Oscar Davis

Existentialist philosophy, in particular the work of Franz Fanon and Jean-Paul Sartre, was crucial to early postcolonial theorising and, as demonstrated in the work of Brendan Hokowhitu, continues to be an important perspective for understanding Indigenous postcolonial experience. Existentialism is a valuable tool in the on-going attempt to gain clarity about the nature of racist oppression and ways of overcoming it. We focus on two films by Warwick Thornton: Samson and Delilah (2009) and Sweet Country (2017) that together form a study of an Indigenous existentialism, and in contrasting ways illustrate both the difficulty of, and possibility of, emergent transcendent agency in postcolonial environments.

In attempting to debunk moral realism through an appeal to evolutionary facts, debunkers face a series of problems, which we label the problems of scope, corrosiveness, and post‐hoc justification. To overcome these problems, debunkers must assume certain metaphysical or epistemological positions, or otherwise pre‐establish them. In doing so, they must assume or pre‐establish the very conclusion they seek in advancing the argument. This means that such debunking arguments either beg the question against the moral realist or are undermined as standalone metaethical arguments.