Background

John Anderson was born on November 1, 1893, in Stonehouse, United Kingdom. He was the son of Alexander Anderson and Elizabeth, née Brown.

Education

John Anderson attended the local school, where his father was headmaster, before enrolling at the former Hamilton Academy in 1907. In 1911, he won first place in the All Scotland Bursary Competition which enabled him to study at Glasgow University. In 1917, Anderson received a Master of Arts degree in philosophy.

Career

John Anderson started his career as an assistant in Philosophy at Cardiff University in 1917. He held this post until 1919 and became an assistant in Moral Philosophy and Logic at the University of Glasgow. In 1920, Anderson took up a post of a lecturer in Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Edinburgh. He left this spot in 1926 and moved to Australia where he became Challis Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sydney in 1927. He founded the Sydney University Free Thought Society which ran from 1931 to 1951. Anderson held this post until his retirement in 1958.

Though authored no books, Anderson wrote journal articles during his lifetime and the greater majority of these were for the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy. A selection of these articles was published posthumously as Studies in Empirical Philosophy and Education and Inquiry.

Achievements

• John Anderson was an English educator, philosopher, and writer who was famous as a founder of the empirical brand of philosophy known as Australian realism. He also was famous for his numerous articles devoted to philosophy.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Studies in Empirical Philosophy

    (Studies in Empirical Philosophy was published in 1962 sho...)

    1962
  • Education and Inquiry 1980

Politics

John Anderson was associated with the Communist Party of Australia in 1927 and contributed to its journals. Later he began to believe that communism under Joseph Stalin in the Soviet Union was a dictatorship with no room for workers' control or participation. He then became aligned with the Trotskyist movement for a period of time. Anderson later abandoned authoritarian forms of socialism. He became what would today be called a libertarian and pluralist. Sometimes he described himself as an anarchist but, after the 1930s, he gave up his earlier political utopianism.

Views

John Anderson attempted to develop a systematic philosophy of naturalism and realism, grounded in the view that there is only one realm of being, that of events and processes in space and time. There are no Platonic forms or universal, no souls distinct from bodies, and no God. A healthy-minded philosophy should remorselessly criticize such illusions. Knowledge, for Anderson, is always based on descriptions of matters of fact. Concerning a priori knowledge, he took a strong empiricist position, denying any sharp distinction between the ‘rational sciences’ and the natural sciences, and insisting that the former are merely extremely general forms of scientific enquiry. Philosophy is conceived as continuous with science rather than distinct from it, a claim that provoked a critical response from Gilbert Ryle. In ethics Anderson adopted a somewhat idiosyncratic position, dismissing the concepts of ‘right’, ‘ought’ and ‘duty’ as empty and outmoded relics from the Age of Faith. ‘Good’, by contrast, names a straightforwardly descriptive property of certain human activities – those that are free, creative, productive, enterprising, intelligent and risky.

Like Nietzsche, Anderson regarded Christian ethics as the morality of slaves. In his social and political philosophy, Anderson opposed atomistic individualism, arguing for the reality of irreducibly social forces and movements. He nevertheless opposed ‘solidarism’, the view that there is such a thing as the common good. Every society, he argues, is made up of conflicting and opposed forces, with no prospect of reconciliation. In his influential writings on education, he develops these ideas further, urging that the aim of education should not be ‘socialization’ but the development of the child’s critical intelligence.

John Anderson also was a formidable champion of the principle of academic freedom from authoritarian intervention. He fought a successful battle to end the role of the British Medical Association in setting course standards and student quotas in the medical school. He also railed against the presence on campus of a military unit. Anderson also advocated religious and sexual freedoms and free discussion of issues in an era when a mention of taboo subjects commonly resulted in angry public condemnation by prominent moralists. However, after the Second World War Anderson began exhibiting more conservative views.

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• David Armstrong: "He is, arguably, the most important philosopher who has worked in Australia. Certainly he was the most important in both the breadth and depth of influence. Among the philosophers who got their original intellectual formation from Anderson are John Passmore, John Mackie, A.J. ('Jim') Baker, David Stove and myself. There are lots more. But for every student who became a philosopher there were far, far, more in the law, in medicine, in journalism, in other academic disciplines, that were profoundly influenced by him. I am inclined to think that, especially in the thirties and forties of the last century, Anderson was the person who set the agenda, and set the tone, for intellectual discussion in Sydney."

Connections

John Anderson married Janet Currie Baillie on 30 June 1922. The marriage produced one son.

Father:

Alexander Anderson

Mother:

Elizabeth Brown

Wife:

Janet Currie Baillie

References

• Anderson's social philosophy
  1979
• Biographical Dictionary of Twentieth-Century Philosophers This Biographical Dictionary provides detailed accounts of the lives, works, influence and reception of thinkers from all the major philosophical schools and traditions of the twentieth-century. This unique volume covers the lives and careers of thinkers from all areas of philosophy – from analytic philosophy to Zen and from formal logic to aesthetics.
  1996
• Australian Realism: The Systematic Philosophy of John Anderson This book outlines the realist and pluralist philosophy of John Anderson, Australia's most original thinker, whose articles and teaching at Sydney University have deeply influenced Australian intellectual life. Several main themes run though his work, but Anderson never gave an overall account of his views.
  1986
• Memoirs of a Semi-detached Australian In this vivid and iconoclastic memoir, John Passmore takes us on an unsentimental journey from his childhood in Manly, then half-village, half-resort 'seven miles from Sydney, a thousand miles from care' to the hot-house environment of the University of Sydney, and on to the realities of his imagined Europe.
  1997