019), by French ethnopsychiatrist Tobie Nathan, and Our Grateful Dead: Stories of Those Left behind, (2021) by Belgian ethnologist Vinciane Despret.