About us

ACU has established the Dianoia Institute of Philosophy to achieve a world-leading position for philosophical research in the analytic tradition.

We aspire to excellence in the central areas of philosophical inquiry, including metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and metaethics, logic, social and political philosophy, aesthetics, history of philosophy, and the philosophy of mind, language, religion and science.

With a dedicated focus on research, we emphasise productive collaboration with an international community of scholars and institutions.

We play an important role in furthering ACU’s commitment to philosophy, as central to the University’s Mission. The institute will be based at the Melbourne Campus.

Meet our people

About our name

Sometimes translated as thought, 'dianoia' is used by Plato in the Republic to denote the processes of reflective and discursive reasoning that lead from mere opinion (doxa) to knowledge or understanding (nous);

"When the eye of the soul is really buried in a sort of barbaric bog, dialectic gently pulls it out and leads it upwards, using the crafts we described to help it and cooperate with it in turning the soul around. From force of habit, we've often called these crafts sciences or kinds of knowledge, but they need another name, clearer than opinion, darker than knowledge. We called them dianoia..." (Republic 533d).