This chapter looks at the work of the contemporary Noongar writer Kim Scott, focusing both on its portrayal of his family history and the history of Indigenous settler contact in Western Australia. It emphasizes the importance of the university as a context for Scott’s historical fiction, focusing on creative-writing programs and practice-led research. It demonstrates how the rise of “the doctoral novel” plays a vital role in a more plural and more just model of literary engagement.

Several ancient philosophers and philosophical schools address issues about terms and propositions. The most important contributions are offered by Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. In the Sophist, Plato distinguishes names and verbs (which roughly correspond to subject-expressions and predicate-expressions), he claims that truth and falsehood qualify only speeches (which roughly correspond to complete sentences), and he sketches accounts of truth and falsehood for speeches of the simplest sort. In De Interpretatione, Aristotle picks up Plato’s distinction between names and verbs and identifies the bearers of truth and falsehood with sentences of a special sort, namely, declarative sentences. In the Prior Analytics, he develops a theory of inferences constructed from propositions and terms, but he ignores the distinction between names and verbs. With the Stoics, a contrast analogous to that between terms and propositions is found at the level (not of speech, but) of sayables, incorporeal items signified by utterances. The Stoics single out a special type of sayable, the statable, as the bearer of truth and falsehood. Of the four sections of this chapter, the first is dedicated to Plato, the second to Aristotle’s views in De Interpretatione, the third to his position in the Prior Analytics, and the fourth to the Stoics.

Chapter 5 locates Montesquieu in an intellectual context he fashioned through his own choice of interlocutors in The Spirit of the Laws – his world of ancient political writers and lawgivers. Montesquieu turns to the classical world in search not of models for imitation but knowledge of the science of politics. This chapter considers the relationship between Montesquieu’s critique of the substantive ideals of classical politics and his significant debts to the Aristotelian mode of regime analysis.

Greek mathematics may not have been unique, among the ancient mathematical traditions, in its very use of proof (in the last generation, Høyrup and Chemla have shown the role of proof in the Babylonian and Chinese mathematical traditions, respectively1). But in no other ancient mathematical tradition was proof so explicit and foregrounded. Other mathematical civilisations proved: Greeks did so self-consciously.

This chapter clarifies the philosophic dimension of Montesquieu’s essay on Rome, which comes to sight when, in chapter 18, Montesquieu makes explicit that he is presenting here a preeminent case study vindicating the contention that “it is not Fortune that dominates the World”; there are “general causes, some moral, some physical, which operate,” and “all the accidents are subject to these causes.” This foreshadows the claim with which Montesquieu opens his Spirit of the Laws: “I have posed the principles, and I have seen the particular cases unfold therefrom as if by themselves; the histories of all the nations are nothing but the consequences.” These statements signal the emergence of the modern philosophy of history, as a major component of Enlightenment rationalism’s most ambitious project and hope: to show that human reason can provide a system of universal causal explanation that will leave no room for plausible evidence of governance by supra- and contra-rational providential and legislative divinity (which is profoundly opposed not only to revealed religion but to ancient political rationalism.)

The notion of validity and the systematic codification of valid forms of deductive argument are central to the discipline of logic. This chapter will reconstruct how, in antiquity, Aristotle and the Stoics constructed two different deductive systems meant to capture and codify an especially important subset of valid inferences, which they called ‘syllogisms’.1 In the process, we will also emphasise some key similarities and differences between the two systems, and between both of them and modern conceptions of validity and formal logic. Because of space limitations we will not include in our presentation other interesting and for the most part subsequent developments in the classification of valid forms of inference.2

Whereas much scholarship still associates migrant fiction in Australia with social or documentary realism, this chapter emphasizes its playful, iconoclastic, and experimental qualities. It questions the conventional long form as a closed, stable narration that relies on summation and style. Instead it turns to short fiction, examining writers such as Tom Cho, Nicholas Jose, and Melanie Cheng who operate as transnational, experimental, and decolonial forces in Australian writing.

How did Montesquieu, born into a noble family in rural Bourdeaux, become a world-historical figure? In what particulars was he a man of his own times? That he lived when he did and where he did is obvious. How he managed to escape the limitations imposed upon him by time and place is not. The volume opens with a chapter introducing the reader to the development of Montesquieu’s thought throughout his literary and philosophical career. The essay will situate this account within the relevant biographical and historical context. It will consider the relationship between the major works and pursue insights into Montesquieu’s intellectual development derived from the study of minor works such as his Reflections on Universal Monarchy in Europe and Pensées.

The Spirit of the Laws (1748) is often considered one of the founding works of political liberalism. Yet more recently, a series of interpreters have thrown doubt on this dominant reading. In order to revisit and assess this debate, this contribution delineates Montesquieu’s definition of political liberty as distinct from so-called “philosophical” liberty. It considers his “solution” to the threat despotism poses to all forms of government, namely, the distribution of state powers and the division of social forces, while evaluating the status of the “English model.” Finally, it probes the original distinction between political and civil liberty, while showing that Montesquieu’s political theory cannot be integrated into the tradition of republicanism conceived as a theory of participatory self-rule. In The Spirit of the Laws, the understanding of liberty fits neither a standard liberal view nor a civic republican one; it includes elements that reach beyond both, such as a political culture grounded on honor as much as on the love of liberty.

Chapter 10 picks up with an exploration of sovereignty. This chapter will offer an analysis of the meaning and practices of political sovereignty with a focus on Montesquieu’s seminal treatment of the English constitution, where sovereignty is ambiguous and divided in ways that are constitutively connected to liberty. The chapter considers Montesquieu’s treatment of sovereignty in the context of other major modern theories of sovereignty and its relevance for contemporary liberal democratic states.

This chapter considers Alexis Wright’s trajectory as a writer from Grog War (1997) to The Swan Book (2013), arguing that her body of work presents a consistent vision that is “at once Aboriginal and Australian, modern and ancient, local and yet outward-looking.” It pays special attention to the notion of “all times,” the relation between form and politics, and how imaginative sovereignty underpins Wright’s work.

In late antiquity interpreters of Plato’s philosophy insisted that the whole of logic was already present in his dialogues. All kinds of syllogisms were used by Socrates and his interlocutors, and it was left to Aristotle and his successors only to name, classify and formalise them.1 This approach remained popular among interpreters until the first half of the twentieth century.2 More recent historians of logic have protested that in order to ‘discover’ or ‘invent’ logic it is not sufficient to reason according to certain valid patterns, or to represent someone acting in this way in a fictional dialogue. But there is a sense in which Plato did play a key role in the birth and development of ancient logic, a role which is often underplayed in histories of logic. In his dialogues Plato identified and explored a number of central philosophical issues to which logical concepts and methods offered powerful responses, if not definitive solutions. In this way, he was an essential catalyst for the birth of logic: if ancient logic was the promised land, Plato was its Moses. He never set foot in it, but enabled others to see the destination. Of course, when setting this agenda, Plato was not operating in a philosophical vacuum; often he was engaging in original ways with problems raised or foreshadowed by some of his predecessors and contemporaries (on the ‘prehistory’ of logic see Chapter 1 – Denyer).

This chapter explores the particularity of Montesquieu’s political vision that includes a commitment to traditional social orders alongside a defence of liberty. It demonstrates how later theorists associated with the liberal tradition develop at least one of three features largely derived from Montesquieu’s work that we now associate with modern liberalism once combined with a commitment to social and political equality. These features are: institutional and constitutional organization to guarantee political accountability and the rule of law; social pluralism and representative government as a structure for the aggregation, education and voicing of broad social interests; and an ethos of moderation and avoidance of cruelty in social and political life. They characterize broad aspects of the liberal tradition at the level of institutional design, the structure of civil society and the broad social ethos needed to sustain it. The chapter concludes with reflections on perceived threats to liberalism today.