Australian philosopher and academic

John Jamieson Carswell Smart AC FAHA (16 September 1920 – 6 October 2012), was a British-Australian philosopher and was appointed as an Emeritus Professor by the Australian National University. He worked in the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. He wrote multiple entries for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Contents

• 1 Career
• 2 Metaphysics
• 3 Philosophy of mind
• 4 Ethics
• 5 Works
• 6 References
• 7 Sources
• 8 External links

Career

Born in Cambridge, England, of Scottish parents, Smart began his education locally, attending The Leys School, a leading independent boarding school. His younger brothers also became professors: Alastair (1922–1992) was Professor of Art History at Nottingham University; Ninian was a professor of religious studies and a pioneer in that field. Their father, William Marshall Smart, was John Couch Adams Astronomer at Cambridge University and later Regius Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow. In 1950, W.:M. Smart was President of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 1946, Jack Smart graduated from the University of Glasgow with an MA, followed by a BPhil from Oxford University in 1948. He then worked as a Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for two years.

Smart served in the Second World War with the British Army where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals on 9 October 1941 and given the service number 212091. His war service was mainly in India and Burma. He was demobilised in April 1946 and in 1950 was granted the honorary rank of lieutenant.

He arrived in Australia in August 1950 to take up the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide, which he occupied from 1950 until 1972. After twenty-two years in Adelaide, he moved to La Trobe University where he was Reader in Philosophy from 1972 to 1976. He then moved to the Australian National University where he was Professor of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences from 1976 until his retirement in 1985, and where the annual Jack Smart Lecture is held in his honour. Following his retirement he was Emeritus Professor at Monash University.

Smart was a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities at its establishment in 1969. In 1990 he was awarded the Companion in the General Division of the Order of Australia. In 1991 he was elected to become an honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and in 2010, elected to become an honorary Fellow of Queen's College, Oxford.

At first Smart was a behaviourist before becoming an early proponent of type iden*y theory.

Metaphysics

Smart's main contribution to metaphysics is in the area of philosophy of time. He has been an influential defender of the B-theory of time, and of perdurantism.

His most important original arguments in this area concern the p*age of time, which he claimed is an illusion. He argued that if time really p*ed, then it would make sense to ask at what rate it p*es, but this requires some second time-dimension with respect to which p*age of normal time can be measured. This in turn faces the same problems, and so there must be a third time-dimension, and so on. This is called the rate of p*age argument and it was originally put forward by C. D. Broad.

Smart has changed his mind about the nature and causes of the illusion of the p*age of time. In the 1950s, he held that it was due to people's use of anthropocentric temporal language. He later came to abandon this linguistic explanation of the illusion in favour of a psychological explanation in terms of the p*age of memories from short-term to long-term memory.

Philosophy of mind

Regarding the philosophy of mind, Smart was a physicalist. In the 1950s, he was also one of the originators, with Ullin Place, of the mind–brain iden*y theory, which claims that particular states of mind are identical with particular states of the brain. Initially, this view was dubbed "Australian materialism" by its detractors, in reference to the stereotype of Australians as down-to-earth and unsophisticated.

Smart's iden*y theory dealt with some extremely long-standing objections to physicalism by comparing the mind–brain iden*y thesis to other iden*y theses well-known from science, such as the thesis that lightning is an electrical discharge, or that the morning star is the evening star. Although these iden*y theses give rise to puzzles such as Gottlob Frege's puzzle of the Morning Star and Evening Star, in the scientific cases, some claim that it would be absurd to reject the iden*y theses on this ground. Since the puzzles facing physicalism are strictly *ogous to the scientific iden*y theses, it would then also be absurd to reject physicalism on the grounds that it gives rise to these puzzles.

Ethics

In ethics, Smart was a defender of utilitarianism. Specifically, he defended "extreme", or act utilitarianism, as opposed to "restricted", or rule utilitarianism. The distinction between these two types of ethical theory is explained in his essay Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism.

Smart gave two arguments against rule utilitarianism. According to the first, rule utilitarianism collapses into act utilitarianism because there is no adequate criterion on what can count as a "rule". According to the second, even if there were such a criterion, the rule utilitarian would be committed to the untenable position of preferring to follow a rule, even if it would be better if the rule were broken, which Smart called "supers*ious rule worship".

Another aspect of Smart's ethical theory is his acceptance of a preference theory of well-being, which contrasts with the hedonism *ociated with "cl*ical" utilitarians such as Jeremy Bentham. Smart's combination of the preference theory with consequentialism is sometimes called "preference utilitarianism".

Smart's arguments against rule utilitarianism have been very influential, contributing to a steady decline in its popularity among ethicists during the late 20th century. Worldwide, his defence of act utilitarianism and preference theory has been less prominent but has influenced philosophers who have worked or been educated in Australia, such as Frank Jackson, Philip Pet*, and Peter Singer.

One of Smart's two entries in the Philosophical Lexicon refers to his approach to the consequences of act utilitarianism: to "outsmart" an opponent is "to embrace the conclusion of one's opponent's reductio ad absurdum argument." This move is more commonly called "biting the bullet".

Works

"Extreme and Restricted Utilitarianism", The Philosophical Quarterly, Oct. 1956, pages 344–354.An Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics, 1961.Philosophy and Scientific Realism, 1963.Problems of Space and Time, 1964 (edited, with introduction).Between Science and Philosophy: An Introduction to the Philosophy of Science, 1968.Utilitarianism:: For and Against (co-aut*d with Bernard Williams; 1973)Ethics, Persuasion and Truth, 1984.Essays Metaphysical and Moral, 1987.Atheism and Theism (Great Debates in Philosophy) (including contributions by John Haldane; 1996)

References

Sources

• Who's Who in Australia 1990
• Pet*, Philip; Sylvan, Richard; Norman, Jean (editors); Metaphysics and Morality: Essays in Honour of J.J.C. Smart, 1987.
• Franklin, James, Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia, 2003

External links

• The annual Jack Smart lecture at Philosophy RSSS, the Australian National University
• JJC Smart obituary, The Guardian, London, 30 October 2012
• J.J.C. Smart (1920-2012) by Graham Nerlich in Philosophy Now
• Vale J. J. C. Smart obituary notice from Monash University with tributes from John Bigelow and Graham Oppy
• John Smart; gifted Scottish philosopher who became a leading light in Australia Scotsman obituary
• J. J. C Smart (1920-2012): Remembering Jack Chadha, M., Bilimoria, P. & Bigelow, J., SOPHIA (2013) 52: 1.
• J. J. C. Smart, 1920 - 2012 by John Bigelow, with Elizabeth Smart and Helen Smart
• British Army Officers 1939–1945

Theories

• Anti-realism
• Australian realism
• Causal theory of reference
• Descriptivism
• Emotivism
• Feminism
• Functionalism
• Logical atomism
• Logical positivism
• Marxism
• Neurophilosophy
• Ordinary language
• Pragmatism
• Quietism
• Scientific structuralism
• Sense data

Concepts

• *ysis (paradox of *ysis)
• *ytic–synthetic distinction
• Counterfactual
• Natural kind
• Reflective equilibrium
• Supervenience

Philosophers

• Noam Chomsky
• William Lane Craig
• Keith Donnellan
• Paul Feyerabend
• Gottlob Frege
• Edmund Gettier
• Jaakko Hintikka
• Giuseppe Peano
• Karl Popper
• Nathan Salmon
• Russ Shafer-Landau
• Ernest Sosa
• Barry Stroud
• Alfred Tarski
• Jan Łukasiewicz
• Michael Walzer
• Nicholas Wolterstorff

Harvard

• Roderick Chisholm
• Donald Davidson
• Daniel Dennett
• Nelson Goodman
• Christine Korsgaard
• Thomas Kuhn
• Thomas Nagel
• Robert Nozick
• Hilary Putnam
• W. V. O. Quine
• John Rawls

Notre Dame

• Robert Audi
• Peter van Inwagen
• Alvin Plantinga

Pittsburgh School

• Robert Brandom
• Patricia Churchland
• Paul Churchland
• Adolf Grünbaum
• John McDowell
• Ruth Millikan
• Alexander Pruss
• Nicholas Rescher
• Wilfrid Sellars
• Bas van Fra*en

Pragmatism

• Susan Haack
• Nicholas Rescher
• Morton White

Princeton

• Alonzo Church
• Jerry Fodor
• David Lewis
• Jaegwon Kim
• Saul Kripke
• Richard Rorty

Quietism

• James F. Conant
• Alice Crary
• Cora Diamond

Stanford School

• Nancy Cartwright
• John Dupré
• Peter Galison
• Ian Hacking
• Patrick Suppes

• Category
• Index