Damon Young

Last updated

Damon Young
Damon Young in 2007.jpg
Born1975 (age 4748)
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Era Contemporary philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
School Continental philosophy
Main interests
Aesthetics, Asian philosophy, Rights, Democracy, Spirituality, Environmental philosophy, Martial arts
Notable ideas
Philosophy of distraction

Damon Young (born 1975 in Melbourne, Victoria) is an Australian philosopher, writer and commentator, and author of the books Distraction, Philosophy in the Garden and How to Think About Exercise. [1] He is an Honorary Fellow in Philosophy at the University of Melbourne. [2]

Contents

Work

In 2013 Young won the Australasian Association of Philosophy's media prize for his public writing and broadcasting.

Young is the author of Distraction, an eclectic popular history of Western philosophy, focusing on themes such as attention to life and distraction from it, work, freedom and necessity. [3] [4] [5] The Australian called it lacking in precision, saying its "central proposition – that new information technologies distract us from our common existential challenge – is never thoroughly probed" [6] while London's Financial Times called it "lucid and optimistic". [7]

Philosophy in the Garden, published in Australia in December 2012, was described by The Australian as "fluent and stylish and never marred by cliches or cliched thinking". [8] It was published in the UK in April 2014 by Rider, an imprint of Random House, under the title Voltaire's Vine and Other Philosophies: How Gardens Inspired Great Writers. [9]

Young's columns, reviews and features have been published in The Age , The Sydney Morning Herald , The Australian, Herald Sun , BBC and ABC. [10] He has written poetry and fiction for Overland and Meanjin magazines.

Young regularly comments on radio, and has appeared on Channel 7 Sunrise and ABC TV. He was a regular panellist on ABC Radio National's Life Matters , a monthly guest on Mornings with Alan Brough on 774 ABC Melbourne, and was "philosopher-in-residence" on Afternoons with James Valentine on ABC Sydney 702, and "sports philosopher" with Francis Leach on 1116 SEN. [11]

Bibliography

Books

Articles

Poetry

Short fiction

Critical studies and reviews of Young's work

On Getting Off

———————

Notes and full bibliographic citations
  1. Young, Damon (2020). On getting off : sex and philosophy. Brunswick, Vic.: Scribe. ISBN   9781925849219.

Related Research Articles

Judith Arundell Wright was an Australian poet, environmentalist and campaigner for Aboriginal land rights. She was a recipient of the Christopher Brennan Award.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alex Miller (writer)</span> Australian novelist

Alexander McPhee Miller is an Australian novelist. Miller is twice winner of the Miles Franklin Award, in 1993 for The Ancestor Game and in 2003 for Journey to the Stone Country. He won the overall award for the Commonwealth Writer's Prize for The Ancestor Game in 1993. He is twice winner of the New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Christina Stead Prize for Conditions of Faith in 2001 and for Lovesong in 2011. In recognition of his impressive body of work and in particular for his novel Autumn Laing he was awarded the Melbourne Prize for Literature in 2012.

Melbourne University Publishing (MUP) is the book publishing arm of the University of Melbourne. The press is currently a member of the Association of University Presses.

Thelma Honora Forshaw or Thelma Korting was an Australian short story writer and journalist. In 1967 she published a largely autobiographical collection of short stories, An Affair of Clowns, in 1967. As a journalist she worked as a freelancer and book reviewer for The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, The Australian, The Bulletin, Meanjin, Nation, and Quadrant.

Beverley Anne Farmer was an Australian novelist and short story writer.

Sophie Cunningham is an Australian writer and editor based in Melbourne. She is the current Chair of the Board of the Australian Society of Authors, the national peak body representing Australian authors.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Edward Duyker</span> Australian historian, biographer and author (born 1955)

Edward Duyker is an Australian historian, biographer and author born in Melbourne.

Louise Adler is an Australian publisher. She was CEO of Melbourne University Publishing (MUP) from 2003 until 2019, when she became editor-at-large at Hachette Australia. In March 2022 she took up a three-year appointment as director of Adelaide Writers' Week, starting with the 2023 edition of the event.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">John Anderson (philosopher)</span> Scottish Australian philosopher (1893–1962)

John Anderson was a Scottish philosopher who occupied the post of Challis Professor of Philosophy at Sydney University from 1927 to 1958. He founded the empirical brand of philosophy known as Australian realism.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jeff Sparrow</span> Australian writer (born 1969)

Jeff Sparrow is an Australian left-wing writer, editor and former socialist activist based in Melbourne, Victoria. He is the co-author of Radical Melbourne: A Secret History and Radical Melbourne 2: The Enemy Within. He is also the author of Communism: A Love Story and Killing: Misadventures in Violence.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Leslie Cannold</span> Author, commentator, ethicist, and activist

Leslie Cannold is an Australian philosopher, ethicist, educationalist, writer, activist, and public intellectual.

Jennifer Mills is an Australian novelist, short story writer and poet.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Chris Flynn (author)</span> Australian author, editor and critic

Chris Flynn is an Australian author, editor and critic.

John Gordon Morrison was a British-born Australian novelist and short story writer.

Australian philosophy refers to the philosophical tradition of the people of Australia and of its citizens abroad. Academic philosophy has been mostly pursued in universities. It has been broadly in the tradition of Anglo-American analytic philosophy, but has also had representatives of a diverse range of other schools, such as idealism, Catholic neo-scholasticism, Marxism, and continental, feminist and Asian philosophy.

Ellen van Neerven is an Aboriginal Australian writer, educator and editor. They are queer and non-binary. Their first work of fiction, Heat and Light (2013), won several awards, and in 2019 Van Neerven won the Queensland Premier's Young Publishers and Writers Award. Their second collection of poetry, Throat (2020), won three awards at the 2021 New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards, including Book of the Year.

Stephen Kenneth Kelen, known as S. K. Kelen, is an Australian poet and educator. S. K. Kelen began publishing poetry in 1973, when he won a Poetry Australia contest for young poets and several of his poems were published in that journal.

Luke Carman is an Australian fiction writer and academic. He is known for his collection of semi-autobiographical stories, which is entitled An Elegant Young Man. The stories are set in Liverpool, Australia, a suburb outside Sydney. He has been called a post-grunge lit writer, a reference to an Australian literary genre from the 2000s which emerged following the 1990s grunge lit genre.

Criminal activity in New South Wales, Australia is combated by the New South Wales Police Force and the New South Wales court system, while statistics about crime are managed by the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research. Modern Australian states and cities, including New South Wales, have some of the lowest crime rates recorded globally with Australia ranked the 13th safest nation and Sydney ranked the 5th safest city globally. As of September 2018 the City of Penrith (475.7) and City of Blacktown (495.1). Rural areas have comparatively high crime rates per 100,000 with rural shires such as Walgett Shire (1350.3) and Moree Plains Shire (1236.2) having some of the highest violent crime rates in the state. The overall NSW crime rate has been in steady decline for many years.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bruce Grant (writer)</span> Australian journalist (1925–2022)

Bruce Alexander Grant was an Australian journalist, foreign correspondent, government advisor, diplomat, novelist and author of several books on Australian politics and foreign policy.

References

  1. Damon Young's website
  2. Damon Young's staff page at the University of Melbourne
  3. Boris Kelly, "Distraction" (Review), Overland, 23 February 2010, Overland.org Archived 13 July 2012 at archive.today
  4. Brad Frazier, "Review – Distraction", Metapsychology Online Reviews, 16 Feb 2010(Volume 14, Issue 7), Metapsychology.mentalhelp.net
  5. "Damon Young", Readings, Readings.com.au
  6. Luke Slattery, "On paying attention" (Review of Distraction: A Philosopher's Guide to Being Free by Damon Young), The Australian , 6 September 2008
  7. Mark Vernon, Distraction (Review), Financial Times , 8 September 2008
  8. Theaustralian.com
  9. Random House Retrieved 30 December 2014.
  10. Damon Young
  11. Damon Young