JJC Smart:JACK SMART, who has died aged 92, changed the course of philosophy of mind. He was a pioneer of physicalism – the set of theories that hold that consciousness, sensation and thought do not, as they seem to, float free of physicality, but can be located in a scientific material worldview.
His article Sensations and Brain Processes (1959) put forward his Type Identity theory of mind – that consciousness and sensations are nothing over and above brain processes. Invariably included in any collection of mind-body problem papers, it is now part of the canon, for, along with UT Place and David Armstrong, Smart converted what was once “the Australian heresy” into orthodoxy.
While all three were based principally at Australian universities, Place was born in Yorkshire and Smart to Scottish parents in Cambridge, where his father was professor of astronomy. Jack went to the Leys School, studied maths, physics and philosophy at Glasgow University, and during the second World War served in India and Burma. He gained a BPhil at Queen’s College, Oxford, in 1948, under the behaviourist Gilbert Ryle, and in 1950 became professor at Adelaide, where he stayed until 1972.
Away from the language-centred philosophy of Britain, Smart was freer to draw the implications that science had for philosophy. He began to ask why consciousness alone should remain exempt from physico-chemical explanation. He was one of the leading figures to push Anglo-American analytic philosophy into collusion with the sciences. In his earliest article, The River of Time (1949), he invoked Einstein’s special theory of relativity, arguing that our notion of time passing must be an illusion – a then-unfashionable position, which, largely thanks to him, moved more into the mainstream.
In Philosophy and Scientific Realism (1963) and subsequently, Smart acknowledged that what science tells us about the world is often hard to reconcile with how it seems in experience, but he stuck up for a reality that exists independently of our conceptions of it.
One reason he gave for liking Australian philosophers was that they were not as liable to talk nonsense as French ones did.
In addition to his chair at the Australian National University, Canberra (1976-85), at various times Smart had visiting posts in the US at Princeton, Harvard, Yale and Stanford.
Jack (John Jamieson Carswell) Smart, born September 16th, 1920; died October 6th, 2012