Gricefully outsmarted

Speranza

In 1998 the Philosophy Program at RSSS decided to fund an annual lecture in honour of a former Professor and Head, John Jamieson Carswell Smart, formerly, like Herbert Paul Grice, of Corpus Christi, Oxford.

When approached to secure his permission, Smart agreed on condition that the Lecture be given a more 'down market' name than the proposed 'J.J.C. Smart Lecture.'

Accordingly, the Inaugural Jack Smart Lecture was given on Friday 15 October, 1999 by Frank Jackson, Jack's successor as Professor and Head of the Philosophy Program, and, at that time, Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies, ANU.

Before the Lecture began Philip Pettit, Professor of Social and Political Theory in the Program, said a few words (and implicated a few others) about Jack by way of introduction.

John Jamieson Carswell Smart left Corpus Christi (Oxford) -- and indeed, implicaturally, Heathrow, and arrived in Australia in August 1950 to take up the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide.

Smart had completed two years as a Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, where he had earlier taken the new B.Phil. degree instituted by Gilbert Ryle (at Queen's College) and he was just short of thirty years old.

He spent twenty two years in Adelaide and then, after four years at La Trobe, moved to the Australian National University in 1976.

 He officially retired over ten years ago but  never ceased to be an active member of the ANU philosophical scene.

In the decades after his arrival in Australia Smart helped to change the direction of Philosophy, not just in Australia itself, but in the world at large.

His part in effecting those results has been well recognised in the various honours he has received from Australian and overseas Universities; in his having been invested in the Order of Australia; and indeed in his having the annual lecture series named after him.

Were there a Nobel Prize in Philosophy, I have no doubt but that he would have long ago been awarded this recognition.

With a small group of philosophers world-wide he succeeded in changing the direction of his discipline and he contributed to significant advances along the trajectory thereby set.

The redirection that Jack helped bring about in philosopohy was motivated by an insistence on three points.

First, that science, in particular physics, has to be taken realistically and seriously, as the best account we have of the nature of the world.

Second, that common experience cannot be breezily dismissed as illusory, since it gives us the picture of the world by which we successfully steer in our day-to-day lives.

And third, that the scientific image does not sit easily with the experiential image of the world, so that there is work to be done in trying to reconcile them to one another.

These three observations helped give shape to the project that has dominated analytical philosophy ever since.

Smart was not on his own in articulating and helping to advance the project - he himself, ever unassuming, would want to give greater credit to figures like W.V.O. Quine, Wilfred Sellars and David Armstrong - but he was certainly at the forefront of the new movement.

That movement took shape without a manifesto, it must be said, and it is only now, fifty years after it first began to appear, that we can appreciate the depth of change that it brought about.

Smart's great Oxford mentor (literally "tutor") was Gilbert Ryle and while there is much in Ryle's work that remains of value - and much that Smartcontinues to draw to our attention - it reads today, and not just in Australia, like a tract from another country.

There are non-philosophers in the audience, I am aware, and it may be worth mentioning some of the topics that Jack tackled in the spirit of the new movement.

One is the issue of how to make sense of the place that sensations enjoy in our lives, assuming that we are formed out of the bare materials described in physics and that we move under the exclusive control of physical law.

In his 1959 paper on 'Sensations and Brain Processes' - one of the classics of twentieth century philosophy - he showed, following on the work of his colleague, Ullian Place, that we could identify sensations with brain processes without having to give up on the sorts of things we spontaneously believe about them.

The new identity theory of sensations - and more generally of mental processes and states - is at the origin of the hypotheses that guide cognitive science and neuroscience today and marked a genuine revolution in philosophical thought.

It attracted the name of 'Australian materialism' in its early days and while the tag was initially applied with a sneer, it quickly became a badge of honour for the generation of thinkers who took Jack Smart as one of their gurus.

A second topic on which Smart made a particularly influential contribution is one of the toughest issues in metaphysics: the nature of time. True to his scientific realism he argued that there really is no way of reconciling our experience, as it seems to be, of time passing: that the passage of time is indeed an illusion.

While he thought that the scientific image could make room for sensations and other mental phenomena - including, for example, free will - he was honest enough, even outrageous enough, to argue that it could not make room for the notion that, in any literal sense, time passes. Time is a fourth dimension, as physics teaches us, and making sense of our experience as of the passage of time can only mean explaining to ourselves how it can seem - mistakenly - that time passes.

His views on both of those topics show us how bold Jack was prepared to be. Hidden beneath the fleece of the unassuming member of the flock - and this, in his gregarious way, he loved to be - is the wolf of an original, uncompromising and voracious intellect.

His boldness also appeared in the direction that he took in regard to matters of value and morality.

True to his scientific realism, once again, he recognised that whatever place value had in the world, it wasn't the sort of place occupied by physical properties like volume and charge and spin. This led him to argue that value, ultimately, could only be associated with the experiences of pleasure and pain that we human beings, and other sentient creatures, enjoy and suffer. Thus he spearheaded efforts in the later part of the century to breathe new life into what had been the discredited doctrine of utilitarianism. In this initiative, as in the others, he was one of the first to champion his chosen line, and he was one of those who had to suffer the incredulity, even the ridicule, that new departures always attract. But here as elsewhere the new departure proved to be one that others, in a short time, began to admire and follow. While he was always prepared to go out on a limb, Jack chose his branches well.

As we have suggested in passing, Smart was not only a leading intellect; he was also a relentlessly gregarious and social being.

And so, unsurprisingly, we learn from published reminiscences that soon after arriving in Australia in August 1950 he set out to visit and make the acquaintance of leading philosophers in the country. One of these was A.C.Jackson, then a lecturer at the University of Melbourne, and Jack recalls that as he spoke to Camo Jackson, they watched Camo's young son play cricket on Ormond College grounds. It is fitting, not just that Frank Jackson succeeded Jack in his Chair at the Australian National University, but that he took the podium as the inaugural Jack Smart Lecturer.

 Jack Smart Lecturers

Susan Wolf
Edna J. Koury Professor, Chapel Hill
"Two Concepts of Rule-Utilitarianism"
10 July 2012
Alvin Goldman
Board of Governors Professor, Rutgers University
"Philosophical Naturalism and Intuitional Methodology"
19 July 2011
Kit Fine
Silver Professor of Philosophy and Mathematics, New York University
"Truth-maker Semantics"
29 June 2010
Ned Block
Silver Professor of Philosophy, New York University
"Why Consciousness Does Not Extend Outside The Brain"
30 June 2009
Click here for the podcast.
Brian Skyrms
Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science, University of California, Irvine
Professor of Philosophy, Stanford University
"Game Theory, Evolution & The Social Contract"
22 July 2008
Philip Kitcher
John Dewey Professor of Philosophy, Columbia University
"Ethics after Darwin"
8 August 2007
Ruth Garrett Millikan
Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut
"Let me count the ways to tell a weasel: on extensional meanings and nature's clumps"
10 July 2006
Timothy Williamson
Wykeham Professor of Logic at the University of Oxford
"Philosophy, Conceptual Analysis, and the World"
26 July 2005
Simon Blackburn
Professor of Philosophy, University of Cambridge
"Hard Realism or Soggy Pluralism?"
29 July 2004
Thomas M. Scanlon
Alford Professor of Natural Religion, Moral Philosophy, and Civil Polity, at Harvard University
"Blame"
30 July 2003
Jerry Fodor
State of New Jersey Professor of Philosophy, Rutgers University
"Having concepts: a brief refutation of practically everything"
31 July 2002
David Lewis
Class of 1943 University Professor of Philosophy, Princeton University
"How many lives has Schroedinger's cat?"
27 June 2001
Peter Singer
Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University
"Outsiders: our obligations to those beyond our borders"
24 August 2000
Frank Jackson
Professor of Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences, and Director, Institute of Advanced Studies, Australian National University
"Locke-ing onto content"
15 October 1999