Keith Campbell (1938 – 12 October 2024) was an Australian

philosopher Philosophy ('love of wisdom' in Ancient Greek) is a systematic study of general and fundamental questions concerning topics like existence, reason, knowledge, Value (ethics and social sciences), value, mind, and language. It is a rational an ...

working in

metaphysics Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the basic structure of reality. It is traditionally seen as the study of mind-independent features of the world, but some theorists view it as an inquiry into the conceptual framework of ...

Biography

With D. M. Armstrong, Campbell was one of the founders of so-called '' Australian materialism'' and, within it, of a variety of

trope theory Trope denotes figurative language, figurative and metaphorical language and one which has been used in various technical senses. The term ''trope'' derives from the Greek language, Greek τρόπος (''tropos''), "a turn, a change", related to th ...

. He also had a distinctive view of concrete and abstract objects: the former can exist by themselves, and the latter are incapable of independent existence. He refused, following

Frank P. Ramsey Frank Plumpton Ramsey (; 22 February 1903 – 19 January 1930) was a British people, British philosopher, mathematician, and economist who made major contributions to all three fields before his death at the age of 26. He was a close friend of ...

, the necessity of choice between realism and

nominalism In metaphysics, nominalism is the view that universals and abstract objects do not actually exist other than being merely names or labels. There are two main versions of nominalism. One denies the existence of universals—that which can be inst ...

in the

problem of universals The problem of universals is an ancient question from metaphysics that has inspired a range of philosophical topics and disputes: "Should the properties an object has in common with other objects, such as color and shape, be considered to exist ...

, because they both share "a false presupposition being that any quality or relation must be a universal" (Campbell 1991, preface). The separation between the

University of Sydney The University of Sydney (USYD) is a public university, public research university in Sydney, Australia. Founded in 1850, it is the oldest university in both Australia and Oceania. One of Australia's six sandstone universities, it was one of the ...

's Departments of Traditional and Modern Philosophy and of General Philosophy is attributed to his organising the proposal in 1973. He was a senior lecturer in the "Traditional and Modern" one and later became an emeritus professor in the recombined Department of Philosophy (part of the School of Philosophical and Historical Inquiry). Campbell was elected a Fellow of the

Australian Academy of the Humanities The Australian Academy of the Humanities was established by Royal Charter in 1969 to advance scholarship and public interest in the humanities in Australia. It operates as an independent not-for-profit organisation partly funded by the Australi ...

in 1977. Campbell was known as a co-editor of ''Ontology, Causality, and Mind: Essays in Honour of D. M. Armstrong'', and as author of ''Body and Mind''. Campbell died on 12 October 2024, at the age of 85–86.

Bibliography

* ''Body and Mind'', Garden City, N.Y., Anchor Books, 1970, (2nd edition, 1984). * ''Metaphysics: An introduction'', Encino, Calif.: Dickenson Pub. Co., (The Dickenson series in philosophy), 1976. * ''A Stoic Philosophy of Life'', Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1986. * ''Abstract Particulars (Philosophical Theory)'', Cambridge, Mass., USA : B. Blackwell, 1991. * ''Ontology, Causality, and Mind: Essays in Honour of D.M. Armstrong'', Keith Campbell, John Bacon, and Lloyd Reinhardt (eds.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993.

References

20th-century Australian philosophers 21st-century Australian philosophers Australian non-fiction writers Academic staff of the University of Sydney Challis professor 1938 births {{Australia-philosopher-stub Fellows of the Australian Academy of the Humanities 2024 deaths