Continental Philosophy in Austral-Asia – serie

Through a curated selection of papers written over four decades by one of Australia’s leading philosophers, this collection demonstrates the impact of Continental philosophy on philosophical thought in Australia.The development of specific philosophical problems, over a period of more than forty years by a philosopher whose first training was ‘pre-continental’, shows that it is possible to achieve interaction between ‘continental’ and ‘pre-continental’ methods in philosophy, even while recognizing their distinctiveness. These essays ‘work towards’ continental philosophy in the ways they pay attention to language, to how we experience things and are experienced by others, and to the structures of language and power that frame what it is possible to say and to hear, to write and to read.

Critically and comprehensively examining the works of Habermas and Foucault, two giants of 20th century continental philosophy, this book illuminates the effects of scientific reason as it migrates from its specialized institutions into society. It explores how science permeates shared human consciousness, to produce effects that ripple through the entire social body to restructure relations between persons, discourses, institutions, and power in ways which we are barely conscious of. The book shows how science, through its entwinement with power, discourses, and practices, presents certain social arrangements as natural and certain courses of action as beyond question. By arguing for a non-reductive, liberal scientific naturalism that sees science as one form of rationality amongst others, it opens possibilities for thought and action beyond scientific knowledge.Examining the shifting relations between science and other social institutions, discourses and power, the book addresses the narrowing of freedom by the instrumental modes of thinking that accompany scientific and technological change. McIntyre simultaneously raises the question of the good life and the question of a philosophical critique both directed towards science and, at the same time, shaped by, and responsive to it. By analysing the works of Foucault and Habermas in terms of their social, political, and historical contexts it reveals the two thinkers as linked by a commitment to the Enlightenment tradition and its emancipatory telos. The significant differences between the two are seen to result from Foucault’s radicalization of this tradition, a radicalization which is, at the same time, implicit within the Enlightenment project itself.

Over the past 25 years, activists, farmers and scholars have been arguing that the industrialized global food system erodes democracy, perpetuates injustices, undermines population health and is environmentally unsustainable. In an attempt to resist these effects, activists have proposed alternative food networks that draw on ideas and practices from pre-industrial agrarian smallholder farming, as well as contemporary peasant movements. This book uses current debates over Michel Foucault’s method of genealogy as a practice of critique and historical problematization of the present to reveal the historical constitution of contemporary alternative food discourses. While alternative food activists appeal to food sovereignty and agrarian discourses to counter the influence of neoliberal agricultural policies, these discourses remain entangled with colonial logics. In particular, the influence of Enlightenment ideas of improvement, colonial practices of agriculture as a means to establish ownership, and anthropocentric relations to the land. In combination with the genealogical analysis, this book brings continental political philosophy into conversation with Indigenous theories of sovereignty and alternative food discourse in order to open new spaces for thinking about food and politics in contemporary Australia.