J. J. C. Smart

Smart was a Foundation Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities at its establishment in 1969. In 1990 he was awarded the Companion in the General Division of the Order of Australia. In 1991 he was elected to become an honorary Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, and in 2010, elected to become an honorary Fellow of Queen’s College, Oxford.

He arrived in Australia in August 1950 to take up the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide, which he occupied from 1950 until 1972. After twenty-two years in Adelaide, he moved to La Trobe University where he was Reader in Philosophy from 1972 to 1976. He then moved to the Australian National University where he was Professor of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences from 1976 until his retirement in 1985, and where the annual Jack Smart Lecture is held in his honour. Following his retirement he was Emeritus Professor at Monash University.

Smart has changed his mind about the nature and causes of the illusion of the passage of time. In the 1950s, he held that it was due to people’s use of anthropocentric temporal language. He later came to abandon this linguistic explanation of the illusion in favour of a psychological explanation in terms of the passage of memories from short-term to long-term memory.

Regarding the philosophy of mind, Smart was a physicalist. In the 1950s, he was also one of the originators, with Ullin Place, of the mind–brain identity theory, which claims that particular states of mind are identical with particular states of the brain. Initially, this view was dubbed “Australian materialism” by its detractors, in reference to the stereotype of Australians as down-to-earth and unsophisticated.

Smart served in the Second World War with the British Army where he was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Royal Corps of Signals on 9 October 1941 and given the service number 212091. His war service was mainly in India and Burma. He was demobilised in April 1946 and in 1950 was granted the honorary rank of lieutenant.

Born in Cambridge, England, of Scottish parents, Smart began his education locally, attending The Leys School, a leading independent boarding school. His younger brothers also became professors: Alastair (1922–1992) was Professor of Art History at Nottingham University; Ninian was a professor of religious studies and a pioneer in that field. Their father, William Marshall Smart, was John Couch Adams Astronomer at Cambridge University and later Regius Professor of Astronomy at Glasgow. In 1950, W. M. Smart was President of the Royal Astronomical Society. In 1946, Jack Smart graduated from the University of Glasgow with an MA, followed by a BPhil from Oxford University in 1948. He then worked as a Junior Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, Oxford, for two years.

John Jamieson Carswell Smart AC FAHA (16 September 1920 – 6 October 2012), was a British-Australian philosopher and was appointed as an Emeritus Professor by the Australian National University. He worked in the fields of metaphysics, philosophy of science, philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and political philosophy. He wrote multiple entries for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.