Themes Seminars
July 2007
PUBLIC & PRIVATE REASONING

Speakers:

• Stephen Stich (Rutgers),
• John Doris (Washington, St. Louis),
• Joshua Knobe (N Carolina),
• Frank Jackson (Princeton/ANU/LaTrobe),
• Michael Smith (Princeton),
• David Chalmers (ANU)

Subject: the relationship between the experimental study of intuitions and reasoning and the use of these intuitions in conceptual analysis - how studying the public aspects of reasoning sheds light on private intuitive reasoning. Contact: Máire Ní Mhórdha, maire@coombs.anu.edu.au>

July 19 - F H Gruen Lecture

5.00pm Thursday July 19 2007
Venue: Haydon-Allen Tank Lecture Theatre

Quarantining Australians’ Welfare Income: Lessons from the U.S. Professor David Ribar, University of North Carolina

MONDAY JULY 23 2007
2.00-5.00PM
MILLS ROOM, CHANCELRY

Speakers:

• Jon Altman (The Australian National University)
• Ian Gray (Charles Sturt University)
• John Gray (Anthropology, University of Adelaide)
• Daniela Stehlik (Curtin University of Technology)
• Carolyn Morris (University of Canterbury)

Ruralism and the limits of neo-liberalism
In many nations, including Australia and New Zealand, rural communities have had to contend with the global extension of market-based social and economic policies. Their self-understanding as 'families' and 'communities' have been challenged by governmental social imaginaries in which they appear as incipient or actual entrepreneurs and enterprises or as unreconstructed pockets of subsidised, rent-seeking inefficiency. Succeeding generations of rural dwellers have been invited to identify with either their rural heritage, with the winds of change, or to contrive their own compromise between the two. In Australia there have been two versions of this clash.

One has featured non-Indigenous practitioners of various forms of agriculture. Public policy in the past secured their land base cheaply, ensured their access to relatively inexpensive finance, and stabilised the markets for their produce. It was widely assumed that there was a sympathetic relationship between the norms of kinship and of productive efficiency. There has long been a market-based critique of this form of 'rurality', but it had a strong political defence. The advance of neo-liberal approaches to property, finance and trade has strengthened the political challenge to these Australian rural institutions and ways of life, in the last thirty years.

The other clash has emerged more recently. Over the last forty years, Indigenous Australians have lost their position as a rural labour force, and become owners of a large proportion of the Australian land mass (around 20 per cent). There have been large variations in the pace and the extent of this shift from being labourers to being land-owners. One of the most striking instances of this shift was the decentralisation of the remote Aboriginal population, a shift made possible by changes in land tenure and by the entry of remote Aboriginal people into the Australian welfare state. In recent years this rural transition has come under sustained critique by policy intellectuals who argue that this rural reformation has produced 'ghettos', a 'lost generation', a socially unviable economy propped up by public subvention. These critics seek the social inclusion of remote Aborigines as bearers of human capital, as private home-owners and as commercially-oriented owners of natural resources - transitions that require public policy to intervene in new ways in the social reproduction of remote Aborigines.

The purpose of this symposium is to bring into the one framework of discussion these two instances of embattled rurality (or of rurality in transition?).

Special seminar, jointly sponsored by the RSSS History and Philosophy Programs, the Centre for Consciousness, and the Public and Private Reasoning theme:

Jessica Riskin (History, Stanford University)

"Mechanical Christs, Hydraulic Brutes and the Invention of Consciousness"

Friday 13 July, 2pm, Seminar Room E, Coombs Building