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Articles

At the Festival of Philosophy

Martin Cohen was at the American Philosophical Association Eastern Division Meeting, Boston, December 27-30th, 1999. Jack Reynolds organised the 6th Australasian Philosophy Postgraduate Conference in Canberra, April 2000.

Over the last 150 years the commanding heights of philosophy have been captured by paid, university-based academics. A feature of this shift has been the growth of conferences – hundreds take place each year, tiny ones and vast ones, some devoted to narrow topics such as the Early Wittgenstein and others covering the whole range of human thought. Opinions are divided about conferences, with some seeing them as a substitute for actually doing philosophy and others regarding them as essential to the exchange of ideas which can spark genuinely creative work. Here we present two very different views of two very different conferences.

The 96th annual festival of pomposity is over.

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