Maverick Philosopher

Footnotes to Plato from the foothills of the Superstition Mountains

Category: Anderson, John

  • John Anderson: “We are all bothered by different things.”

    One of the nasty roots of political disagreement. Over at Substack

  • We are Bothered by Different Things

    Brian Kennedy, A Passion to Oppose: John Anderson, Philosopher, Melbourne University Press, 1995, p. 141: Melbourne intellectuals came to regard [John] Anderson 'as the man who had betrayed the Left, a man who had gone over to the other side.  Melburnians wanted Anderson to answer a simple question: was he or was he not interested in…

  • Working Draft: The Case Against Facts

    Comments appreciated if you are en rapport with the subject matter.   The Case Against Facts   Arianna Betti, Against Facts, The MIT Press, 2015, pp. 296 + xxvii   If Buridan's contribution to the bestiarum philosophorum was the ass, and David Armstrong's the ostrich, Arianna Betti's is the hedgehog bristling with spines. The hedgehog…

  • John Passmore on Entity-Monism and Existence-Monism

    The Australian philosopher John Passmore (1914 – 2004) is described in his Telegraph obituary as "an Andersonian radical, swept away, though not to the point of unquestioning devotion, by his Scottish-born philosophy professor, John Anderson . . . ."  The influence of Anderson on Passmore is very clear from the latter's Philosophical Reasoning (Basic Books,…

  • We Are All Bothered by Different Things

    Brian Kennedy, A Passion to Oppose: John Anderson, Philosopher, Melbourne University Press, 1995, p. 141: Melbourne intellectuals came to regard [John] Anderson 'as the man who had betrayed the Left, a man who had gone over to the other side.  Melburnians wanted Anderson to answer a simple question: was he or was he not interested…

  • God as an Ontological Category Mistake

    John Anderson's rejection of God is radical indeed. A. J. Baker writes: Anderson, of course, upholds atheism, though that is a rather narrow and negative way of describing his position given its sweep in rejecting all rationalist conceptions of essences and ontological contrasts in favour of the view that whatever exists is a natural occurrence…

  • John Anderson, Heraclitus the Obscure, and the Depth of Change

    A. J. Baker on John Anderson: ". . . there are no ultimates in Anderson's view and in line with Heraclitus he maintains that things are constantly changing, and also infinitely complex . . . ." (Australian Realism, Cambridge UP, 1986, p. 29, emphasis added) Change is a given.  From the earliest times sensitive souls…

  • Clive James on John Anderson; Anderson and Rand

    There is little philosophical 'meat' here, but it is useful for contextualizing the man and his thought. I stumbled upon this while searching without success for something comparing John Anderson with Ayn Rand.  They are fruitfully comparable in various respects.  Both were cantankerous and dogmatic and not open to having their ideas criticized or further…

  • Anderson Against Modes of Being: The Case of Berkeley

    I'm on a John Anderson jag at the moment and I'm having a blast. (Whatever else you say about philosophy it is a marvellous and marvellously reliable source of deep pleasure, at least to those to whom she has revealed herself and who have become her life-long acolytes.)  Anderson (1893-1962) is a fascinating character both…

  • John Anderson on Levels of Reality

    Call it the MOB doctrine: there are modes of being, ways of existing, levels of reality.  I have defended the MOB in these pages and in print, chiefly in "Existence: Two Dogmas of Analysis" in Novotny and Novak eds., Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives in Metaphysics, Routledge 2014, 45-75.  But I have yet to come to grips with…