Anderson’s style, it has often been noted, was both Socratic and authoritarian.[16] As Peter Shrubb, one of Anderson’s former students, remarked in an article that appeared shortly after Anderson’s death:
Here, shivering, my Philosophy I class sat on the morning of March 20, 1945, waiting to hear its first lecture from Professor Anderson. This was the introduction to a series on the Apology, Socrates’ defence at his trial, and before it was half over I already had the bull by the foot; I was young and fodish, and I was not sure which was Socrates and which was John Anderson. One was short, strikingly ugly, and wore a sort of toga; the other was tall, strikingly handsome, and wore a blue suit. But these differences were superficial. They were great men, and men of the same kind.[17]
Following in the Socratic style, Anderson maintained that ‘[t]he work of the academic, qua academic is criticism’.[18] In this vein, John Passmore has gone so far as to suggest that, with the exception of his writings on logic and, to some degree ethics, ‘Anderson did not develop his views systematically but rather through a critique of the classical philosophers’.[19] He was not, in Passmore’s view, ‘a scholar’ of the classic texts, but relied on secondary interpretations, and focused on critique as the basis of his scholarship.[20] Indeed, his ability to critique and ‘powers of dismissal were simply boundless’.[21]
This critical focus was also reflected in Anderson’s teaching style. ‘Socratic education begins’, he wrote in an early article, ‘with the awakening of the mind to the need for criticism, to the uncertainty of the principles by which it supposed itself to be guided’.[22] That said, among the most often repeated criticisms of Anderson’s scholarly style is that he could not tolerate being criticised himself. He was, as Armstrong notes, ‘authoritarian in his own personality and intolerant of dissent from his own views among his staff and students’.[23] His greatest intellectual weakness was his overwhelming desire to acquire disciples, many of his former students noting that they were treated with suspicion by Anderson for not joining the inner circle of his followers.[24]
Anderson’s authoritarian nature was also reflected in his lecturing style; his lectures were dictated in what were ‘by formal standards’ the ‘worst possible’ manner.[25] As tedious as it must have been for his students to endure this ‘pedagogical passivity’,[26] the distinct advantage of Anderson’s method for contemporary scholars is that his lecture notes represent almost exactly what was conveyed to his students. It is thus from his lecture notes and other papers, particularly ‘Realism and Some of its Critics’,[27] that we can begin to discern precisely what Anderson’s ‘Australian realism’ entailed.
[16] In a report of his 1941 address to the Freethought Society titled ‘Christianity, Faith and Credulity’, John Anderson is described as the ‘local Socrates’. (See John Anderson, ‘Christianity, Faith and Credulity’, University of Sydney, Australian Studies Resources, Professor John Anderson 1893–1962, John Anderson Lecture Notes and Other Writings, available at <http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/anderson/>, accessed 25 June 2008.)
[17] Peter Shrubb in The Bulletin, 30 June 1962.
[18] John Anderson, ‘The Place of the Academic in Modern Society’, in D.Z. Phillips (ed.), Education and Inquiry, Blackwell, Oxford, 1980, p. 214.
[19] Passmore, Memoirs of a Semi-Detached Australian, p. 94.
[20] Passmore, Memoirs of a Semi-Detached Australian, p. 94.
[21] Stove, ‘The Force of Intellect: Fifty Years of John Anderson’, Quadrant, vol. 21, 1977, pp. 45–46 (45).
[22] John Anderson in Franklin, Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia, p. 22.
[23] David M. Armstrong in R.J. Bogdan (ed.), in D.M. Armstrong, Reidel, Dordrecht and Boston, 1984, p. 7.
[24] David M. Armstrong in Franklin, Corrupting the Youth: A History of Philosophy in Australia, p. 47.
[25] Passmore, Memoirs of a Semi-Detached Australian, p. 93.
[26] Armstrong, ‘Introduction’, to University of Sydney, Australian Studies Resources, Professor John Anderson 1893–1962, John Anderson Lecture Notes and Other Writings, available at <http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/anderson/>, accessed 25 June 2008.
[27] John Anderson, ‘Realism and Some of its Critics’, in Studies in Empirical Philosophy, 1930, available at <http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/anderson/>, accessed 25 June 2008.