Article: “You all ok?” The Impossibility of Being Alright amid Mass Violence

by Christopher G. Robbins

In response to the 17th mass shooting in only 14 days of February 2023, or the 71st mass shooting in 45 days of 2023 in the U.S, this time at Michigan State University, my friend who lives a world away in Australia wrote a short, caring message, “You all ok? Re Lansing?” I live approximately 60 miles away from Lansing and have colleagues who work there and close friends whose children attend school there.

Some contexts of Jeremy Beckett 1931-2022

by Tim Rowse

Jeremy Beckett died in Sydney 8 December 2022. Thesis Eleven is proud to honour his memory with this appreciation of Jeremy and his work, revised by Tim Rowse from an earlier version published in Encounters with Indigeneity: Writing about Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples. We are grateful to both Tim Rowse and Aboriginal Studies Press for the opportunity to republish this work in celebration of Jeremy’s life and work

Remembering Riaz Hassan 1937–2022

by Iván Szelényi

Riaz Hassan passed away in Melbourne on June 8, 2022 after a long illness. His is a great loss to the Australian social sciences and to the social sciences in general. Riaz was a great scholar, a wonderful colleague, a good friend and an excellent teacher. He was the mentor of a whole generation of social scientists. His death is an especially great loss to me personally.

Retrospective: Harry Redner – Pursuing Philosophy as a Vocation

by Jill Redner

For Harry, philosophy was a vocation in Weber’s sense. But pursuing this ideal in today’s technocratic multiversity can seem almost quixotic, because specialist knowledge and technical expertise are cultivated, rather than a general intellectual grasp of problems affecting humanity. Generalists still exist but are increasingly likely to find themselves dismissed as mere “intellectuals”. Harry accepted this situation with good humour: “Though my academic sins be scarlet”, he quipped recently, “let my books be read”.

Extract: The Birth of Science from the Spirit of Art

by Harry Redner

Section I. The origin of the natural sciences in music and painting.

Western achievements in the arts and sciences began with the Greeks. During the great age of Classical civilization, that of the glory of Greece and the grandeur of Rome, the basis was laid for all the later achievements in the development of the arts and sciences in the West…

Extract: Theorybabble

by Harry Redner

The history of Theorybabble is now well-known to everyone and is an often-told story that need not preoccupy us unduly. It arose in the hothouse atmosphere of the avant gardist intellectual circles of the Paris of the 1960s and 70s. But it only really flourished in the American elite universities of the 1980s and 90s. Since then, it has become much more widespread, though not in Paris itself, where it has more or less petered out.