{"id":7485,"date":"2014-12-30T05:56:16","date_gmt":"2014-12-30T05:56:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/12\/30\/clive-james-on-john-anderson\/"},"modified":"2014-12-30T05:56:16","modified_gmt":"2014-12-30T05:56:16","slug":"clive-james-on-john-anderson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/12\/30\/clive-james-on-john-anderson\/","title":{"rendered":"Clive James on John Anderson; Anderson and Rand"},"content":{"rendered":"

There is little philosophical 'meat' here<\/a>, but it is useful for contextualizing the man and his thought.<\/span><\/p>\n

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 developed by their acolytes; both founded highly influential cults; both were atheists and naturalists;  both had curious and old-fashioned notions in logic; both were controversialists; both resided on the outskirts of academic respectability.<\/span><\/p>\n

The last point of comparison merits some exfoliation and qualification.  Anderson was surely a much better philosopher than Rand: unlike Rand, he was trained in philosophy; he held academic posts, mainly at the Unversity of Sydney whose intellectual life he dominated for many years; he read and wrote for the professional journals engaging to some degree with fellow professional philosophers.  But the majority of his strictly  philosophical publications were confined to the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy<\/em> and its successor the Australasian Journal of Philosophy<\/em>.  Also noteworthy is that, with the exception of a few epigoni, his ideas are not discussed. <\/span><\/p>\n

One such epigone is A. J. Baker who has written a very useful but uncritical and not very penetrating study, Australian Realism: The Systematic Philosophy of John Anderson,<\/em> Cambridge UP, 1986.  He rightly complains in a footnote on p. 62:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

D. M. Armstrong, who in his Universals and Scientific Realism<\/em>, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1978, gives an account of many types of theories, curiously dedicates the book to Anderson and yet does not discuss or even describe Anderson's theory on the subjec<\/span>t.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

\nRelated articles<\/legend>\n
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\"\"<\/a>Anderson Against Modes of Being: The Case of Berkeley<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>The Ramsey Problem and the Problem of the Intrinsically Unpropertied Particular<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Ayn Rand Helped FBI Investigate 'It's a Wonderful Life'<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Happy Selfish Christmas! 21 Ayn Rand Holiday Cards<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 … Continue reading “Clive James on John Anderson; Anderson and Rand”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[564,175],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7485","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anderson-john","category-rand-ayn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7485","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7485"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7485\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7485"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7485"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7485"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}