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The Lincoln Inn The Northern Line No 2 Apr. 2007 An on-line journal dedicated to the life and work of John Anderson Edited by Mark Weblin. This journal is funded entirely from donations. Please forward any donations to 282 Blaxland Rd, Wentworth Falls 2782 Email: [email protected] In this issue: John Anderson and Idealism............................................................................................................................................................. 2 The Lincoln Inn .................................................................................................................................................................................. 6 Anderson/Walker Correspondence Feb. 1952 ............................................................................................................................... 10 The Andersonians............................................................................................................................................................................. 18 In this issue of The Northern Line, four separate items are published. The first is a contribution on John Anderson and Idealism which will be published in an up-coming volume The Dictionary of British Idealism (Thoemmes Press 2007). This article discusses the initial influence of Absolute Idealism on Anderson, his rejection of that position and then examines the evidence which suggests that he may have been moving back to a position which could be called ‘Idealist’ in his later life. Such a view will obviously be controversial amongst Andersonians, but it is a view that I first tentatively proposed over a decade ago and despite the passage of time, I have only become more certain that such a view is correct. The evidence, it must be said, is not conclusive, but it is the only conclusion I have consistently come back to on the basis of comments made by John himself. The second item is an impressionistic history of the Lincoln Inn Coffee Shop. Readers of the first issue of this journal may recall that I asked for a copy of the Lincoln Scrapbook and Index compiled by George Clarke in 2002. Ewan Maidment sent me an electronic copy of both documents and on the basis of this I have summarised the following history of the Lincoln Inn. The purpose of the article is not to provide a detailed history of The Lincoln for such a project would take more time than I can devote to it. Hence I have attempted to capture the main personalities, themes, locations and conflicts which characterised the brief life of The Lincoln. I am confident that there will be errors – either of fact or of omission – and I welcome any comments or corrections to the article. The third item continues the publication of the Anderson/Walker correspondence from 1952. This collection has extracts from February 1952 by which time Ruth has settled in to Crosby Hall at London University College and is attending seminars by Popper and Ryle. John has not yet started his university year and is reading the Scottish philosopher Robert Adamson and the English historian, Leslie Stephen. The final item is a continuation of my autobiographical outlines of the Andersonians. In this issue, I discuss briefly the careers of John Passmore, Doug McCallum, Jim Baker and David Armstrong. Again I welcome any corrections or additions to the text. I hope in time to have a fairly complete biographical outline of anyone who would have regarded themselves as an Andersonian. Since the publication of the first issue of The Northern Line, Jim Packer has completed and published his item listing of the entire Anderson archives at Sydney University. This has been an immense undertaking for Jim having taken the last three years to complete and I would like to publicly state my appreciation of the work he has done. Finally I would like to apologise for the long delay between the first and second issues of The Northern Line and anticipate that future issues will appear more regularly. Donations received: H.N. $50; P.H. $100; E.F. $20; 2 John Anderson and Idealism John Anderson was born on November 1, 1893 in the village of Stonehouse, thirty miles southwest of Glasgow and died in Sydney on July 6, 1962. He was the third born, and second son, of the marriage of Alexander Anderson, the headmaster at the local school with radical political tendencies, and Elizabeth Brown, also a schoolteacher but with literary interests. Anderson attended his fathers’ school until 1907 when he transferred to the Hamilton Academy. In 1910, he came first in the All Scotland Bursary Competition, a feat not repeated by any Scottish philosopher of his generation. Anderson entered Glasgow University in 1911 and studied Greek, Latin, mathematics and natural philosophy, winning the Cunninghame medal in mathematics in 1915. He then studied for an M.A. in moral philosophy, logic and political economy, winning the Caird medal in moral philosophy in 1917. During this period Anderson was exposed to a wide range of intellectual influences, including William James, John Burnet, Dosteovsky, Vico, Ibsen, Mathew Arnold, James Joyce, Georges Sorel, Freud, Marx, G.E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, although the predominant influence during this period were the 1917/18 Gifford Lectures of the Australian philosopher, Samuel Alexander. Following graduation, Anderson accepted a visiting lectureship to Cardiff but returned to Glasgow on a Shaw fellowship in 1919, where he remained until his move to Edinburgh University as a lecturer in 1922. It was in this year that he married Janet (Jenny) Baillie whom he had known since his school days and had courted during and after his study at university. Their only child Alexander (Sandy) was born in the following year. Anderson arrived in Australia in 1927 to take up the Challis Chair of Philosophy at Sydney University from which he eventually retired in 1958. He remained in Australia until his death leaving the country on only one occasion in 1938, when he visited Scotland, England and America. Although Anderson was a regular contributor to the Australasian Journal of Psychology and Philosophy (A.J.P.P.) during this time, he published only one book in his lifetime, a slim volume, Education and Politics, in 1931. At the time of his death, he was working on the index for Studies in Empirical Philosophy which was published posthumously in the same year, with an introduction written by John Passmore. Since his death, four more collections of Anderson’s writings have appeared, Art and Reality, Education and Inquiry, A Perilous and Fighting Life and Space-Time and the Proposition, dealing with his aesthetic, educational, political and ontological writings respectively. During this time, there have been three books written on Anderson, Anderson’s Social Philosophy, Australian Realism and A Passion to Oppose. The John Anderson web site contains many of Anderson’s lectures, articles and addresses and can be found at http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/anderson/. John Anderson’s early exposure to philosophy was in the form of the Scottish Hegelianism as articulated by Henry Jones, professor of philosophy at Glasgow. During his undergraduate years, Anderson appeared to accept the general doctrines of Idealism and many of his student essays, including his prize winning ‘The State as a Moral Agent’, defended the general Idealist perspective. The decisive shift in Anderson’s philosophical development occurred when he attended Alexander’s Gifford lectures and from this point his philosophy can be described as a Realist and Empiricist position. By 1922, he had articulated a clear statement of his new ‘positive’ philosophical position and in 1926 he used this position to criticise the humanism of F.C.S. Schiller. In the first five years after his arrival at Sydney University in 1927, Anderson publicly defended his Realist and Empiricist philosophy from criticisms by the Australian Idealists in a series of articles in the A.J.P.P.. On the basis of these articles, Anderson’s philosophy is often regarded as a set of unchanging doctrines which included such descriptions as Empiricism, Positivism, Realism, Objectivism, Naturalism, Pluralism and Determinism. Anderson’s philosophy is most widely known as a Realist philosophy, a description which emphasises its opposition to Idealism and which has three closely connected meanings. The first is the epistemological meaning that the object of knowledge exists independently of either the subject of knowledge or the relation of knowing. The logical form of this doctrine is ‘s/R/o’. The second is the ontological meaning that the qualities that a thing has must also be independent of the relations that it has, thus implying that no qualities are relations and no relations are qualities. The third was the logical doctrine of external relations where in any relationship ‘a/R/b’, the terms of the relation are independent from each other and of the relations between them. After his arrival in Australia, Anderson engaged with the Australian Idealists on a number of fronts and the clearest statement of his philosophical position at this time appeared in his 1931 article, ‘Realism and some of its critics’. In this article, he argued that Realism stands opposed to Idealism – Idealism is in fact ‘unintelligible’ – and develops into a pluralist, empiricist and positivist position in reaction to the monism, rationalism and relativism of Idealism. 3 Firstly Realism develops as a pluralist philosophy and as such not only stands in opposition to the monism of Absolute Idealism but
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