Re: John Anderson (1893-1962)

Yes, indeed, Australia's greatest philosopher, and the one who has had more influence on subsequent Australian philosophers than anyone else. I've been reading the excellent Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia, by James Franklin (Macleay Press, 2003); as well as Anderson's Studies in Empirical Philosophy. Anderson was Scottish by birth and upbringing and always retained his Glaswegian accent. He was a member of the Australian Communist Party, until he was kicked out for criticising Stalinist bureaucratisation. He then joined the Trots, but split the party at its 1937 conference by arguing that Trotsky was wrong to see the Soviet Union as a true workers' state merely suffering temporarily from Stalinism. By 1943 he had become an anti-Communist, and in the post-war society he criticised the spread of welfarism and what he saw as the decline of academic standards. He always retained a libertarian streak (including about sex: 'freedom in love is the condition of other freedoms ... there can be no culture without it' - quoted in Franklin, p. 42). He was extraordinarily charismatic, and had an immense impact on his students. He was a fierce critic of what he called "moralism", insisting that the very concept of moral obligation - the normal use of the word "ought" - was muddled and incoherent and corresponded to nothing in objective reality. David Stove, his one-time student and a future philosopher, confessed that the Andersonian students would shoplift under his influence! (Franklin on Anderson: 'What is lacking in his view of good is any sense of the restraint of conscience. "Thou shalt not" is not in anywhere, as that would be a sign of a "servile" mentality. Anderson was completely open about his view that conscience is simply part of the "fraud of moralism"'. Corrupting the Youth, p. 41) Most of Anderson's writings, however, were on theoretical issues in logic, metaphysics and epistemology, rather than ethics. Anderson's writings tend to be critical and polemical in tone, seeking to knock down what he considered pious orthodoxies of one kind or another. His political activity also seemed "oppositional" and against established authority. There's a nice quote from (Catholic philosopher) James McAuley: 'John Anderson had an answer to every conceivable question. It was "No".' (ibid. p. 7) I'm still reading, and so haven't quite got the measure of Anderson's moral, social and political views yet, but I might return to this topic here once I have more knowledge.