The "form and pressure" of Australian philosophy.(Philosophy & Ideas)

THIS IS THE MOST wonderful book. It is the second fine book that Jim Franklin, one of the most important scholars now working in Australia, has published. (The first was The Science of Conjecture: Evidence and Probability before Pascal, brought out by Johns Hopkins in 2001, a work of quite extraordinary learning. It is not so much a classic in its field as a book that creates a field.)

A little background on Jim is perhaps appropriate. He was a student at Sydney University and took both Mathematics and Philosophy. Mathematics became his major study and he is now Associate Professor of Mathematics at the University of New South Wales. But in some ways philosophy has always been nearer to his heart.

In philosophy you usually need a teacher to set you alight. For Jim it was David Stove, and it was both David's particular philosophical concerns and his polemical writings, with their elegance and wit, that engaged Jim's attention and admiration. He is David's literary executor and is one of those who has helped Roger Kimball, editor of the New Criterion in New York, to make Stove a posthumous cult figure among a number of conservatives in the USA.

It has taken a long time for Corrupting the Youth to see the light of publication. That is not Jim's fault. The book was originally accepted by Melbourne University Press; and then, years later, they rejected it. I understand that legal worries were alleged. But one cannot help wondering whether there were other worries in marvellous, but politically correct, Melbourne.

Then it was the turn of the University of NSW Press, his own university, who eventually said that they would publish it, but only without most of the footnotes. If this was their real motive, then in terms of traditional academic values it was a criminal suggestion. There are a great number of footnotes, it is true, but just turning over the pages one can see that these references are a gold mine for anybody who is interested in that idiosyncratic but not undistinguished enterprise: Australian philosophy; or indeed anybody who wishes to consider Australian thought in general.

But don't be put off by these footnotes. As Michael Devitt says on the jacket--and he's a good philosopher but one not noted for his scholarly interests--it is a terrific read. There is plenty of scandal, and even sex, and there are excellent jokes. At the end Jim reproduces the Monty Python skit on Australian philosophy, the definitive skit that culminates with the drinking song proving that every famous philosopher from Socrates onwards was a hopeless alcoholic.

So, rejected by two university presses, one of them a press with a distinguished history, who did Jim turn to? Macleay Press, of course, the press of Keith and Elizabeth Windschuttle. If you really have got something to say in Australia, but for reasons based on political correctness, or whatever, no university or other press will publish you, turn to Keith and Liz. They deserve great congratulations for publishing this book. What is needed now is for it to be issued in paperback--still with the footnotes, of course--something, alas, beyond the resources of Macleay.