Jim G . Packer
I am the librarian at the WEA Sydney. My PhD thesis (1998) had as its subject the life and fiction of the Australian novelist Brian Penton, and its relevance to the aion and chreon of Heraclitus, the moral preoccupations of Dostoevsky, Nietzsche and Conrad, and the general history of Australian fiction. My current research, extending back to my years as an undergraduate, relates to the political, social and more broadly philosophical theories of the Scottish-Australian philosopher John Anderson, and seeks to extend and modify his work in the direction of an anti-relativistic, anti-Eleatic view of predication.
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In the course of this, and in consequence of it, the paper takes a different view to the one dominant at present to both “subject-predicate” and what might be said to be across subject-predicates in view of subject-predicate. The first, subject-predicate, is treated toward the end of Plato’s Sophist and might be called the issue of “logical form”, or the Eleatic Stranger’s disentanglement of the form of logos; the second is an issue of what Plato’s Parmenides, or even Parmenides himself, might recognise as “logical space”, not a space “within which” existence is possible, but a space by which the terms of existence are manifest.
Books by Jim G . Packer
Penton’s fiction and his later life enact a dialectic between “will” and “fate”, and of what self-displacements this dialectic entails. Time is an issue brought to the surface because neither “will” nor “fate” can cancel the other out. The Kierkegaardian formulations of dread and despair are highly developed here since life at any point is indeterminate irrespective of the determinate structures into which it appears to crystallise. Moral anxiety is the form of indeterminacy that characterises a life as it pursues its ends oblivious of the forms of existence these ends produce—so Derek Cabell, in Landtakers. Historical anxiety finds individuals embedded in national environments against which individuality itself is imperilled; life vanishes behind such survival tactics as self-corrosive doublethink—so James Cabell in Inheritors. Fictional anxiety requires an individual to create a life sui generis even in the face of crippling insufficiency—so Bob Cash in Penton’s unpublished Third Novel. Aesthetic anxiety traps the self in acts of self-control that paradoxically betray and dissolve that self—so Derek Cash in the Third Novel, and so also, Penton in his own life.
In the course of this, and in consequence of it, the paper takes a different view to the one dominant at present to both “subject-predicate” and what might be said to be across subject-predicates in view of subject-predicate. The first, subject-predicate, is treated toward the end of Plato’s Sophist and might be called the issue of “logical form”, or the Eleatic Stranger’s disentanglement of the form of logos; the second is an issue of what Plato’s Parmenides, or even Parmenides himself, might recognise as “logical space”, not a space “within which” existence is possible, but a space by which the terms of existence are manifest.
Penton’s fiction and his later life enact a dialectic between “will” and “fate”, and of what self-displacements this dialectic entails. Time is an issue brought to the surface because neither “will” nor “fate” can cancel the other out. The Kierkegaardian formulations of dread and despair are highly developed here since life at any point is indeterminate irrespective of the determinate structures into which it appears to crystallise. Moral anxiety is the form of indeterminacy that characterises a life as it pursues its ends oblivious of the forms of existence these ends produce—so Derek Cabell, in Landtakers. Historical anxiety finds individuals embedded in national environments against which individuality itself is imperilled; life vanishes behind such survival tactics as self-corrosive doublethink—so James Cabell in Inheritors. Fictional anxiety requires an individual to create a life sui generis even in the face of crippling insufficiency—so Bob Cash in Penton’s unpublished Third Novel. Aesthetic anxiety traps the self in acts of self-control that paradoxically betray and dissolve that self—so Derek Cash in the Third Novel, and so also, Penton in his own life.