Paul R. Patton

Patton received a B.A. and M.A. from the University of Sydney, and, in 1979, received a Doctorat D'Universite from Paris VIII (Vincennes). Before he took up his professorship at University of New South Wales, Patton lectured at the Australian National University, in Canberra, Australia, and the University of Sydney. Patton is a member of the Australasian Association of Philosophy.

Patton has published widely on aspects of 20th-century French philosophy. Including focus on the works of Deleuze, Derrida and Foucault.

Patton’s philosophical career is pre-occupied by the twin tasks of, on one hand, critically analysing and bringing out the nuances of the modern European philosophical tradition and situating it within its broader social and political milieu; and, on the other, drawing out the implications of the philosophical tradition and thought for our present social, political and legal circumstances. One specific tangent of Patton’s work has been to undertake an incisive analysis of how both the liberal political tradition and post-structuralist approaches to political philosophy have implications for contemporary local social and political struggles. For example, Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, which he co-edited with Duncan Ivison and Will Sanders in 2000, reveals the ambiguous nature of political theory: while political theory has been at the centre of the past subjugation of indigenous people and their continued disadvantage, it also lends clarity and coherence to the indigenous people’s struggles for justice and autonomy.

Patton also makes a significant contribution to the enduring problem of indigenous reconciliation which he attributes to the failure of the Anglo-Australian legal system to “translate” the indigenous spiritual and economic conceptions and also “relations to the land into a form of property right recognisable by the common law”[1]

Patton’s work analyses how the thought and ideas emanating from the European philosophical tradition can be applied to the contemporary social and political issues of how and what does the exercise of political power and sovereignty by contemporary liberal democratic state say about the political status of Indigenous people. In this way, Patton has enabled the Western philosophical tradition to speak directly to Australia and other settler societies. By delineating the complexities that arise with the establishment of colonies in countries such as Australia, United States, Canada and New Zealand, Patton’s work has instigated critical conversations whose trajectory has seen both the insertion of these countries into the postcolonial canon and also the perceptive insights that western political thought have cast on postcolonial thought. Colonialism as “a stark expression of the external power of sovereign European states” was made possible by “[t]he absence, in the new land, of equivalent forms of state” and also the perceptions of backwardness of the indigenous populations which was “considered sufficient justification for the imposition of sovereign power.” [2] The fact that these countries have become liberal democratic states despite the impoverished living conditions of the indigenous people highlights how the putative promises of equality and justice of all citizens remains mired in ambiguities. As such, the pluralism that underpins the policy of multiculturalism in those countries is betrayed.

In 2011, with Duncan Ivison (University of Sydney) and Nikolas Kompridis (University of Western Sydney), Patton established the Sydney Political Theory Workshop (SPTW), a collaborative network of scholars with a shared interest in philosophy/political theory in the Sydney region. The aim of the workshops was “to create a collaborative and dynamic community of scholars working in the area and to provide a venue for innovative and exciting work to be discussed” while also having a focus on postgraduate students working in philosophy/political theory with the aim to provide them with a venue “to participate in colloquia and have the chance to meet and work with leading figures in the field.”[3] The workshop convened a series of symposia and conferences and master classes that brought together renowned political philosophers from around the world and PhD candidates from numerous universities in Sydney.

Between 2000 and 2006, Patton appeared in a number of ABC radio broadcasts, including 'The Descent of Man,' on ABC Radio National's Science Show in 2000, 'Deleuze and Democracy' in 2005,[4] and 'Where philosophy gets done' in 2006,[5] both on the show 'The Philosopher's Zone'.

In 1994 and 1997 Patton was a Visiting Fellow at the Humanities Research Centre, at Australian National University. In 2005, he was a Visiting Fellow of the Scots Philosophical Society, at the University of Dundee in Scotland.

Awards

For his outstanding performance in teaching PhD supervision, Patton has the following awards:

• 2011 Vice-Chancellors Award for Teaching Excellence in Postgraduate Research Supervision Faculty of Social Science;
• 2010 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Dean’s Award for Excellence in Postgraduate Research Supervision;
• Awarded the 2010 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences’ Best Doctoral Thesis Prize for the thesis Deleuze, History and Becoming by Craig Lundy;
• Awarded the 2009 Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences’ Best Doctoral Thesis Prize for the thesis The Ontological Priority of Events in Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense by Sean Bowden.[6]

• Australasian Society for Continental Philosophy

• Patton at UNSW
• Australasian Association of Philosophy Expert Pages: Paul Patton. (Accessed 28 Oct 2007).
• Paul Patton's home page at UNSW. (Accessed 13 January 2014).
• Philosophy Compass, Paul Patton page. (Accessed 28 Oct 2007).