Alan Donagan and Melbourne Philosophy

Abstract

Throughout his career, Alan Donagan was his own person-never ready to take up a philosophical position for partisan reasons, always determined to test new ideas and doctrines on his own pulse. So his friends and readers never found his views easy to label. He hung out in youth with people much influenced by Wittgenstein, yet his sympathetic reading of Wittgenstein was too measured to make him a Wittgensteinian; he had a far more solidly based understanding than most of his contemporaries of the merits of Collingwood, yet he was no Collingwoodian; his careful reading of Aquinas gave him an appreciation for Thomas's analysis of moral and theological issues, yet Alan was too little seduced by the charms of system ever to be a full-scale Thomist; nor can we even call him a Kantian without laying him open to misinterpretation. All the same, he was introduced to academic philosophy at a lucky place and time. Through a coincidence of two distinct historical accidents, the Philosophy Department at the University of Melbourne, in the 1940s, was the focus of a vigorous conversation and a great place to be drawn into the traditions of philosophical literature and debate. This conversation began early in World War II, with the arrival from Cambridge of a newly appointed lecturer in philosophy. This was George Paul, who was at Ludwig Wittgenstein's classes in the late 1930s, married the sister of the late Frank Ramsey, and took a job at Melbourne while aspiring to win a research fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge. But it developed a full head of steam a couple of years later, when George Paul was confronted by a lively group of immigrants from Central Europe-not least, from Vienna-several of whom were already well along in their study of law or the natural sciences, as well as philosophy. George Paul himself was a fine teacher-though others, notably Kurt Baier, can speak about this from a first-hand knowledge I do not claim. Traveling on the ship to Melbourne, he spent his time putting the last touches on a fellowship dissertation that he planned to send