The 2008 Wednesday Lectures

Faculty of Theology and Philosophy

School of Philosophy

Rethinking our Place in Nature

Raimond Gaita - "The Significance of the Human"

4 June (Video Stream)

Raimond Gaita is Foundation Professor of Philosophy at ACU National and Professor of Moral Philosophy at King's College London. He is perhaps best known to the general reader for the prize-winning memoir, Romulus, My Father. His other books include Good and Evil: An Absolute Conception, A Common Humanity: Thinking About Love and Truth and Justice and The Philosopher’s Dog.

Clive Hamilton - "Understanding Nature from Ourselves"

11 June (Video Stream)

Clive Hamilton is a visiting fellow at the Regulatory Institutions Network, ANU, and former executive director of The Australia Institute, a progressive think tank he founded. He is the author of a number of best-selling books including, Growth Fetish, Affluenza (with Richard Denniss) and Scorcher: the dirty politics of climate change. His next book, The Freedom Paradox: towards a post-secular ethics, will be published on 1 August.

Alex Arbuthnot - "Country and City"

18 June

Alex Arbuthnot is an irrigation dairy farmer from Nambrok in Victoria where he has farmed with his family for 30 years. He is the former President of the Victorian Farmers Federation and is a Director of Landcare Australia Limited. Alex was appointed a Member of the Order of Australia in 1998 for his services to agriculture and landcare and in 2005 was appointed to the Australian Landcare Council representing the National Farmers Federation.

Deborah Rose - "Indigenous and Western Understandings of Nature"

25 June (Video Stream)

Deborah Rose is Senior Research Fellow in the Fenner School of Environment and Society at the Australian National University. Her research focus is indigenous knowledge and ethics and she has worked with Aboriginal people in their claims to land, and in other decolonising contexts. Her books include the award winning Dingo Makes Us Human and Reports from a Wild Country: Ethics for Decolonisation.

Martin Harrison - "Sense and Sustainability"

2 July

Martin Harrison is an award winning poet, essayist and literary critic. His publications include The Kangaroo Farm, Summer, Music: Poems and Prose, and a collection of essays, Who Wants to Create Australia? concerned with contemporary Australian poetry and senses of place and environment. Harrison is currently Director of Writing and Cultural Studies at the University of Technology, Sydney.

Freya Mathews - "The Radical Meaning of Sustainability"

9 July

Freya Mathews is Associate Professor in the Philosophy Program at La Trobe University, teaching ecological philosophy and co-ordinating the Environmental Enquiry major. Her books include The Ecological Self, For Love of Matter: A Contemporary Panpsychism and Reinhabiting Reality: Towards a Recovery of Culture. She is also co-editor of the journal, PAN (Philosophy Activism Nature).