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Biography
Peter Murphy (b. 1956) grew up in Rockhampton and Brisbane in Queensland, Australia. During 1973-1979 he completed two years of an undergraduate Arts degree at the University of Queensland followed by three years in national student politics, finishing his Bachelor of Arts degree at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Victoria. He then undertook a PhD (1980-1985) at La Trobe University supervised by the Hungarian social philosopher Agnes Heller. He was Heller's first PhD student after her years of political banishment in Communist-era Hungary.

Murphy's university appointments have included Professor of Arts and Society at James Cook University, adjunct Professor in the Cairns Institute (also at James Cook University) and adjunct Professor of Social Sciences at La Trobe University as well as appointments at the New School for Social Research (NYC), the University of Ballarat (subsequently Federation University, Australia), Baylor University (Texas), Victoria University Wellington (New Zealand) and Monash University (Melbourne).

Murphy also has been a visiting academic at Ohio State University, Panteion University in Athens, Ateneo de Manila University, Seoul National University, the University of Copenhagen, and Goldsmiths College University of London. Mid-career he spent four years (1998-2001) in the then pioneering Internet industry, working for the start-up company, search engine and database publisher Looksmart.

Work
Murphy's intellectual work spans three areas:


 * 1) Social theory and political philosophy
 * 2) Political economy and public policy
 * 3) The social science of creativity and the imagination

His work combines detailed empirical inquiry with theoretical, philosophical and analytical frameworks. It fuses classic social science approaches with those drawn from social philosophy, aesthetics and the metaphysics of the imagination.

Research contribution
One commentator has observed that Murphy’s Limited Government (2019) is rooted in an “epistemological scepticism” which recognises “the limits of human knowledge when crafting public policy”. This philosophical scepticism looks to “form, proportion, shape, and patterns, as they manifest themselves organically in societies” to explain human behaviour rather than volition, intention and conscious purposeful design.

Murphy’s epistemological scepticism emerged in systematic form in Civic Justice (2001). In that work, justice was presented as a “union of opposites” that the imagination fuses together. Murphy followed the journey of the idea of the “union of opposites” and its pattern order from the ancient Greek pre-Socratics through to modern neo-classical social theory and aesthetic practice. This has been described as an epic tracing of “its archaic Greek antecedents and developments… to Rome and its near demise after the advent of Christianity and the decline of the Roman empire, through to its re-invigoration in the Italian Renaissance, and the taxing challenges of modernity and its New World translation…” The emphasis of Civic Justice was on the productive power of the “union of opposites” and its ability to create objects through the imaginative synthesis of opposites and their “symphonic balancing”. The effect of this on the life of great cities was to endow them with an “objectifying spirit” and a “productive ethos”. Elsewhere the model underpinning Civic Justice is described as “aesthetic-political” in nature, the work of “continually balancing forces” and a history of “conflicts” that “harmonise” through the operation of ratios and proportions, means, scales and limits.

In Dialectic of Romanticism (2004) Murphy and his co-author David Roberts counter-posed the neo-classical idea of creation to influential Romantic conceptions of creation and the imagination. As one commentator put it, the book distinguished “between ‘enlightened’, ‘romantic’, and ‘classical’ modernisms”. Another observed the work’s “useful distinction between civilizational and romantic modernisms” set off against "the dialectics of romanticism and enlightenment [that] culminate in the internecine bloodbaths of the early twentieth century". Following from this, the book proposed the paradox that "successful modernity is always underpinned by classical themes”. Paradox was later depicted as a prime medium of the imagination in Murphy’s book The Collective Imagination and as a condition of successful societies in Limited Government (2019) and The Political Economy of Prosperity (2020). Written in an “austere, apodictic style”, the “intellectual brilliance” of Dialectic of Romanticism, it was commented, “is evident on every page”; another critic described the work as “philosophically vast and very wide-ranging in its implications”.

The role of the imagination in acts of creation that coalesce opposites is a recurring motif throughout Murphy’s work. In the co-authored work Imagination, which received The American Education Studies Association (AESA) Critics Choice Book Award in 2010, Murphy proposed that “creation is best described as a union of opposites”. His discussion of the uncanny nature of creation culminated in The Collective Imagination (2012). That book was described as “one of the most illuminating and comprehensive explorations of that mysterious and elusive dimension of human experience: acts of creation”. In this particular interpretation of Murphy’s theory, the imagination is presented as that which "unites what reason analytically separates, such as near and far, beginning and end. The imagination does not juxtapose these things as opposites, rather it brings these things together without making them the same—such imaginative creations are those of Aristotle’s idea of the ‘unmoved mover’ or Einstein’s compound: ‘space-time’.”

Murphy’s studies of creation and the imagination are complemented by a number of books on innovation—the practical application of the imagination. These include Auto-Industrialism (2017) and Universities and Innovation Economies (2015). The former is a study of “the auto-industrial era, where service-based jobs and white-collar workers are being replaced by self-service technology which relies on online, computerised or robotic automation”. The latter volume on higher education contains “a diagnosis of the decline and failure of the contemporary bureaucratic and managerially governed university” and the consequent “discrepancy between funding and achievement” and between creative promise and creative output. It belongs to a body of research literature that shares the “growing unease in modern societies about the costs of [the] massive investment in universities”, an unease that is “married to an epistemological crisis in the worth and meaning of the humanities, arts and social sciences (HaSS) themselves.”

Universities and Innovation Economies discusses questions of worth and meaning alongside those of money and production. Murphy’s social theory systematically integrates, as a continuum, the dual dimensions of meaning and materialism. Both dimensions are indebted to what, in The Collective Imagination, he called the “media of creation”. Murphy's theory focuses on two types of “media of creation”. One is anchored in language; the other in numbers. One draws its analytical framework from the humanities; the other from the social sciences. The former is concerned with paradox, analogy, wit, and what has been called Murphy’s interest in “comic distance”. The latter concentrates on metrical phenomena. Metrical media appeared in Civic Justice as ratios, proportions and scales. Throughout Murphy’s body of work, metrical media have assumed various guises including equilibria, symmetries, rhythms, fractals, and bell curves. The “media of creation”, as he conceives them, both generate meaning and give form, shape and pattern to the material dynamics of cities, industries, markets and publics. In later public policy works such as Limited Government and The Political Economy of Prosperity, Murphy merged metrical and paradoxical accounts of economic and social behaviour.