Arran Gare

Arran E. Gare
Arran Gare Sketch
Born	15 January 1948 Subiaco, Western Australia
Era	Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western Philosophy
School	Process Philosophy
Main interests	Complex Processes, Environmental philosophy, Philosophy of Culture, Metaphysical Foundations of Science, Philosophy of Economics

Arran Gare (born 1948) is an Australian philosopher known mainly for his work in environmental philosophy, philosophy of science, philosophy of culture and the metaphysics of process philosophy. He currently holds the position of Associate Professor in the Faculty of Life and Social Sciences at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia.

Gare is the son of Frank Gare ISO, former Commissioner for Native Welfare and Regional Director of Aboriginal Affairs in Western Australia, and Nene Gare, author of The Fringe Dwellers and other novels. He is also the brother of Shelley Gare, an Australian author and journalist.

Gare attended Applecross Senior High School, then graduated from the University of Western Australia with a BA (Hons) in philosophy. He then wrote his PhD, ("Science, Process Philosophy and the Image of Man: the metaphysical foundations for a critical social science"), at Murdoch University in which he formed his version of process metaphysics. On the basis of this he won a Postdoctoral Fulbright Fellowship to Boston University. Gare has taught at Murdoch University, University of Queensland, Curtin University and Swinburne University. In 2006 he was a Keynote Speaker to the 6th International Whitehead Conference at Salzburg University, Austria, delivering a paper entitled: "Reviving the Radical Enlightenment". More recently he has aligned himself with Chinese environmentalists in the quest to create a global ecological civilisation.

Gare's work is mainly in environmental philosophy, the history and philosophy of science, philosophy of culture and the metaphysics of process philosophy. In 1983 with Robert Elliot he published Environmental Philosophy, one of the first anthologies in this field. In 1993 he published Nihilism Incorporated: European Civilization and Environmental Destruction and Beyond European Civilization: Marxism, Process Philosophy and the Environment, and then in 1995 Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis. In these works he attempted to explain the ascendance, world domination and environmental destructiveness of European civilisation, the failure of orthodox Marxism as practised in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe to provide a real alternative to this, and the ineffectuality of deconstructive postmodernism in the face of the ecological crisis confronting humanity, while offering a different path into the future based on a synthesis of process metaphysics, neo-Aristotelian ethics, neo-Hegelian political philosophy and eco-Marxism. In 1996 he published Nihilism Inc.: Environmental Destruction and the Metaphysics of Sustainability.