Frank Jackson

Frank Cameron Jackson FBA AO took mathematics and philosophy at the University of Melbourne and a PhD in philosophy at La Trobe University. He taught at Adelaide for a year (1967) before moving to La Trobe and then to a chair at Monash (1978). He joined the ANU in 1986 as Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences. Each Fall from 2007 to 2013, he was a visiting professor at Princeton University. 

At ANU Jackson has served as Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies (1998-2001), Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) (2001) and Director of the Research School of Social Sciences (2004-2007). He was appointed as Distinguished Professor at ANU in 2003. He became an emeritus professor on 1 August 2014.

He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. He gave the Locke lectures at Oxford in 1995, the Blackwell/Brown lectures in philosophy in 2006, the Gavin David Young lectures at Adelaide in 2012, the Carnap Lectures at Bochum in 2017, was a visiting Leverhulme Professor at Cambridge University in 2011, and was Lim Chong Yah Visiting Professor, National University of Singapore in 2017.

Why did you initially study philosophy?

What attracted you to it?

I had a mathematics background at school and – for some reason I don’t really understand –people with a maths background often like philosophy. David Chalmers was a mathematician, as were Peter Forrest and Huw Price. There’s something about mathematics and philosophy, or at least analytical philosophy, that plays well together. So, I think it’s partly just that. Also, my parents were both philosophers. So, I heard a lot of philosophy at home, and often visiting philosophers of considerable distinction came for dinner. They would have a few glasses of wine, and the arguments would flow backwards and forwards. It was all very interesting and exciting and fascinating. So, when I went to university, I did mathematics with a bit of philosophy on the side, and the philosophy on the side included a weekly lecture from David Armstrong.

Adrian Walsh: So, David was in Melbourne in those days?

That’s right. He gave a weekly lecture on [George] Berkeley. Everyone knows that David was a terrifically good philosopher, but perhaps not everyone knows that he was a terrifically good teacher as well. So, from that point on, the amount of math I did went down, and the amount of philosophy went up. That’s the story of me.

What is philosophy?

How might we define or understand the nature of the problems explored?

Why does it matter?

This is the question that philosophers dread, isn’t it? You’re at a dinner party and someone turns to you and says “I understand you are a philosopher. What is it exactly that you do?” There is no short answer to this question, and this can be a bit of a downer at a dinner party. Philosophers do a hell of a lot. But there's a way of capturing what philosophers often do, which I think is illuminating. I call it “asking the next question”. 

Let me illustrate what asking the next question means. Everyone knows that objects look coloured, and many people know why they look coloured. They look coloured because of certain wavelength properties – in fact, it's the reflectance profiles of the light that comes off the surfaces that look coloured. But what’s colour itself? Well, you might say it’s the light property, the reflectance profile. Or you might say it’s the disposition to look coloured. Or you might say it's not the disposition, it’s instead the causal ground of the disposition to look coloured. Or you might say no, it’s a property of certain mental states and/or brain states, the property we call having something looking coloured to us. Or you might say colour is an illusion; objects aren’t really coloured; their surfaces look coloured but that’s a systematic illusion.

Now you know what the next question is. You’ve got some agreed stuff: objects look coloured, and the scientific story about why they look coloured. But that doesn't say what colour itself is. The philosopher steps in and offers an answer to that question – that's the next question. I have just given you one example but that’s what philosophers (often) do. They take something which is pretty much common knowledge – perhaps common knowledge to the folk, perhaps common knowledge to the scientifically informed – and then they probe. They ask what I like to call “the next question”. 

Finally, why does it [philosophy] matter? Well, here’s me being a sort of Humean. When you ask why something matters, that relates to what people care about, and people care about understanding and knowledge. That's why proving Fermat's Last Theorem got so much coverage. The answer to why philosophy matters is that we philosophers are answering questions to which people desire to know the answers. 

Who were some of the philosophers who most influenced you – either directly through personal interactions in seminars and classrooms or indirectly through their writings?

My parents, obviously, but mostly from their passion for philosophy and not so much their doctrines. There were [David] Armstrong's lectures. I met Donald Davidson briefly on one of his visits to Australia. I read an awful lot of Davidson. I was lucky enough to meet David Lewis and became a friend of his, which was a great privilege. One could not possibly fail to learn from him. Walking around the block with David or driving him to and from, say, the airport while he was talking philosophy was an education in itself.

As far as reading goes, [Willard Van Orman] Quine, [Hilary] Putnam were influential. I read a lot of G. E. Moore at one stage. I liked the way he wrote, so I read a lot of Moore. 

In terms of personal contacts, it was largely colleagues. I have been incredibly lucky. My first job was in Adelaide, where my colleagues included Jack Smart and Michael Bradley. I learnt an awful lot from Smart and especially Bradley. Then, I went to La Trobe, then Monash and then later here at ANU, then Princeton. In all these places I’ve had terrific colleagues. You couldn’t walk down the corridor at La Trobe in those early days without meeting people who wanted to talk about this, that, and the next thing. Much the same was true at Monash, and ANU, and Princeton. I have learnt an awful lot from my colleagues.

Who was at La Trobe in those days?

Well, there was Robert Pargetter and Brian Ellis, and they knew a lot of philosophy of science. And, although I had a science background, I didn't know a lot of philosophy of science. So, Brian and Robert gave me an education in the philosophy of science.

And it was a big department in those days?

It was huge. It was the largest department in Australia, and there were a lot of young people who were keen and wanted to make their mark. The seminars were very lively. Good papers, lots of visitors, very good discussion. It was an ideal environment. But then I went to Monash and had terrific colleagues there as well. Some of whom knew more philosophy of logic than I did, so I learnt a lot of philosophical logic there.

Is that where you did work on conditionals?

Some of the work on conditionals was done at La Trobe (where I also wrote the paper on grue), and some at Monash. At Monash, Lloyd Humberstone told me about two-dimensionalism in the paper he wrote with Martin Davies. I got involved in all that. Then, at ANU, I got an education in ethics from Michael Smith and Philip Pettit, and did more work on two-dimensionalism.

Where were you when you wrote the Mary Article?

That was at Monash. I was asked by the psychology department to give a lunchtime talk. So, I sat down and said to myself, “what am I going to tell them that's suitable as a lunchtime talk”. I wrote a rough draught of the Mary paper. When you read the published article, you may notice that it is slightly informal for an academic article. 

It has been incredibly influential, however. 

Yes, it has been and, of course, that’s gratifying. Who wants to write articles that no one reads? The basic argument has been around for a long time, as I have said elsewhere. I give myself brownie points for forceful presentation, but the basic argument has a long history. I mentioned some of the history in footnotes in the paper, but subsequently I discovered it has a very long history.

Of course, and this is slightly awkward for me, I no longer think of it as successful. I think it is a good article because it raises a whole heap of issues and it has generated some very good philosophy, but, of course, I now think the basic argument is a mistake.

I was going to say, you are no longer an epiphenomenal qualia advocate? 

No, I am now a representationalist about perceptual experience, and if you’re a representationalist, the whole discussion around the knowledge argument looks very different.

What were the central topics in philosophy when you first studied philosophy?

Have those changed?

Have your views on what matters in philosophy changed?

Well, the first question is an easy one. When I was an undergraduate, nearly everyone or everyone in Melbourne philosophy, was talking about the Mind-Brain Identity Theory. So, that was very dominant. And the students divided into those who were for the identity theory and those who were against it, and the faculty were divided too. But the discussions weren’t as narrow as you might have thought, because what’s interesting about the Mind-Brain Identity Theory is that it raises a whole host of issues. Like the nature of identity, is there any such thing as contingent identity? And one of the arguments for the mind-brain identity theory was a view about scientific reduction, so that was on the table also, as one of the issues to be discussed. 

And Armstrong defended the theory partly via conceptual analyses of mental states. So, the role of conceptual analysis was on the table as well. 

How have things changed since then? I think the overall style of philosophy is much the same. A feature of the debate about the Mind-Brain Identity Theory was acknowledging the relevance of science for philosophical issues, and the importance of having clear forceful arguments, with limited ‘waffle’. Anyone who saw Armstrong in action saw minimum waffle at a maximum. So, I think that’s remained a feature, a good feature, of Australian philosophy.

As far as the topics discussed go, there have been big changes. When I was an undergraduate the impact of Hilary Putnam and Saul Kripke's work on the necessary a posteriori and the theory of reference was only just filtering through. And then there was the influence of Peter Singer. We all did meta-ethics, and we all did normative ethics, but when Peter came along we all thought we should probably do some applied ethics as well, and that was a kind of tip of the iceberg. It brought philosophy into the public domain, which is without a doubt a good thing.

What was the understanding of the social and political role of philosophy when you first studied?

How has that changed?

What do you think it should be?

When I was an undergraduate there wasn’t much of a role for philosophy. People were demonstrating against the Vietnam war, but I don’t think that they did so because of their philosophical opinions. But later on, under the influence of Peter Singer’s arguments, a number of my colleagues, and a number of philosophers (and non-philosophers) all over the world, became vegetarians. And philosophers these days are much more active in arguing for our moral responsibility for the planet – take John Broome on climate change, for instance.

There have of course always been philosophers in Australia making important contributions to debates in the public domain: Robert Young at La Trobe, John Kleinig at Macquarie, Tony Coady at Melbourne, John Passmore at ANU, come to mind. I think it is fair to say that they were a bit on the fringe to start with, but later on people realised that what they were doing was enormously important. When I was an undergraduate the idea of writing a paper on, say, moral obligations to protect the planet from the threat of climate change would not have been on the top of people’s agenda. They would more likely have wanted to write on, say, why the Mind-Brain Identity Theory can’t possibly be true, or the correct theory of indicative conditionals. So, there has been a change. And that's a good thing, surely.

How do you think philosophers should deal with the problems they discuss?

What should be at the heart of philosophical method?

I’m a fan of clarity and good arguments, but then aren’t we all fans of clarity and good arguments? And of taking the science seriously. The day after I read Jack Smart on time, I realised there was not much point in thinking about the concept of time without paying attention to what physics says. In the past it is true, of course, that philosophers did write about time without thinking much about what physics has to say. I think Jack was absolutely correct that not looking at the physics is a big mistake.

I think it’s interesting to think about the best way to teach first year philosophy. There are roughly two ways of doing it. One way is to work through specific problems and the other is to work through it historically, starting with Socrates and ending up in the 21^st century.

When I was a student, Armstrong’s lectures, mentioned earlier, were problem orientated, and they were very good lectures. But, at the same time, I attended lectures from Boyce Gibson, which were historically based. He never said whether he thought that what Socrates was saying was true or false. Armstrong would come in and say, “Berkeley argues so and so and I reply thus”. And right away you became engaged in the debate, whereas in the lectures that Gibson gave on Plato’s Republic, you never heard Gibson say, “I think Plato makes a big mistake when he has Socrates saying such and such”. There was nothing like that. 

What are the proper limits of philosophical inquiry?

Well, it’s a bad thing generally to talk about something you don’t know much about. But that’s not just true for philosophers, it’s true for all of us. I think philosophers should talk on any topic, provided they know what they are talking about. Sometimes they may not be talking as philosophers.

Is there anything distinctive about Australasian Philosophy?

Is there an Australian way of doing philosophy?

Well, the conventional wisdom is that we are admirably direct, we respect science, and some suggest (tongue in cheek) that the bright sunlight means we see things more clearly. I think there is some truth in that, but I think it’s also been a bit overplayed. A lot of philosophers in England and America (and elsewhere) say things that are forceful, clear and direct, and respect science. But there is some truth to the idea that there is a certain Australasian writing style, which perhaps goes back to Armstrong and Smart. When you read Armstrong and Smart, their philosophical writings are unusually direct and clear, and this has influenced people. 

Have you seen any change in the way philosophy and philosophical questions have been approached in Australasia over the last 100 years?

There has certainly been more attention to science, but I think that’s true of analytic philosophy in general. I think, apart from that, one thing that has happened is that there’s been a lot more focus on the philosophy of language as such. For example, when you read old articles on ethics, the idea that ethical language might not be property-ascribing, doesn’t appear anywhere. People talk about being morally good as if it is like being shaped or being square. The idea that you might instead see moral terms as expressing an attitude, not reporting a property, is invisible.

On the changes in philosophy, someone told me years ago that if you go have a look at the issue in Mind where Bertrand Russell published his article “On Denoting”, it is surrounded by a lot of papers by British Hegelians. It stands out and looks odd in a way. I guess that just says something about what happened with British philosophy. 

Yes, and thank heavens that Russell had his paper accepted. 

What, in your view, will the next 100 years bring for Australasian Philosophy?

Of course, the short answer is I don't know. But I’m optimistic. There are so many good graduate students, they are keen, they are doing lots and lots of good stuff. So, I’m optimistic about the future.