Frank Cameron Jackson

Jackson was interested in mathematics and science, but he switched to philosophy after finding it more enjoyable and challenging. He obtained his BA and BSc from the University of Melbourne and his PhD from La Trobe University. He taught at the University of Adelaide, La Trobe University, and Monash University before joining ANU in 1986 as Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Philosophy Program. He also held visiting positions at Princeton University, Cambridge University, and National University of Singapore. He retired in 2014 and became an Emeritus Professor. Jackson’s main research interests were philosophy of mind, epistemology, metaphysics, and meta-ethics. He made significant contributions to these fields with his original and influential ideas. He is best known for his Mary’s room knowledge argument, a thought experiment that challenges physicalism by showing that there are facts about qualia that cannot be captured by physical information. He also developed a two-dimensional semantics framework that aims to account for the meaning and reference of expressions in different possible worlds. He also proposed a moral functionalism theory that analyzes moral concepts in terms of their causal roles in a society. Jackson was a highly respected and admired philosopher who received many honors and awards for his work. He was a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. He gave the Locke Lectures at Oxford in 1995, the Blackwell Brown Lectures in Philosophy in 2006, the Gavin David Young Lectures at Adelaide in 2012, the Carnap Lectures at Bochum in 2017, and many other distinguished lectures. He published several books and articles on various topics in philosophy, including Perception: A Representative Theory (1977) Conditionals (1987) From Metaphysics to Ethics: A Defence of Conceptual Analysis (1998), Language, Names, and Information (2010), and many more.