While he's not as famous as he deserves to be, I'm posting this here anyway.
John Jamieson Carswell 'Jack' Smart passed away on the 6th of October.
http://www.monash.edu.au/news/show/vale-j.-j.-c.-smart
Quote:
J.J.C. Smart was one of the most influential professional philosophers in the English-speaking world in the second half of the twentieth century.
In the first place, he was extremely influential as an advocate of a theory in 'metaphysics’ concerning the nature of the soul or mind and its relationship to the human body. This theory, which Smart began defending in the early 1960s, was at first widely dismissed as “the Australian fallacy” (the English philosophers said that the poor fellow, having become Professor at Adelaide, had obviously had his brain addled by the Australian sun). But largely through Smart’s influence various species of Smart’s theory became extremely widely accepted among professional philosophers by the end of the century. The theory Smart launched was the theory that conscious experiences are identical with (and not just correlated with) brain processes. [It was later called "Australian Materialism" and now "Materialism" and is the predominant position today - ZG.]
Smart was also hugely influential as an advocate of a philosophical theory about the nature of time, closely related to Einstein’s theory of relativity. According to this theory time is a “fourth dimension” that is very much more similar than we normally realise to the familiar three dimensions of space. We normally think of things that are distant in space that they exist, even though they are not near to us; but we think of things that are distant in time as if they do not exist. Smart argued that science teaches us that this commonsense attitude to time is a mistake. He argued that although the past is distant from us it does still exist in exactly the same sense that things exist that are distant from us in space.
[New findings in quantum physics seem to require this approach - ZG]
Smart was also hugely influential as an advocate of grounding ethics in an attitude of universal benevolence. And he was influential as an advocate of atheism. Yet he was an atheist who never wavered in his sense of awe and wonder at the incredible beauty of the cosmos that science has discovered our world to be, governed as it is by astoundingly beautiful mathematical laws of nature. On top of that, he was a top bloke. His theoretical support of universal benevolence was accompanied by a genuine, heart-felt benevolence towards his family, friends, and colleagues. He was much loved and will be sorely missed. [I've heard that each year Jack would calculate the average income in Australia, keep that much of his salary fro himself, and give the rest to charity. And there are any number of anecdotes that begin "Jack took some visiting academics from US/UK/Etc for a hike, and ..."- ZG]
Even if he is right in his theory that his whole life does exist, though at a spatiotemporal distance from us, nevertheless the present and future parts of those who knew him, those parts that exist in the years after his death, will be pained by their temporal distance from him.
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I had a little to do with him when I was a graduate student. Although he was well retired, he was still on the ball, and was pretty much the archetypical affable old professor type.
Although one time he knocked on my office door and asked for help with his computer, because there were cats running around on the screen and tearing holes in things. He got the idea of a screensaver pretty quickly for an octogenerian.