Genevieve Lloyd
Genevieve Lloyd is a graduate of the University of Sydney and holds the degrees of B.Phil and D.Phil of the University of Oxford. She is an Emeritus Professor in Philosophy at the University of NSW, and a fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She taught Philosophy at the ANU from 1967 to 1987 and was Professor of Philosophy at the University of NSW from 1987 to 2001.
Her most recent books are Reading Spinoza in the Anthropocene (EUP: 2024) and ‘Land and Country: Rethinking Identity on a Changing Planet’(Bloomsbury: forthcoming, 2026).
Why did you initially study philosophy?
What attracted you to it?
I didn’t actually know what it was. So, I can't say I was attracted to do the academic subject, philosophy. It was more that there was a certain kind of question which I used to think about a lot. And I never knew quite what made those questions different. But they arose for me in some way out of my religious education. That sounds a bit bizarre, I know. But it’s not irrelevant to the history of philosophy in Australia. At that time, in the early 1950s, schools in Australia—unless perhaps they were some very elite kind of private school—had little idea what philosophy was. What made my background different in relation to philosophy was that I’d been through a very ordinary Catholic school; and in that education it wasn't unusual to get some understanding of philosophical questions, though that came out of a very restrictive context. We did study – or at least listen to people talking about – what was called ‘apologetics’. It was rightly so called because the philosophical issues came up in the context of defending the faith – e.g. proving that God existed. So, it was a very distorted understanding, of course, of what philosophy was or could be. But it did mean that those of us who went through that sort of education at least had some minimal understanding of philosophical questions.
I remember when I went to Oxford in the mid-1960s, Elizabeth Anscombe asked me why, at that stage, so many of the students who came from Australia to study graduate philosophy were Catholics. I was rather surprised to learn that they were. But it was true. I remember my response was that we did get some understanding of philosophy out of our school education, which was unusual in those days. There was no general intellectual culture around philosophy in Australia.
I did though have a proneness to consider philosophical issues. I can remember when I was about 12—again, in the context of Catholic education—I was sitting in a very boring classroom with a very dictatorial style of teaching, listening to a nun giving one of her moral sermons. And she said that time is so precious that God only gives it to us drop by drop. Rather than absorbing the moral lesson about not wasting time, I found myself thinking: how else could God give us time?
Most kids do think philosophically. Most adults grow out of it, but some people don’t. For me there was a combination of circumstances, including having that very restricted kind of Catholic education. But the other part of the context, which is relevant, was that given what Catholicism was at the time, I already had some inkling that philosophy was connected somehow with theology. But I didn’t really know what either of them was.
I went to a Catholic Girls School, and it was very unusual for anyone from my school to have gone on to university. I can only think of one girl I knew, who was a couple of years ahead of me. It was all the more unusual if you were female. But when I did go, I had to work during the day and go to university at night. I had a scholarship but no living allowance. That meant that I was restricted in the subjects I could take. I could do philosophy as an ‘evening student’, but I couldn’t have done Honours in Philosophy that way. My interest in doing philosophy at Honours level developed later.
Adrian Walsh: Were you at Sydney then?
I only ask because if you were from a Catholic background, and there were notorious atheists at Sydney back then.
Well, that’s right. I knew at the time that Catholics did not study philosophy at Sydney University because that was public knowledge. Of course, it was a den of atheists and John Anderson was the devil for Catholics. So, for a while I went, not formally, to some classes at the Aquinas Academy in Sydney, which was where you went if you wanted to know more about philosophy if you were Catholic. So, I tried that out and it was weird.
Dr Woodbury would prowl around the class reciting from Aquinas and getting people to recite back. They were very charismatic people. They glowed with enthusiasm. But it was also very dictatorial. It was just dictation. Anyway, that didn’t grow on me.
Tony Coady was three years I think ahead of me, so he had just finished his honours year when I was thinking of doing my first year in philosophy, having not done it in my first year at university. As an evening student I had to spread my first year over two years. Tony was also an evening student. And from just being around Tony and hearing him talk about philosophy with such enthusiasm—not in the Dr Woodbury sort of way—I thought, well, that’s where I should be. That’s what I should be doing. So it was through Tony that I came to think it was worth trying out philosophy.
My answer to the question has been rather long-winded. I don’t think I knew enough about philosophy to be attracted to doing it as an academic subject. That just evolved over time. I guess it didn’t really satisfy me at all for the first three years of my studying it. I just couldn’t quite work out why I was so committed to it. It’s relevant to the history of philosophy of Australia, not just to me. I did my first year in philosophy the first year after Anderson stopped teaching. But Anderson’s shadow was still very much over the philosophy department in Sydney. It wasn’t a den of atheists or evil people, but it was associated with ‘the Sydney Push’. I was never actually part of the Push, but I was around it. And philosophy was part of the Push scene. It was a very interesting time. But for my first few years I think the Philosophy department was in the doldrums. Anderson was gone, but nothing else had yet happened. It was very fragmented, and it was weird trying to piece together quite what [philosophy] was.
AW: Who was there then?
Tom Rose, Milo Roxon, Ruth Walker. I was taught logic by Annette Baier. Kurt Baier was in Melbourne. Annette was in a junior position, teaching logic and she was very good at it.
Edward Kamara was the most exotic of them, I guess. He taught [a class on] Hegel. And Alan Stout was the Professor of Moral Philosophy. For me it wasn't exactly a stimulating environment.
In my final year, however, things started to come together very much for me because there was a group of young graduates who came back to Australia after having studied at Oxford, some of them Wittgensteinian. It was a breath of fresh air, exciting and really absorbing. Bill Ginnane was one of the biggest influences on me at that stage. He had got his Wittgenstein through Camo Jackson in Melbourne before going to Oxford. There was also Kim Lycos.
What is philosophy?
How might we define or understand the nature of the problems explored? Why does it matter?
I've never been able to define philosophy. I still really don’t know – any more than I did at the beginning – but I know a philosophical question when I see one. I’ve come to think increasingly – although I thought it somehow right from the beginning – that it’s an art of exercising imagination in a contemplative way addressed to conceptual issues. Where I’m most identified with it, it’s a kind of thinking that allows you to get beneath the surface of a lot of assumptions that structure thought patterns – the way we perceive questions about the world, about politics – and to be able to see that there are alternative ways of thinking. It is not just thinking about specific topics. It is about alternative ways of thinking. And I came to know that —though I would never have been able to articulate it at the time—in my honours year in philosophy at the University of Sydney. It came through being introduced by Bill Ginnane and Kim Lycos to Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations. It was Kim’s first year teaching in Australia. He was a graduate from the University of Sydney, who knew Bill in Oxford, and came to a job at the University of New South Wales, the same time Bill came to the University of Sydney. Together they taught a fourth-year honours course that I took at the University of Sydney on the Philosophical Investigations.
There were other philosophers who came back from Oxford at a similar time. Bill Bonney was one, Michael Bradley was another. They also talked about Wittgenstein, but it was more from the angle of the philosophy of language rather than Camo Jackson’s kind of Wittgenstein.
I just fell in love with the Philosophical Investigations. I thought it was exciting, magical. It posed the idea of being able to show that philosophers often thought through very misleading pictures about basic concepts. The ‘beetle in the box’ was a way of thinking of thoughts. Why would you think of it that way? There are so many other ways in which you can think of it.
I didn’t see it at the time as having anything much to do with politics. But, as the years went on, I thought that this way of doing philosophy involves a form of social critique. It is a way of getting to grips with the assumptions that underlie the way we commonly think about things and bring those things to the surface so that you can see that those ways of thinking can be changed.
Adrian: So, the point is that what we often regard as necessary is actually contingent and that inevitably has social implications. Wittgenstein somewhere says (in Philosophical Investigations), that “A philosophical problem has the form: “I don't know my way about”.
Yes, exactly. I love that. I knew that feeling and then I loved finding my way about.
AW: This is a good segue into The Man of Reason.
Well, the book came out of that. It was a way of challenging the maleness of philosophy that the philosophers themselves didn’t even know was there. Feminists later would call it ‘cognitive dissonance’. But I remember—and I must have been going through this experience for years, when I was at ANU, I went to every possible seminar, not just in the School of General Studies where I was teaching, but in the Research School, and there were all these visiting philosophers—and there came a moment when I actually realised what cognitive dissonance was. I was sitting through one of these talks from an Oxford visiting fellow. He was my original Man of Reason. He was droning on about Aristotle’s ‘Magnificent Man’, in a pompous voice. That was the picture of philosophy. And I was sitting there thinking, what would it be for a woman to be that– megalopsychos–greatness of soul? It didn’t fit at all. You just couldn't imagine it. No woman could be like that. So that just started me thinking about maleness and philosophy.
Adrian: Why do you think no woman could be like that?
It would be unimaginable. I spent the rest of that lecture just trying to think through what it would it be to imagine a woman who fitted the description. And here was a male philosopher implicitly claiming that the ideal philosopher was the archetype of Aristotle’s man of reason. That was the gist of the paper. So my next thought was: is a woman not supposed to be a philosopher? I started playing around with that.
The way the book then happened was due to another visitor who came to Canberra, Jonathan Rée. He had just become editor of a series of books for Methuen; and he asked if there was anything I had in mind to write. I had already given a talk – a painful experience – on ‘The Man of Reason’ at an AAP conference in Adelaide, which was not received very well. I told him I had this possible book in mind, which would be about how I saw maleness and philosophy. He ran with it and fought for it, because Methuen was not particularly keen on running with it; no one was particularly keen on running with the idea.
AW: It was very, very influential, obviously.
Surprisingly influential. It wasn’t always influential in the way that I wanted it to be, or in a positive way. It didn’t really help my reputation a great deal.
Yet the Man of Reason really for me came out of Wittgenstein, because it was to do with imagination and the way philosophers could have a flawed imagination when they think they're being totally intellectual. It came also out of thinking about traditional ways in which philosophers have dealt with the relations between reason, imagination and emotion. When I came to look back on the Man of Reason, even just a couple of years after writing it, I realised that I didn't really know what I was doing at the time I wrote it. There weren't any available models then for what I was doing. But I was, without knowing it, ‘deconstructing’ the male-female distinction.
Question 3:
Who were some of the philosophers who most influenced you – either directly through personal interactions in seminars and classrooms or indirectly through their writings?
Well certainly Wittgenstein. Bill Ginnane and Kim Lycos were enormous influences on me; it was mainly through that initial exposure to Wittgenstein, and the way they did philosophy in that Wittgensteinian mode. Bill was probably much more like Cammo Jackson, I think. He was more ponderous. And Kim would talk very fast. They both would hammer away at questions and draw students in. It was just marvellous.
Elizabeth Anscombe certainly was an influence. Before I arrived at Oxford, I had read Intention. I knew that she was into Wittgenstein. It’s a bit weird, I know, but I already was thinking of her as a rare female model for how philosophy could be done.
Adrian: There weren't many models then for women. Recently a book titled The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics was released.
Yes, and there is also Metaphysical Animals. They're different, but they come together very well. The contrasts between them tell its own story. The one written by Clare MacCumhaill and Rachael Wiseman has much more emphasis on gender than the other. But The Women Are Up to Something is informed and respectful; it’s a significant book. It follows up Philippa Foot’s later influence on American moral philosophy. Whereas Metaphysical Animals is really all about the Oxford friendships. So, it stops when they leave Oxford. Anyway, they’re very different books, and yet they do converge and they do raise important issues. The responses to those two books really enact again a lot of the disputes within Australian philosophy.
AW: About Continental Philosophy?
Yes, though the books are not about the division between continental and analytic philosophy. The disaffection of those women is with the emerging style of Oxford philosophy – with the narrowing of the subject matter, the professionalising of the discipline, the focus on the policing of meaning. There are ways in which that resonates very strongly with the disaffection that I and other women had with Australian philosophy later in the 1970s and 1980s. So, I want to draw out those connections while also saying there are also, of course, enormous differences. It would be wrong to try to tell one story through the other, but it does play into the way things developed in Australasian philosophy. One interesting thing is that analytical philosophers are now interested in the history of analytical philosophy. I think that is an enormous breakthrough. It was a contingent and important development. The unfortunate division between ‘analytic’ and ‘continental did not have to happen in the way that it did.
AW: The Man of Reason had a tremendous influence across Australian philosophy. You were also the first woman professor of philosophy in Australia. Were you aware of the importance of that at the time?
Yes, I was aware of it. I managed to hold some doors ajar, while other women slipped through those doors and then went on, to my great pleasure, to do something entirely different from what I do in philosophy. But there were certain costs to doing what I had done.
Elizabeth Anscombe, to me, was a role model. Not that she personally took much interest in me, but she really was, in a good sense, a role model. And while there were other women too, because of her and the Wittgenstein connection, I was able to think: yes, I could be a woman doing philosophy. She was prepared to be eccentric, and she was prepared to deal with a lot of pretty sexist stuff, without being beaten down by it all. I really admired her and still do.
What were the central topics in philosophy when you first studied philosophy?
Have those changed?
Have your views on what matters in philosophy changed?
I think there’s a continuity in topics. But there has been change in how questions are raised –_ the style, the kind of thinking. As for what matters in philosophy, I think one thing that has changed – under the force of circumstances, of course— is that philosophy is forced to justify itself. I don’t think that is entirely a bad thing. But I don’t think the issue has been taken seriously enough.
What was the understanding of the social and political role of philosophy when you first studied?
How has that changed?
What do you think it should be?
I don't think anyone much thought about it when I started doing philosophy, even at the time when I was undertaking graduate studies. But certainly, by the time I was a Professor of Philosophy, I thought it was a very serious and important question, and I tried to address it. What struck me was that philosophy wasn’t going to survive if it didn’t manage to articulate a social role for itself. The funding issues were such that it was just going to die away. To the extent that it was addressed in the mid 1980s—the period when I came to the University of New South Wales— philosophers’ collective attitude, in general, was that we shouldn’t be expected to justify the value of philosophy. That would be to demean philosophy. Philosophy somehow was supposed to speak for itself. Its importance was self-authenticating.
I remember addressing this in a seminar of Honours students at the University of New South Wales and discussing with them, “What do you think about the question of whether philosophy should be justified?”. I suggested that if they were going to go on and study philosophy seriously, then they must be able to justify taxpayers’ money being given to that. That didn’t mean that they had to buy into questions about narrow social utility. It’s perfectly legitimate to say it has value in itself, for the kind of thinking it is. But then you have to take the next step of saying why that matters. That question regarding why such an inquiry should be funded, why it should exist, why it should be taken seriously—to my mind, at that stage—was not by and large taken seriously by philosophers. It was an unusual thing to say that philosophy must be justified. At that stage I was on a lot of committees, including the ARC, and it was common for the application forms to ask why a project matters for Australian society, by and large,–in fact, pretty much universally–philosophy applicants didn’t take the question seriously at all.
There has been a change in how the question of the social and political role of philosophy is understood. But I think in some ways it remains true that philosophers don't really think about that as a question that they ought to have to address. Things have changed a lot, I know, but you still get that defensive attitude: “Of course, you know, philosophy is the paradigm of something that ought to be done because it's so important”. But it’s never really articulated just what that value is.
As to what I think the value of it is, I think it is to do with the power of social critique: being able to think of things as contingent rather than necessary, and being able to imagine alternatives to the way things are.
AW: I suppose there was the applied turn, which is just slightly different from the way you're putting it, which is social critique.
Applied philosophy? I think there’s some wonderful work that’s been done under that label. But the label itself still puzzles me. What is it exactly to ‘apply’ philosophy? I think in some way the very concept of ‘applied’ here is part of the heritage of the influence of what came to be known as analytical philosophy. The idea that there is this structure of thought, which has access to the way things really are, and that that structure can also be ‘applied’. But why not just say it’s all simply philosophy?
How do you think philosophers should deal with the problems they discuss?
What should be at the heart of philosophical method?
What are the proper limits of philosophical inquiry? [N.B. These two questions were asked as a pair]
I don't think there is any one method of philosophy that philosophers should pursue. As for limits. I don’t think there are any limits. The way I think about philosophy, that question doesn't make a lot of sense.
AW: I guess some people might claim “Well, here’s a philosophical question, and here’s an empirical question and the latter is not philosophy.”
I think philosophers who work with scientists know their science. They’re working on conceptual aspects of a project. They’re bringing conceptual skills to bear in an area of science, and that is enriching the science. There is no longer a very sharp distinction between philosophy and what is empirical, and I think that’s good.
Adrian: If you go back to the 1960s, and you read somebody like John Hospers, there was in the mind of those writers a very clear sense of what philosophers do. It’s quite striking. Hospers provides a very clear demarcation line between what philosophers do and what scientists do.
I’d never give Hospers to a first-year student. I don’t think there are any limits that should be placed on philosophy. I have an approach to philosophy, but I don’t think of it as something that other people should be doing instead of what they’re doing. When I was supervising graduate students, I was never interested in forming a school and didn’t try to. Sure, the students learned things from me, and then they went off and did their own thing, and that was great.
AW: But there have been times when philosophers set up a clear method and would say “this is what you do when you do philosophy”.
Well, of course. I mean, Sydney University in the past has been full of those disputes about what philosophy is. But my answer to the question, how do you think philosophers should deal with the problems of philosophy, is that it’s not up to me to tell them. In my experience, though, some of those philosophers think that I myself should be doing something different from what I am doing.
To be fair, I do reflect on how I do philosophy. And I suppose that’s a meta-thing, a meta-philosophy of sorts. Is that a meta question? I'm not sure. I think it’s integral. You can’t really separate these things out. Think of the comparison with, say, historiography and history, I can see there’s a real distinction between doing the history and reflecting on the conceptual basis of the way you do history. So, there’s a distinction between history and historiography. The relation between philosophy and history of philosophy is a very vexed question. But philosophy has never really taken seriously the question of its own relation to the history of philosophy. Sure, it’s starting to change now. But there’s still no great interest among philosophers in the meta-questions about how to deal with the history of philosophy.
My question is always, “well, what exactly are you applying and why do you have to apply it before you get to consider the context in which the issue arises?” I feel the same thing about meta philosophy. It ascends into another level. But, somehow, it’s supposed to leave philosophy intact as this independent structure of thought which has a privileged access to reality.
Is there anything distinctive about Australasian Philosophy?
Is there an Australian way of doing philosophy?
I think it’s as silly as talking about Australian identity; trying to define it. David Armstrong used to claim that there was such a thing as Australian philosophy. It was supposed to be robust and earthy. I think that’s as silly as talking about, or trying to define, an Australian identity.
Have you seen any change in the way philosophy and philosophical questions have been approached in Australasia over the last 100 years?
Oh yes, but either too many to list or not enough to capture it with general categories.
I mean one could say that the development of a strong strand of so-called Continental Philosophy in Australia is a new approach. But given that I’m questioning the whole distinction between Continental and Analytic, that might not mean much.
If I had to say what is the difference of approach [over the past 100 years], I guess I would just fall back on saying that there are refreshing, positive developments. One of these is the strengthening of interdisciplinary connections, especially with the work that is going on in philosophy of mind and neurobiology. That’s a difference in approach which I think is a more integrated approach of philosophy; it’s not just interdisciplinary, it’s creating a new way of doing things, which is bringing the conceptual skills of philosophers to engage at a deeper level with the empirical stuff. So it’s the opposite end of the spectrum from what you described in Hospers. There’s no longer a clear distinction between what's empirical and what's philosophical and I think that is a positive development.
AW: Would Peter Godfrey-Smith’s work be an example of what you have in mind?
Exactly. I was thinking of that. It’s interesting stuff. And it’s not irrelevant that he’s the philosopher that he is. But that is a new approach for philosophers. You just get out and dive and talk about octopi and let the philosophical issues emerge. I think that’s a wonderful development. And it's got nothing to do with the distinction between analytic and continental.
In some sense—while I don’t like the label—applied philosophy is also a new development. It was a change in how philosophers approach issues. There’s also more engagement with literature and the arts. Once we just thought of aesthetics as a branch of philosophy, but now there's philosophical engagement with all sorts of stuff. And it's right to call that work ‘philosophical’. It’s a rich intellectual development. However, I think at that point we lose our grip on which bits of it are philosophy. There is conceptually rich work in those areas coming from some who have a philosophically informed background. But I don't think of it as a new approach within philosophy. Rather, I think of it as a new intellectual development, in which philosophy loses its sharp borders.
One other new development, that I mentioned before, is that self-styled analytical philosophers are now taking a serious interest in the history of analytical philosophy. That is very welcome. It’s a fresh approach, because in the past it was almost as if they thought that the way they did philosophy was timeless, yet reaching back somehow in a clear trajectory, say, to Aristotle.
AW: I can remember myself going back to teaching a unit in Hegel. And I’d been taught Hegel by Marxists. Then I taught in a unit where we taught Hegel, Rousseau, Marx, and Mill. And the thing that was striking about it was that Hegel was much more grounded than those Marxists would have had us believe. If you read The Philosophy of Right, rather than the Phenomenology, it’s striking how grounded he is in things like property rights and social institutions. And that was sort of surprising given the way that we were taught.
Think also of the way we were taught Hume. Ridiculous. I mean, you have this rich and wonderful text, and you just get these idiotic statements pulled out of it as a ‘theory’ of reason and the passions. I think it's appropriate to read texts in the history of philosophy as if you're dealing with a literary text, and you look at the literary strategies that are employed. You take seriously that these texts are pieces of writing and that there are contexts to the ways they are written. They have intellectual contexts of the way they are written. You shouldn’t just mine a rich text to extract nuggets of supposed falsehood.
What, in your view, will the next 100 years bring for Australasian Philosophy?
I don’t have much optimism about the next hundred years for philosophy, humanities, or universities. But I do have some hopes, and again this is still just talking from within my own approach to philosophy. I would like to see philosophy seriously ask, for example, what it might be to engage with Indigenous knowledge. I would like to see a wide range of diverse styles and approaches to philosophy be recognised and encompassed in a philosophical practice that takes seriously the multicultural character of Australia, rather than the very Anglo way it has been taught in the past. I would like to see it reflect the diversity of multicultural Australia.
I would especially like to see the issue of decolonizing Australian philosophy taken very seriously by philosophers. It’s something that is going to be demanded of philosophers. The Academy of Humanities has a program—a strategy—underway for decolonizing humanities disciplines, and the various Sections are being asked to review what they should be doing in that direction. I think I can imagine how philosophers are going to react. They’ll say there is no such thing as Indigenous philosophy. And my question is, “What would have to change about the practice of philosophy to take Indigenous knowledge seriously?” Australian philosophers seem to think they can’t be expected to engage seriously with Indigenous ways of knowing. That may be because the idea has taken hold that Indigenous knowledge is myth, mere storytelling. So, it’s seen as just an exercise of imagination – almost as if it has been left behind in a prehistory of philosophy. I don’t think it has to be seen that way.
Adrian: And what you mean by decolonising, is to take seriously Indigenous knowledge.
Yes. There was a Saunders Memorial Lecture this year [2022] by Bryan Mukandi. It was a fascinating lecture. "Normal and the White Fantastic: When will things go back to normal?” he called it. The point that emerged along the way was that he was giving the lecture by telling stories about himself, about the kind of conversations he had with other Australians. I found it striking that David Rutledge opened the discussion by saying how intrigued he was that Bryan Mukandi gave that whole talk by telling stories.
I was left with the question, “how would Australian philosophy have to change for storytelling to be taken seriously as a way of doing philosophy?” Now, I’m sure a lot of philosophers say, “well, that’s just mad. It's got nothing to do with philosophy. It’s different.” But why do we think that? If storytelling is a serious intellectual engagement, then why would one say it’s ‘just’ ‘myth?
I think it would be wonderful for students today to be part of projects decolonizing Australia, including Australian philosophy. I look forward to that becoming a reality. I look forward to a time where we no longer think of Indigenous ways of knowing as just the prehistory of serious knowledge. How would philosophy have to change? There’s no one simple answer to that question. There could be some very romantic and sentimental answers to it that go nowhere. But I think it is a serious issue.