John Passmore (1914–2004) was an Australian philosopher.
Passmore was born in Manly, Sydney. He graduated from the
University of Sydney with first-class honours in English literature and philosophy, and went on to study to become
a secondary-school teacher. In 1934 he accepted the position of assistant lecturer in philosophy at the University of Sydney,
continuing teaching there until 1949. In 1948 he went to study at the University of
London.
From 1950 to 1955 he was professor of philosophy at Otago University in
New Zealand. In 1955 he spent a year at the University of Oxford on a Carnegie grant. Upon his return to Australia he took up a post at the
Institute of Advanced Studies at the Australian National University,
where he was professor of Philosophy in the Research School of Social Sciences from 1958 to 1979.
In 1960 he was Ziskind visiting professor at Brandeis University in the
United States. He subsequently lectured in England, the
United States, Mexico, Japan, and in various European countries.
Passmore was as much an historian of ideas as a philosopher, and his scholarship always paid careful attention to the complex
historical context of philosophical problems. He published about twenty books, many of which have been translated. Passmore will
be remembered as a thinker who helped to shape public debate and to open up domains of applied philosophy and the history of
ideas to the wider world.
In his book Man's Responsibility for Nature (1974) Passmore argued that there is urgent need to change our attitude to
the environment, and that humans cannot continue unconstrained exploitation of the biosphere. However, he rejected the view that
we need to abandon the Western tradition of scientific rationalism, and was unsympathetic towards attempts to articulate
environmental concern through radical revisions of our ethical framework, as advocated by deep
ecologists, which he conceived as misguided mysticism or irrationalism. Passmore's unequivocal anthropocentrism made him a reference point in the discourse of environmental ethics and many treatises in the field begin with (or include) a refutation of his
views. Passmore's skepticism about attempts to attribute intrinsic value to nature, and his preferred position of valuing nature
in terms of what it contributes to the flourishing of sentient creatures (including humans), is perhaps not as unfashionable now
as it was in the years following the publication of Man's Responsibility for Nature. Passmore described himself as a
"pessimistic humanist" who regarded neither human beings nor human societies as perfectible.
Passmore took a keen interest in film and in performing arts and was a director of the Australian Elizabethan Theatre Trust.
He was survived by his wife Doris and two daughters.
Works
- Ralph Cudworth (1951)
- Hume's Intentions (1952)
- Philosophical Reasoning (1961)
- Joseph Priestley (1965)
- One Hundred Years of Philosophy (1956) (1968)
- Man's Responsibility for Nature (1974) (1980)
- Memoirs of a Semi-detached Australian (1997)
Sources
- John Passmore One Hundred Years of Philosophy. Baltimore, MA: Penguin Books, 1968
External links
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