Background
Smith, John Alexander was born in 1863 in Dingall.
Smith, John Alexander was born in 1863 in Dingall.
University of Edinburgh and Balliol College Oxford, 1884-1887.
1886-1891, Lecturer in Greek, University of Edinburgh. 1891-1909, Tutor in Philosophy, Balliol College. Oxford; 1910-1935. Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, Oxford.
Smith's first interests were in philological and literary studies. He was a noted Aristotelian scholar and polymath. From 1891 to 1910. his Philosophy gradually developed from a Cook Wilsonian realism to an idealism which owed much to his discovery of the writings of Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile, whose doctrines he eventually appropriated to his own needs and ends. Smith attempted to occupy a middle position between the idealism offered by F. H. Bradley and Bernard Bosanquet and that offered by Croce and Gentile. He maintained that ‘all reality is history’ but a ‘timeless history, an event which occupies the whole of Time’, engendered by ‘Spirit’ and manifesting itself most freely and fully in ‘Self-Consciousness’. A much respected teacher, Smith passed on the legacy of his idealism to his successor in the Waynflete Chair. R. G. Collingwood.