Background
JACKSON, Frank was born on August 31, 1943 in Melbourne. Son of Allan C. Jackson and Ann E. Jackson.
JACKSON, Frank was born on August 31, 1943 in Melbourne. Son of Allan C. Jackson and Ann E. Jackson.
Melbourne University and La Trobe University.
1967, Temporary Lecturer in Philosophy. University of Adelaide. 1968 77, Lecturer, then Senior Lecturer, then Reader, La Trobe University.
1978-1986, Professor of Philosophy, Monash University. 1986-1990 and since 1993, Professor el Philosophy, Research School of Social Sciences. Australian National University.
1991-1992, Professor of Philosophy, Monash University. Since 1992. Professor of Philosophy, R.S.S.S., Australian National University, 1994-1995, John Locke Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Oxford.
Main publications:
(1974) ‘Defining the autonomy of ethics’. Philosophical Review 83: 89-96.
(1976) ‘The existence of mental objects’, American Philosophical Quarterly 13: 33-40.
(1977) Perception: A Representative Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
(1982) ‘Epiphenomenal qualia’, Philosophical Quarterly 32: 127-36.
(1986) ‘What Mary didn’t know'. Journal of Philosophy 83: 291-5
with Postscript in P. Moser and ■ Trout (eds). Contemporary Materialism, LondonRoutledge, 1995.
(1987) Conditionals, Oxford: Blackwell.
(1988) (with Philip Pettit) ‘Functionalism and broad content’. Mind91: 381-400.
(1991) (ed.)Conditionals, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
(1991) ‘Decision theoretic consequentialism and the nearest and dearest objection’. Ethics 101: 461-82.
Secondary literature:
Morgan, T. (1984) ‘Jackson on physical information and qualia', Philosophical Quarterly 34: 147-52.
The son of a philosopher, A. C. Jackson (who attended Wittgenstein’s classes in Cambridge), Prank Jackson has been, since the 1970s a leading figure among a band of philosophers who have kept alive the strong philosophical tradition in Australia. His first book put up a characteristically powerful defence of the unfashionable representative theory of perception—and against the adverbial version of a direct theory—without invoking the usual argument from illusion. Physical objects are seen ‘in virtue of’ the direct seeing of mental objects (sense data). (He has. however, since abandoned the sense-datum theory he there defended.)
The son of a philosopher, A. C. Jackson, Prank Jackson has been, since the 1970s a leading figure among a band of philosophers who have kept alive the strong philosophical tradition in Australia. His first book put up a characteristically powerful defence of the unfashionable representative theory of perception—and against the adverbial version of a direct theory—without invoking the usual argument from illusion. Physical objects are seen ‘in virtue of’ the direct seeing of mental objects.
Jackson is also widely known as a selfconfessed ‘qualia freak', advancing the so-called knowledge argument in favour of, for example, colour-qualia, and against physical- ■sm.
Mary, who has lived all her life in a blackand-white room with a black-and-white TV, has learned all there is to know scientifically about colours, but there is something crucial she does not yet know: what it is like to experience colours. An interest largely independent of philosophy mind has been in conditionals, on which Jackson has worked for two decades. He has defended a theory of indicative conditionals which he calls a ‘supplemented equivalence theory’, whereby the data of ordinary usage is taken to support an explanation in terms of equivalence to material conditionals, together w,th various conditions of assertion, including the probability of the consequent given the truth the antecedent.
Married Morag E. Fraser in 1966.