Biography

Retirement is a time for reminiscing. So here goes.

My first philosophical thoughts came at age 8 when my cousin and I were trying to find two clover leafs that were exactly the same. It gradually dawned on me that our search was futile since no two objects, clover leafs or whatever, could be exactly the same, i.e., have all their properties – including being in the same place at the same time – in common. As I learned later, I had discovered Leibniz's Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles for myself.

Since that time, much of my thinking has centered on issues to do with the modal distinctions between what must be the case (e.g., that 2 objects must have dissimilar properties), what cannot be the case (e.g., that 2 objects cannot have all the same properties), and what is merely contingent (e.g., that no two clover leafs that we could find even looked alike when viewed up close).

At age 10, modal issues raised their head again in the form of problems about God's foreknowledge and my freedom: How could I do other than what God knew I would do? Reading the volumes of systematic theology that had been bequeathed to me didn't help with that one. Neither did it help answer a question which continued to haunt me throughout my teen-age years, and eventually helped lead to the abandonment of my faith: How is it possible for a perfectly good God knowingly to create an evil world?

In pursuit of these questions I started reading what philosophers, rather than theologians, had to say. And thus, as a part-time student at Auckland University College, I was drawn into the study of Philosophy. Not surprisingly, my subsequent Ph.D. thesis at the Australian National University (1955-57) was entitled Free Will and Logic. An exploration of the various senses of the expression "could not have been otherwise", it led me into an investigation of modal logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, ethics, legal philosophy, and philosophy of physics (quantum indeterminacy, and all that). The upshot was eleven publications between 1958 and 1963 in journals such as Mind, The Australasian Journal of Philosophy, and The British Journal for Philosophy of Science.

Then came the first of two ventures in philosophy of mathematics, a paper in The Philosophical Review (1964) arguing that the propositions of pure Euclidean geometry, as opposed to its physical interpretation, are noncontingent and hence, if true, necessarily so. That led to exchanges with John Mackie (at that time a radical empiricist in Mill's tradition) and eventually, in 1971, to a paper in Nous, co-authored with a young colleague, Malcolm Rennie, arguing that the propositions of pure arithmetic are likewise noncontingent and nonempirical.

Back in the sixties, mobility in the academic world was a commonplace, not the rarity it is these days. Prior to becoming Professor and Head of Philosophy at my old campus, by then known as The University of Auckland, in 1964, I had taught at the University of New South Wales in Sydney for three years, at Oxford's Merton College for part of a year, and then at Canberra's Australian National University for two years.

By the time I went to Simon Fraser University in 1970 my interests had shifted to philosophical logic and a defense of the centrality of modal notions in logic. Hence the book, with Norman Swartz, Possible Worlds (1979), an attempt to bring modal intuitions to the forefront in the teaching of logic.

Prior to that, in the late sixties, I had occasion to attend a lecture by Saul Kripke and to remark to him afterwards that several of his views on modal matters reminded me of the early Wittgenstein's. The upshot of that was a number of papers – some of them in Dialogue, others in The Canadian Journal of Philosophy and The Australasian Journal of Philosophy – on the Tractatus, and eventually, after several drafts, my book The Nature of all Being (1992).


If philosophy has taught me anything, it is the need to be careful with concepts and the words we use to express them. If a distinction has been made, it probably needs to be observed. Among the crucial, time-honored, distinctions that I have defended since the late fifties are those between ontic and epistemic matters, between the way the world is and the way we believe it to be, between truth and verifiability, between plausibility and possibility, between revisability and falsity. Conflate them in the kinds of ways idealists, pragmatists, postmodernists, relativists, and other anti-realists are apt to do – usually in pursuit of some sort of "organic" world-view – and confusion, I believe, will inevitably ensue. That, at any rate, was the conclusion I came to during the period when, as an undergraduate, I fought my way out of the metaphysical morass I'd been trapped in during my studies of idealists such as Hegel, F. H. Bradley, J. M. E. McTaggart, and Brand Blanshard. And it is a conclusion I've come to regard as equally pertinent to the writings of some of today's most influential philosophers: the likes of Dummett, Rorty, and Quine. As a case in point, I argued in "A Refutation of Quine's Holism" that Quine's holistic image of the man-made fabric or web of knowledge and belief within which no statement is immune to revision runs rough-shod over most of these distinctions. His metaphor is captivating but confused; and it lends itself to adoption by each of the "... ists" listed above. Like the early Wittgenstein, I believe that whatever can be said at all can be said clearly. More generally, I have come to think that metaphor, while it may enhance our prose, seldom enhances our thinking.

In some respects my latest philosophical interests have circled back to their starting point: philosophical questions about the content of religious – especially Christian – belief. Only my perspective has changed: from ardent theist to unabashed atheist. In that capacity I have, over the years, participated in numerous debates with leading theists such as William L. Craig. See, for example, our 1994 debate, "Can a Loving God Send People to Hell?". And since retiring in 1996, I have written a number of articles in defence of a secularist viewpoint. Chief among these are: "A Moral Argument for Atheism","The Meaning of Life", "Design: by God or Evolution?", "The Rivalry of Religions", "From Fundamentalist to Freethinker", and "An Open Letter to Professor Antony Flew."

I have also returned recently to another of my early philosophical interests: the philosophical interpretation of quantum theory. In a paper, "Anti-Realism in Quantum Mechanics", presented to the Physics Department of the University of Auckland in 2000, I argued that the kind of antirealism that has become endemic in so many of the social sciences and among all those thinkers who call themselves Post-Modernists has also corroded the thinking of most current interpreters of quantum phyics. And, most recently, I have contributed four little papers to the Philosophy of Science section of a New Zealand website celebrating the 2005 International Year of Physics, with special attention to Einstein. These are: "Is everything relative, including Truth?", "Does God play dice with the Universe?", "Does the Moon exist only when someone is looking at it?", and "Did Einstein believe in God?".

Philosophy has been my intellectual passion, music my cultural passion, and skiing my physical one. After getting back into ski racing at the Masters level in my late 50s, it became my ambition to become not just a Canadian or US National Champion but an FIS World Champion for my age class. All of these I've now achieved, with over 60 medals in National and International events, including three World Championships in the speed event known as Super G.

But there are still more challenges to be met. There's a whole world of literature, science, art, and music that I want to explore more fully – to say nothing of the environs of the country of my birth, New Zealand, to which I have now returned in my retirement. And there's time I want to spend with my sons, with my wider family in New Zealand, and with close friends around the world. Retirement is giving me the chance to take pleasure in these, and many more delights, with renewed vigor and deeper appreciation.

The meaning of life, I firmly believe, lies in the richness of its present contents, not in the contents of some supposed sequel. After all, in what, I ask myself, would the meaning of a future life lie? "Its" sequel?

Contact Ray Bradley at: raybradley@xtra.co.nz