Australian philosophy

Australian indigenous traditions attribute moral authority outside the individual to The Dreaming, which is bound up with the relation of human society to land.

[3]: ch1-2  [9][10] His controversial atheism and his view that there was no such thing as moral obligation attracted condemnation, and through his students had an influence on the Sydney Push and other libertarian currents of the 1960s.

[3]: ch8 Philosophy at Melbourne University was more diverse than in Sydney but in the mid-twentieth century heavily influenced by Wittgenstein.

Partly through the influence of John Anderson, realism has been stronger in Australia than in comparable countries such as the US and UK.

[16] David Chalmers argues that materialism has failed to make progress on the hard problem of consciousness: how to give an account of qualia or felt experience in purely physical terms.

His views on bioethics, including the permissibility of killing even non-disabled babies, have attracted controversy and protests.

Some Australian philosophers have developed non-standard views of God, such as Samuel Alexander in Space, Time and Deity (1920) and Peter Forrest in Developmental Theism (2007).

On the other hand, Richard Sylvan and Val Plumwood were early leaders in moves towards deep ecology, which attributed an intrinsic value to nature, independent of human concerns.