Logic didn’t develop much in the period from the early Stoics to Boethius. Certainly, there was nothing to match the ground-breaking discoveries of Aristotle and Chrysippus. Aristotle found for us the figures of the syllogism, and in the course of proving those forms to be correct, uncovered and exploited numerous logical laws. He even managed to make steps in the right direction with his modal syllogistic. The early Stoics found for us the indemonstrables, the method of analysis, and the themata. There are few, if any, comparable discoveries in the later period. The closest anyone came was Galen with his relational syllogisms, a ‘third class’ of syllogisms that Galen argued was a necessary supplement to Aristotelian and Stoic syllogistic. Moreover, it is also hard to deny that there were some steps backwards taken by some of the later logicians, by which I mean there were some serious misunderstandings of the logical theory of their predecessors.

This chapter offers an interpretation of Part VI of The Spirit of the Laws, the least-discussed and least-understood section of the book: The Spirit of the Laws and its purpose in the book. Part VI systematically unravels all of the various accounts of a unitary founding moment of a unitary French state, all the attempts to find an ancient legitimate principle that could dictate what lawful government would mean in the eighteenth century. Montesquieu rejected founding narratives in favor of evolutionary history and unplanned development; he connected that move to his rejection of legal uniformity in favor of pluralism. Montesquieu rejects all of the contemporaneous theories of political normativity grounded in foundings and origins – la thèse nobiliaire as much as la thèse royale, historical contractarianism as is found in the monarchomachs as much as both hypothetical contractarianism and Machiavellian-republican founding principles. He demonstrates the falseness and impossibility of all of these, rejecting them as incompatible with the pluralism and complexity of history, the contingency and accident that shaped the development of political authority.

This chapter critically analyzes the work of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century white settler colonial writers who represented Indigenous characters and stories. It will examines how certain tropes persisted, from Rolf Boldrewood’s late romanticism to Eleanor Darks reconstructive modernism. It explores how novels by these writers manifest a contradictory set of ideas towards race and landscape, which it takes as emblematic of wider white Australian culture.

The rejection of the medieval scholastic tradition that characterised the logic of the Renaissance did not imply the rejection of ancient logic. On the contrary, the philological expertise of humanist scholars made it possible to read the writings of ‘practically all classical Greek authors’.1 In particular, Aristotle’s logical writings and many commentaries on them, together with new Latin translations and revised scholastic ones, became widely available not only in manuscript form but also in print.2 This favoured a lively dialogue with ancient logical literature, even when it was tinged with criticism.

This chapter examines the transnational Australian novel from a different perspective, focusing on First Nations writing. Whereas most visions of the global privilege literary institutions whose power stems from existing political and global inequalities, First Nations writing fosters a transnationalism of resistance, solidarity, and fungibility. It considers Alexis Wrights novels in translation, and writers engaged in collaborative projects.

From early Australian writers such as Henry Savery and Barron Field through to modernist luminaries such as D. H. Lawrence and contemporary refugee writers such as Behrouz Boochani, authors who have had only a temporary, contingent, or ephemeral relationship to Australia have been a major feature of Australian literary history. This chapter surveys these writers, showing how they pose perennial problems for the institutionalization of Australian literary studies.

In Western Sydney, writers such as Luke Carman, Michael Mohammed Ahmad, and Felicity Castagna have produced novels written from the working-class and multicultural perspectives that are a far cry from mainstream visions of Sydney. Ahmed’s The Tribe (2014) is a multigenerational saga of a Lebanese Australian family that examines ideas of belonging and alienation, inclusion, and exclusion, which touch, but also exceed, identities of ethnicity and religion. Castagna’s novel No More Boats (2017), explores how an Italian migrant to Australia in the 1960s becomes, in the 2000s, a fervent conservative opponent of further migration to Australia by people from Asia and the Middle East. This chapter shows Western Sydney as the place where twenty-first century Australian literature is most vitally happening.

In a passage from his New Essays on Human Understanding (4.5.3–11) Leibniz distinguishes between three kinds of truth: propositional, moral, and metaphysical. Propositional truth belongs to true affirmations and negations, and consists in ‘correspondence of the propositions which are in the intellect with the things they are about’. Moral truth or truthfulness consists in ‘talking about things in accordance with the belief of our spirit’. Finally, metaphysical truth ‘is the real existence of things, in conformity with the ideas which we have about them’ and ‘is typically interpreted by metaphysicians as an attribute of being’. In ancient Greek we can find a similar tripartition of the meanings of the noun alētheia and the adjective alēthēs, which at least from the classical age (fifth–fourth century BCE) prevailed over the other terms adopted in the rich Homeric vocabulary for truth. Therefore, in ancient Greek there are three possible meanings of alētheia: (1) truth as opposed to falsehood (pseudos), (2) truthfulness as opposed to lying, and (3) reality as opposed to appearance. The first meaning is what I will call ‘logical truth’ (obviously not in the sense of ‘logical tautology’) and is an attribute of declarative sentences and of the beliefs that they express. The second meaning, moral truth, applies in particular to people, but also to oracles or dreams; in the case of people it is the ethical virtue of those who are sincere in their discourses (en tois logois),2 namely, of those who say what they believe without hiding anything, and is opposed to the moral vice of lying, which belongs to those ‘who hide something in themselves and declare something else’.3 Finally, there is reality as opposed to appearance, which Leibniz calls ‘metaphysical truth’ and which I prefer to call, faute de mieux, ‘ontological truth’; I distinguish this both from Leibniz’s definition and from the definition of it as an attribute of being given by the metaphysicians of Leibniz’s time and later by Heidegger, which Leibniz considered to be ‘a useless and almost senseless attribute’. By ‘ontological truth’ I will thus mean the attributive use of the adjective ‘true’, as applied ‘to each object, if one wants to express that it really is what it should be according to the name given to it’.4

This chapter explores “constellational form” in Gerald Murnane. It argues that the key continuity in Murnane’s work lies in his associative way of writing, and analyzes the motivations and philosophical convictions underlying this form. It traces these formal continuities across Murnanes work, from his early novel Tamarisk Row (1974) through to his post-hiatus fictions up to Border Districts (2017). It also considers Murnanes “idealism” and probes how this underpins his unique understanding of the ontology of characterological beings and the relationship between implied author and reader.

The “woman question” is at the heart of Montesquieu’s epistolary novel, The Persian Letters, and other early works like the erotic-philosophic tale, The Temple of Gnidus. In these works of the imagination, women are important both as characters and as potential audience. Although women do not seem as central to either Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline or The Spirit of Laws, they do appear at key moments in the unfolding argument of both works. The chapter examines the place of women within Montesquieu’s oeuvre, with special emphasis on the links between women and the politics of liberty in The Spirit of Laws. Not only does the condition of women serve as a paradigmatic case for the status of liberty altogether, women actually become the agents of the liberalizing reforms that Montesquieu cautiously forwards.