Abstract

John Anderson was Australia's most important philosopher in the first half of this century. Coming from Scotland as a young man, he held the chair of philosophy at the University of Sydney for thirty years until his retirement in 1958. The doctrinaire Scots empiricist would become as Australian as a magpie. He developed his own distinctive system of realism and fathered a vigorous local school characterised by inquiry, independence and a deep commitment to philosophy as a way of life. Far from being a remote, albeit distinguished, technical philosopher and university man, he was a formidable public figure and fierce controversialist who, over decades, outraged many of Sydney's clergy and conventionally minded citizenry. From an early Marxist phase, he espoused and applied 'freethought' and criticism in everything, opposing all forms of censorship and mind control - except perhaps, as one intrepid student observed, his own. Anderson was no secular saint and this, his first biography, is no hagiography. Brian Kennedy has uncovered much new material, including personal letters and diaries, about Anderson's Scottish past and his conflicted public and private life in Australia. His relations with students were complex; with women, they were decidedly problematic. Warts and all, Anderson has much to teach us about universities and the intellectual life, as this lucid and incisive book makes clear. In the aftermath of the revolution that has swept our universities and colleges into a brave new world, Anderson's uncompromising calls to unfettered inquiry, criticism and the Socratic way of life are timely.