Frank Cameron Jackson was born on 31 August 1943 in Melbourne, Australia.[2] His parents were both philosophers.[3] His mother Ann E. Jackson, who rose to the rank of senior tutor, taught philosophy at the University of Melbourne from 1961 to 1984.[3] His atheistic father Allan Cameron Jackson (1911–1990)[4] had been a student of Ludwig Wittgenstein[5] (having gone to Cambridge in 1946 for Ph.D. studies).[3] F. C. Jackson, in interview with Graham Oppy, reports of his parents that; they were both "philosophers in the Old School, by which I mean the Wittgensteinian School. Philosophy was part of your life."[6]
Despite his self-reported enjoyment of the philosophical conversation of his household it was with view to becoming a mathematician that Jackson went to the University of Melbourne to study maths and science.[6][7] And it was only in his final year of those studies that he chose to also take some philosophy which he found he better enjoyed and proved significantly more able.[6][7] He passed his B.Sc. but went on to achieve Honours in a B.A. whose main subject was philosophy.[8][6][7] During his time at Melbourne he was a resident at Trinity College, a Clarke Scholar, and a member of the 2nd XVIII football team.[9]
Upon graduation from his second degree, Jackson taught at the University of Adelaide for a year in 1967 and then went to La Trobe University for a lectureship appointment.[10] Whilst there, Jackson published his first book (which was also his doctoral thesis) "Perception: A Representative Theory" (1977). The following year he succeeded his father to the chair of Philosophy at Monash University.[10]
In 1986, he joined ANU as Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Philosophy Program, within the Research School of Social Sciences. At ANU, he 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 (2004–7). Jackson was appointed as Distinguished Professor at ANU in 2003; he became an Emeritus Professor upon his retirement in 2014.[11] Latterly (2007–14) he had also been a regular visiting professor of philosophy at Princeton University.[12]
In philosophy of mind, Jackson is known especially for the knowledge argument against physicalism—the view that the universe is entirely physical (i.e., the kinds of entities postulated in physics). Jackson motivates the knowledge argument by a famous thought experiment known as Mary's room. In a much cited passage[14] he phrases the thought experiment as follows:
Mary is a brilliant scientist who is, for whatever reason, forced to investigate the world from a black and white room via a black and white television monitor. She specializes in the neurophysiology of vision and acquires, let us suppose, all the physical information there is to obtain about what goes on when we see ripe tomatoes, or the sky, and use terms like 'red', 'blue', and so on. She discovers, for example, just which wavelength combinations from the sky stimulate the retina, and exactly how this produces via the central nervous system the contraction of the vocal cords and expulsion of air from the lungs that results in the uttering of the sentence 'The sky is blue'. (…) What will happen when Mary is released from her black and white room or is given a color television monitor? Will she learn anything or not? It seems just obvious that she will learn something about the world and our visual experience of it. But then is it inescapable that her previous knowledge was incomplete. But she had all the physical information. Ergo there is more to have than that, and Physicalism is false.
Jackson's thought experiment features in the 1996 Channel 4 documentary "Brainspotting"[16] and David Lodge's novel Thinks... (2001).[17]
Jackson used the knowledge argument, as well as other arguments, to establish a sort of dualism, according to which certain mental states, especially qualitative ones, are non-physical. The view that Jackson urged was a modest version of epiphenomenalism—the view that certain mental states are non-physical and, although caused to come into existence by physical events, do not then cause any changes in the physical world.
However, Jackson later rejected the knowledge argument,[18] as well as other arguments against physicalism:
Most contemporary philosophers given a choice between going with science and going with intuitions, go with science. Although I once dissented from the majority, I have capitulated and now see the interesting issue as being where the arguments from the intuitions against physicalism—the arguments that seem so compelling—go wrong.
Jackson argues that the intuition-driven arguments against physicalism (such as the knowledge argument and the zombie argument) are ultimately misleading.
Jackson is also known for his defence of the centrality of conceptual analysis to philosophy; his approach, set out in his Locke Lectures and published as his 1998 book, is often referred to as the Canberra Plan.
In 2003 he was appointed as Distinguished Professor at the Australian National University and Emeritus Professor in 2014. In November 2018 Jackson received the Peter Baume Award, which recognises substantial and significant achievement and merit.[24]
^Supervenience, Metaphysics, and Analysis (John Locke Lectures), Oxford University, 1994–95
^Nida-Rümelin, Martine; O Conaill, Donnchadh (2021), "Qualia: The Knowledge Argument", in Zalta, Edward N. (ed.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 ed.), Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, retrieved 19 April 2022.
^In: A. O'Hear (Ed.), Minds and Persons (Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements, pp. 251-272). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2003) doi:10.1017/CBO9780511550294.014.
^"Frank Jackson". Australian Academy of the Humanities. Retrieved 1 December 2018.
^*a significantly revised version of this paper appears (under the same title) as Chapter 6 of Conditionals (1987)
General references and further reading
Franklin, J. 2003. Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia, Macleay Press, Ch. 9. (Chapter as shared by author)
Ludlow, P., Y. Nagasawa, and D. Stoljar (eds.). 2004. There's Something About Mary, MIT Press. (Introduction as shared by publisher and archived by Wayback Machine)
External links
Frank Jackson – homepage at ANU's Research School of Social Sciences
