Stewart Candlish

Biography

Stewart Candlish is a philosopher whose work has brought him wide recognition, both in Australia and internationally. He has contributed to areas in and around the philosophy of mind, such as action and the will, mental imagery, first-person knowledge of position and movement, and the methodology of psychology, but his most sustained and important work is in the history of 20th century philosophy, with seminal articles on F. H. Bradley, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, In particular, his discussions of Bradley and Russell, especially his book The Russell/Bradley Dispute and its Significance for Twentieth-Century Philosophy (Palgrave Macmillan 2007, 2nd ed 2009), have done much to debunk the orthodox, and quite misleading, account of the rise of analytical philosophy. From this work he has shown that philosophers must take seriously a previously ignored theory of truth, now dubbed the Identity Theory, which has since become one of the standard theories of truth discussed in textbooks. He has held visiting research positions at Clare Hall, Cambridge, Darwin College, Cambridge, and the Australian National University; was President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy 2004–05; and was editor of Australasian Journal of Philosophy 2007–13. In 2022 his history of AJP was published in its centenary volume.