John Alexander Smith

Who was John Alexander Smith?

John Alexander Smith was an Idealist philosopher, who was the Jowett Lecturer of philosophy at Balliol College, Oxford from 1896 to 1910, and Waynflete Professor of Moral and Metaphysical Philosophy, carrying a Fellowship at Magdalen College in the same university, from 1910 to 1936. He was born in Dingwall and died in Oxford.

Smith was educated at Inverness Academy, at the collegiate school, Edinburgh, at Edinburgh University, and at Balliol College, Oxford, to which he was admitted as Warner exhibitioner and honorary scholar in Hilary term 1884. His most visible accomplishments were his work with William David Ross on a 12-volume commentary on Aristotle, and his Gifford Lectures for 1929-1931 on the Heritage of Idealism, which were never published.

The 'Moral' tag in his Professorial title disappeared with R.G. Collingwood's appointment in 1936. Smith expressed some unease about the combination of 'moral' and 'metaphysical' in his inaugural lecture Knowing and Acting, Oxford : OUP, 1910: 4-5: The framer of the Chair's regulations, he remarks, describes the Professor's duties 'in a way which rather sets a probem than furnishes guidance. The Professor, he says, 'shall lecture and give instruction on the principles and history of Mental Philosophy, and on its connexion with Ethics.' He distinguishes two great departments of philosophical though86t — so recognizedly different as already to be assigned for separate treatment to two other Professors in the University — and he enjoins that they shall be afresh discussed in their connexion with one another, yet with respect to their distinction. It can scarcely be his meaning that his Professor should attempt the invidious task of harmonizing the possibly divergent accounts given of Logic by the Wykeham Professor and of Ethics by Whyte's Professor, of performing in public the higher synthesis of his colleagues' several contributions to philosophic truth, or — less arrogantly — of indicating or reinforcing their latent consonance. Such a task, had it been required or suggested, I could not have undertaken.'