Anderson, John

« Anderson, John (1893-1962) Arguing against metaphysical ‘ultimates' (that is, supposed unconditioned conditions of things), relative truth, appeals to subjective experience, and opposing some of the main tendencies oftwentieth-century philosophy, Anderson developed a wide-ranging realist and empiricist philosophy.

Highly criticalof religion, he was much concerned with other cultural values and advanced views (influential in Australia) onfreedom of thought, education, ethics and aesthetics.

In ethics, for example, his view is that objective good is notgood because it is approved of by certain people; rather those who approve of good (or have other relations to it)do so because it is good.

He carefully distinguished questions about the intrinsic character of good from those about relations social groups may have to it, and goes on to develop an account of intrinsic goods as certainsocio-mental activities: enterprise or freedom, objective inquiry, artistic production and appreciation, love andcourage.

Similarly, in aesthetics he distinguishes characteristics of works of art from possible relations betweenartists, works, appreciators and critics, such as a work's relation to a writer's intentions.

In Anderson's view thecharacter and structure of the work itself alone provides an aesthetic criterion for assessing the merit of works ofart.

1 Life John Anderson, Scottish-born philosopher, studied at Glasgow University and lectured there and in Cardiff and Edinburgh before becoming professor of philosophy at Sydney University (1927-58) where he became theleading Australian philosopher of his time, and also a leading controversialist.

He was twice censured by the NewSouth Wales Parliament, but was also named as one of the official 200 Australian ‘Greats' at the 1988 Bicentenary.Anderson was influenced by idealist teachers at Glasgow and subsequently in realist ways by William James, G.E.Moore, the New Realists, Kemp Smith, and above all Samuel Alexander.

He was also influenced by Heraclitus, Plato,Sorel, Freud, Marx, Vico and Croce, and on wider issues by The New Age , a journal of critical thought, during its editorship by A.R.

Orage.

A charismatic teacher, Anderson influenced people in a remarkable number of fields,including about thirty who became professional philosophers.

These varied in the extent to which they used oragreed with his views.

For example, J.A.

Passmore , J.L.

Mackie and D.M.

Armstrong produced well-known work of their own (although Mackie did expand Anderson's views on causes and on hypotheticals), while others, such asA.R.

Walker, T.A.

Rose, A.J.

Anderson and W.V.

Doniela, taught and developed views more in the Andersoniantradition.

In Britain, Anderson influenced Rush Rhees at Edinburgh and through him his students at Swansea.Anderson's political orientations, though not his main social theory, changed over the years.

At first a communistsympathizer (he mistakenly believed Soviet workers were exhibiting Sorel's ‘ethic of the producer'), he was then aTrotskyist between 1933 and 1937, and finally a critical oppositionist concerned to defend pluralist values and‘expose illusions' wherever they are found.

In the 1950s he criticized communism and the welfare ‘servile state' whiletenaciously defending learning and thinking values in education against practicalist and supposedly ‘egalitarian' ones.2 Systematic realism In Anderson's view there is a certain dogmatism about advancing any philosophic position; nevertheless, support can be offered by showing confusions and inconsistencies in rival views and, as Socratessuggested, by using a hypothetical method to reveal the consequences of your position.

Criticism is integral toAnderson's philosophizing; not someone who relies on announcing his ‘intuitions', he is one of the leadingphilosophical ‘arguers'.

For brevity, Anderson's position is best stated in terms of the ‘-isms' he sometimes employed.It is mainly one of realism, objectivism, empiricism and pluralism - interlocking views which may be summed up as‘systematic realism'.

Conceptions of relative truth are rejected.

There may be much illusory thinking, but attemptsto deny the absolute or objective truth of all propositions are self-refuting - ‘ If I say "X is true for me", then I am saying that X's being true for me is an absolute fact' ( 1962: 294 ).

Anderson likewise rejects, for instance, antirealist claims that unverified propositions about the past which are unverifiable today are not true or false.

Contrary toidealists and phenomenalists, he holds that the knower and the known have independent status.

Opposing views, asin conceptions of ‘dependent existences' such as ideas, perceptions or sense-data, involve confusions of qualitieswith relations, and Anderson calls such views ‘relativist'.

In a relational situation in which A has r to B, neither A nor r nor B ontologically constitutes any of the others, even when, say, B depends on A for its origin or continued existence.

But in the case of knowledge, relativist confusions are common and are facilitated by cognateaccusatives, talk of intentional objects and other ambiguities in the use of such words as ‘perception' and‘experience'.

Confusions about qualities and relations are also notably rife in ethics and aesthetics (see Realism and antirealism ; Relativism ).

Anderson's realism and empiricism (which differs from traditional empiricism) rejects overt and covert rationalistic attempts to set up ‘levels of reality' in the shape of philosophical ‘ultimates' such asnecessary or divine beings, monism's one, dualism's two, or the units of atomistic philosophers (for example, Hume 's perceptions and the simples of Russell and the early Wittgenstein ).

Arguing against such views - that ‘monism explodes into dualism', though dualism cannot account for the relations between its two sides, and that atomismfails to reduce complexity to unitary elements - Anderson is an ontological egalitarian: whatever exists is on the same level of existence as anything else, and is open to objective, empirical investigation, but there are no underlying ultimate, final or purposive explanations.

In Anderson's empiricism all knowledge is obtained byobservation (and experiment), including introspection, but observation is not indubitable.

In any field there is thepossibility of discovery and also of error, which arises because of the ‘pluralist complexity' both of mind and of non-mental things.

Mind is a network of varied and conflicting tendencies: because of this and because of Freudianmechanisms we are prone to mis observe as well as observe.

He sums up his pluralism thus: ‘ There is not only an unlimited multiplicity of things to which the single logic of events applies but anything whatever is infinitely complexso that we can never cover its characters in a single formula or say that we know "all about it"' ( 1958: 55 ) (see Pluralism ).

3 Logic, categories Although the different parts of his position are separably arguable for or against, Anderson places special emphasis on a realist ‘logic of events', including a realist formal logic.

While his broadconception of logic is of the conditions of existence, his formal logic is traditional logic developed and madeconsistently realist.

It deals with AEIO propositional forms, their implications and other logical relations.

Just asthere is one level of existence, there is one level of discourse and nothing is above or below the proposition whosecopula is the ‘is' of occurrence coupling two terms, one of which, the subject, locates an actual or possiblesituation, and the other of which, the predicate, characterizes it.

Identity, existential and hypothetical statements. »