This chapter investigates the response of the Australian novel to the Anthropocene. It considers ways in which new, speculative fictions have sought to represent deep time and planetary interconnection, and interrogates how this connects to long-standing settler-colonial relations to land. It considers such writers as James Bradley, George Turner, and Tara June Winch, and emphasizes the region of Western Australia as a place of particular environmental urgency.

The refugee novel is a problematic classificiation, especially when one adds a national label to it. This chapter examines the writing of Behrouz Boochani, Michelle de Kretser, and Felicity Castagna in the context Australia’s treatment of refugees. It argues that refugee fiction can play a vital epistemological and ethical role in the Australian context, while also emphasizing the dangers of commodification that dog the category of “refugee writing.”

Chapter 16 considers the moderate lumière in his Enlightenment context with a focus on his relationship to the “radical Enlightenment.”

Early Greek rhetoricians dealt with a wide range of persuasive techniques: emotional appeals, stylistic ornamentation, slander, and eristic tricks were all part of their repertoire. Notwithstanding this variety, there was a basic understanding that any technique of persuasion has to incorporate elements of genuine argumentation. This is why even early systems of rhetoric came to acknowledge the relevance of notions like proof, sign, probability, contrariety, etc. Still, Aristotle was the first to conceive rhetoric as an endeavour that essentially relies on arguments and, thus, requires some expertise in logic. He strikingly requires the rhetorician, who has to deal with rhetorical proofs or arguments, to be an expert in all sorts of sullogismos, or deductive argument. At the time Aristotle wrote the core of his Art of Rhetoric, he seems to have taken for granted that it is the dialectician who is the expert on all sorts of sullogismoi. The logic that he thus adopts for his account of rhetorical arguments seems to be the same logic that underlies his dialectic, which is unfolded in his Topics and Sophistical Refutations. The underlying logic of these works includes a clear understanding of deductive arguments, the difference between deductive and inductive arguments, and the role of premises, conclusions, and refutations. Most notably, it introduces the so-called topoi, argumentative schemes that enable the dialectician to construct premises from which he can derive the intended conclusion.1 These are the most important tools that Aristotle uses for reinterpreting the terminology of the traditional rhetorical manuals. For example, he takes over the traditional notion of an enthymeme, which had previously been used for condensed and antithetical formulations (see Section II below), and redefines it as a sullogismos that is used for rhetorical purposes. He also tries to adapt the sullogismos as it was defined and used in dialectic to the peculiar circumstances of a public speech, taking into account, for example, that the mostly contingent and variable subject matter of rhetorical arguments seldom allows for necessary proofs. This insight brings the role of the sullogismos, in certain cases, close to the role of the likelihoods and probability arguments, which were prominent in early rhetoric; but, unlike his predecessors, Aristotle is able to clearly distinguish between the modal quality of a premise and the (logical) necessity of a conclusion. Equipped with these logical distinctions he reinterprets the use of likelihoods in traditional rhetoric as a modal modification of the premises of a rhetorical sullogismos.

At first blush, Montesquieu seems to exemplify a typical Enlightenment attitude towards revealed religion. Nevertheless, as I argue in this chapter, Montesquieu did not just promote a critical, irreverent attitude to religious dogma and practice. While subtly undermining the idea that Christianity was the one true religion in his masterpiece, The Spirit of the Laws, he at the same time developed an original defense of established religion in general, and Christianity in particular, on instrumental grounds, as being socially and politically useful. Taking account of this aspect of Montesquieu’s work sheds new light on a topic that has provoked considerable scholarly discussion: the diversity of enlightened attitudes towards religion. In particular, my analysis of Montesquieu’s views on religion helps bring into focus a particular strand of Enlightenment thinking that has hitherto remained unacknowledged in the literature and that we might describe as the “Complacent Enlightenment”.

Aristotelian logic was the basis for various traditions of medieval logic: Greek, Armenian, Syriac, Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew. This chapter will concentrate on just two, the Latin and the Arabic. They are certainly the two great traditions of logic in the Middle Ages and the very different ways in which they use the ancient heritage makes a fascinating comparison. A fuller discussion would certainly include the other four traditions: they are omitted here, not just due to considerations of space, but also because scholarship in these areas has not yet reached the stage to make a survey possible.

Paradoxically, Australian nationalist accounts have tended to slight the earliest Australian literature by white settlers from the nineteenth century. This chapter surveys the literary history of this period, examning writers such as Oliné Keese, Ada Cambridge, Henry Kingsley, Rosa Praed, and Catherine Helen Spence. Drawing connections between these writers and the transnational Anglophone literary world centering on Great Britain and the United States, this chapter takes a comparative perspective that at once acknowledges the peripheral standing of these Australian texts and argues for their relevance to the history of the novel in English.

Ever since the beginnings of philosophical thought in Greek antiquity, philosophers have made use of modalities. In particular, the concepts of necessity and ‘what must be’ played an important role in Pre-Socratic thought.1 For example, Anaximander maintained that things perish into that from which they came to be ‘in accordance with what must be’ (kata to chreōn).2 Heraclitus held that ‘everything comes about in accordance with strife and what must be (kat’ erin kai chreōn)’.3 In his poem, Parmenides asserts that what is (to eon) is entirely still and changeless because ‘powerful Necessity (Anankē) holds it in the bonds of a limit, which encloses it all around’.4 Among the atomists, Democritus identified necessity with a whirl of atoms, holding that ‘everything comes about in accordance with necessity, inasmuch as the whirl – which he calls necessity – is the cause of the coming about of all things’.5 Finally, Plato in the Timaeus describes the creation of the cosmos as the result of the interplay between divine demiurgic Intelligence and natural Necessity.6

In Chapter 8, the volume turns to the international dimensions of Montesquieu’s ethical and political thought. We can identify Montesquieu with the cosmopolitan and internationalist vision of the Enlightenment, anchored in the ideal of a common, rational outlook. Yet he understood that this aspiration came with coercion and cost. Universal rationality pushed against the expectation that each people and regime was rooted in particular mores, manners, and dispositions. The costs of cosmopolitan detachment are stamped on the figures of Usbek and Roxanne in Persian Letters, and they are evident in his praise of six “good enough” empires in The Spirit of the Laws. Despite a deserved reputation as a critic of colonialism, Montesquieu’s work also suggests justifications for empire on grounds of survival and sustenance, international security, human rights, the spread of science and enlightenment, and finally, doux commerce, whose global ambitions Montesquieu discerned but never with the naïve, coercionless expectations some readers erroneously drew from his work.

David Malouf and Christos Tsiolkas represent very different generations of gay men with migrant backgrounds, but both use the novel form as a way of articulating gay experience. Malouf, born 1934, started out as a poet, and continued to publish poetry for his entire career. His work is exquisitely styled and highly verbally self-conscious. As opposed to the meditative, scholarly Malouf, Tsiolkas, born 1965, is far grittier and rancorous in his approach. Loaded (1995) details a world of drug use and casual sex, whereas Dead Europe (2005) overturns the traditional Australian nostalgia for and even pretention about continental Europe by examining its sordid post-Cold War reality. Though Malouf and Tsiolkas are very different writers, their concern with aesthetics, history, and what it might be to live in a community make their juxtaposition not just heuristic but inevitable. This chapter explores one convergence between them: their queering of mateship.

Aristotle’s logical work has been handed down to us as a group of six treatises of variable scope, collected under the title Organon, which means ‘instrument’ or ‘tool’. The collection is opened by the Categories, a short treatise which introduces the ten Aristotelian categories, the classification of the ultimate kinds of being which Aristotle discusses or deploys in virtually all his works, but examines only substance, quantity, relative, and quality, and moves then on to the different kinds of opposition. The second treatise in the traditional order, De Interpretatione (Peri hermēneias, perhaps best translated as On Expression, but normally referred to with its Latin title), deals with language: it defines the name and the verb, and discusses what affirmation and negation are. The third treatise, Prior Analytics, turns to logic in a narrower sense, and offers a thorough and quite technical exposition of deductive arguments – its core is Aristotle’s assertoric syllogistic, the system which has dominated Western logical thought for more than two millennia. A second system, modal syllogistic, is also expounded in detail. The fourth treatise, Posterior Analytics, builds on the theory of syllogism in order to elucidate the notion of demonstration and the structure of a demonstrative science; its second book studies definition and the principles of science. The fifth treatise, the Topics, is a lengthy collection and classification of patterns for dialectical arguments, and the sixth, the Sophistical Refutations, deals with fallacies, i.e. apparently good arguments which are in fact invalid or otherwise defective.1

Greeks were intensely competitive. Their historians dated events by who had won what in the Olympics (Thucydides 3.8.1, 5.49.1, Xenophon Hellenica 1.2.1, 2.3.1); they would hold athletic contests as we might hold a memorial service (Aristotle Constitution of Athens 58.1); they staged dramas as competitive spectator sport (Aristotle Constitution of Athens 56.3–5); they had beauty contests for both men and women (Athenaeus 13.610a, Andocides 4.42); and when they sneered at competitions, this was to express their own superiority over the winners (Xenophanes DK 21B2, Thucydides 1.22.4). In particular, Greeks had competitions in which competitors strove to outdo one another in reasoning and argument. Protagoras was, according to Diogenes Laertius 9.52, ‘the first … to arrange contests of speeches’, and he declares that he has taken part in many such contests himself (Plato Protagoras 335a).

The topic of demonstration lies at the intersection of logic and epistemology. It is motivated by the following question: what features must an argument possess to be suitable for providing us with knowledge? A first, obvious thought is that it ought to be valid and to have true premises. But some ancient philosophers came to the view that this is not yet sufficient for an argument to grant knowledge of the truth of its conclusion; there are further requirements, concerning the epistemic status of its premises and the relations they bear towards its conclusion.

This chapter will build on recent work by Elizabeth McMahon and Christos Tsiolkas to situate Australia’s first Nobel Prize winner as a queer modernist with his own distinct political valence. Written by the foremost Chinese scholar of Australian literature, Chen Hong, this chapter explores Whites epochal career. It covers White’s novelistic oeuvre from The Aunt’s Story (1948) through to his late queer masterpeice, The Twyborn Affair (1979).

Montesquieu deems slavery a form of despotism. His interest in how slavery has manifested itself in various cultures through history suffuses The Spirit of the Laws, and he devotes Book 15 of the work to the subject. Montesquieu’s treatment of slavery there is ambiguous, and scholars have reached differing assessments of his ultimate position on slavery. This chapter argues that Book 15 offers a biting satire of slavery in the face of the deeply entrenched prejudices and financial interests of his time. His satire conveys difficult truths in a manner that perhaps could prick European consciences more effectively than outrage and condemnations. Nevertheless, so subtle an approach to the prejudices and cruelties of his age brings with it the possibility of misunderstanding, and his views were cited on both sides of the subsequent debate over slavery.

Chapter 6 takes up the crucial question of foundational principles and Montesquieu’s relationship to the natural law tradition. Montesquieu rejects the traditional skeptical argument that history and cultural diversity indicate that humankind is ruled simply by “fancy.” His explanation of diversity is elaborated in terms common to the natural law tradition: laws defined as “necessary relations” derived from “the nature of things.” For the natural lawyers, “the nature of things” meant “man” defined as “a rational and sociable being”; the laws of morals and justice were a logical deduction from this definition. But the natural lawyers held that positive laws could not be deduced in this way. Montesquieu’s originality is to take as his starting point not a monolithic definition of man as a rational and social being but an account of the “nature” of the different forms of government or possibilities of human nature and to deduce, from the definition of each, the laws that ought to guide both rulers and subjects or citizens.