John Smart
From Philosopedia
Smart, John Jamieson Carswell (1920– )
Smart, son of the Astronomer Royal in England, came to Australia in 1950 from Scotland as a practicing Christian.
Upon studying philosophy, however, he came to reject religion. He did his M.A. at the University of Glasgow, graduating in 1946. His postgraduate B. Phil was earned in 1948 at Oxford University. In 1950 he became Chair of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide, which he occupied from 1950 to 1972. He then moved to La Trobe University where he was a Reader in Philosophy from 1972 to 1976, then moved to the Australian National University where from 1976 to 1985 he was Professor of Philosophy.
An atheist and ethicist, he is known for his espousal of the identity theory of mind: that mental processes are identical to physical processes in the brain. He developed the thesis, in Philosophy of Scientific Realism (1963) that the theories of science are the best account that we can have of the nature of reality and the entities that constitute it.
A number of other Australian philosophers, including David Armstrong, support the view. After his professorship of philosophy at the University of Adelaide he was professor of philosophy at the Australian National University.
A defender of materialism, Smart also wrote Outline of a System of Utilitarian Ethics (1961), Between Science and Philosophy (1968), Ethics, Persuasion, and Truth (1984), Metaphysics and Morality (1987), Our Place in the Universe (1989), and Atheism and Theism (1996).
In 1996, he was elected a Humanist Laureate by the Council for Secular Humanism’s International Academy of Humanism. He is a contributing editor of Philo and a signer of Humanist Manifesto 2000.
