Humanities and Social Sciences

Philosophy Program

Staff Profiles

Background

• undergraduate at Melbourne University, and my postgraduate Oxford (B.Phil '66)
  
• joined La Trobe University as a foundation staff member in October 1966 (five months before the first lecture was given, in early March, 1967)
  
• I have been lucky enough to work in a philosophy department surrounded by excellent colleagues in an atmosphere combining high professionalism and real collegiality.
  
• always worked in the general area of analytic philosophy, broadly construed, and within this field have tended to be a generalist, maintaining an interest in developments in a broad range of the traditional sub-disciplines. (This has had its positive aspects, but it proved to be an error not to specialise more.)
  
• served over many years in the 1980s and 1990s on the Executive of the La Trobe University Staff Association – later reincarnated as the La Trobe University Branch of the NTEU – as an ordinary member, as Secretary (for four years) and as President (for six years)
  
• member of Council of the Australasian Association of Philosophy since 2000 - for the last three years have been secretary to Council
  
• occasionally show up as I.T. Oakley, as Tim, the name by which I am generally known, is in fact my second given name

Research Interests

• My main research interests have for some time been in two somewhat disparate areas: epistemology and the meaning of life. Another topic of some interest has been the area of moral psychology dealing with such ‘self-regarding emotions' as self respect and self esteem.
  
• A thread running though my work in epistemology has been a conviction that sceptics, especially sceptics about justified or rational belief, have got something right, and that most anti-sceptics are missing an important truth.
  
• My work on the meaning of life issue has centered on the role of a person's value commitments in their life, and the ways in which they may be undermined. In this connection, I have been very interested in the realism/irrealism debate in metaethics, and views about the outcome of coming to one conclusion or another on this issue.

Teaching

• I have taught units on ethics, epistemology, history and philosophy of science (the Copernican revolution), the empiricists, philosophical logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, and the meaning of life.
  
• I have written a study guide, Values and the Meaning of Life for the Open Learning Philosophy Subject of the same name. (1996, Monash University Distance Education Centre; revised and enlarged second edition, 2002) I have coordinated the teaching of this Open Learning subject from La Trobe since 1994.
  
• I have also been deeply involved with the development of cross-campus teaching of philosophy subjects by various electronic and other means.

Selected Publications

2005: 'D.A.T. Gasking': entry in The Dictionary of 20th Century British Philosophers, London, Thoemmes, (co-authored with L.J. O'Neill).

2002: "An Argument for Scepticism Concerning Justified Belief" in Huemer, M. (ed.) Epistemology, Contemporary Readings, Routledge. (previously published in the American Philosophical Quarterly, 13:3, July 1976).

2001: "A Sceptic's reply to Lewisian Contextualism" The Canadian Journal of Philosophy, (vol. 31, no. 3, pp. 309-332).

1998: "The Invalidation of Induction" Australasian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 76 No. 3, September 1998.

1996: Language Logic and Causation: philosophical Writings of Douglas Gasking. (Co-edited with L.J. O'Neill) Melbourne University Press.

1994: Reason and Argument (with R.G. Phillips) Monash Distance Education Centre) (2nd revised edition 1996).

1988: "Scepticism and the Diversity of Epistemic Justification" The Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 38, nr 152, July 1988.