Paul Redding

Biography

Paul Redding was educated at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney where he is currently Emeritus Professor of Philosophy in the School of Humanities. He has worked mainly in the areas of the philosophy of Hegel and the broader tradition of what he calls “monadic” idealism stretching from Leibniz in the seventeenth century to various approaches within recent analytic and phenomenological (“continental”) forms of philosophizing. In particular, his research interests have included the relationship of idealism, understood in this way, to the analytic pragmatism of Richard Rorty and his followers as well as to the phenomenological hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Currently, his research pursues the origins of monadic idealism in the late dialogues of Plato, with a focus on the shaping of Plato’s conception of reasoning by Pythagorean mathematics and musical theory. The influence of this later Plato, as understood by the neo-Platonists, Leibniz and Hegel, provides an alternative path for the reception of Platonic ideas into the present from the more conventional Aristotelian account.