John Anderson

John Anderson was a Scottish-born philosopher who held the Challis Chair of Philosophy at the University of Sydney from 1927 to 1958 and founded the empirical school of thought known as Australian realism. His insistence on unrestricted freethought across every subject, including politics and morality, repeatedly put him at odds with the university's governing senate, yet he trained a generation of Andersonian thinkers and activists who later helped place Sydney at the center of the sexual revolution of the 1950s and 1960s. He held that any philosophy worth holding needed real intellectual sweep, capable of challenging and reshaping ideas across the whole of intellectual and social life.