His most visible accomplishments were his work with William David Ross on a 12-volume translation of Aristotle, and his Gifford Lectures for 1929–1931 on the Heritage of Idealism, which were never published.
Smith expressed some unease about the combination of 'moral' and 'metaphysical' in his inaugural lecture Knowing and Acting: The framer of the Chair's regulations, he remarks, describes the Professor's duties 'in a way which rather sets a problem than furnishes guidance.
He distinguishes two great departments of philosophical thought — so recognizedly different as already to be assigned for separate treatment to two other Professors in the University — and he enjoins that they shall be afresh discussed in their connexion with one another, yet with respect to their distinction.
Smith, had opened a lecture course in 1914: 'Nothing that you will learn in the course of your studies will be of the slightest possible use to you in after life – save only this – if you work hard and diligently you should be able to detect when a man is talking rot, and that, in my view, is the main, if not the sole, purpose of education.
[3] Smith's early and perhaps predominant interests were literary and philological, as he makes clear in Contemporary British Philosophy, Second Series, ed.
At the turn of the twentieth century he espoused a form of realism but by the time of his appointment to the Waynflete Professorship had come strongly under the sway of the Italian philosopher, Benedetto Croce (1866–1952).
'In 1910, [Gilbert] Murray had ... to preside over a committee to discuss the possibility of instituting a new final 'schools' to cover part of the Greats [Literae Humaniores] ground.
In his Autobiography he reflected ruefully that discussions of Modern Greats: '... tended to be swamped by the then ruling school of philosophers, a race of men who were all too apt to assume that their own discipline gave them spiritual jurisdiction over all, or nearly all, others, regardless of their degree or relevant technical qualification - to hear, for instance, J.A.
Smith, Waynflete Professor of Moral Philosophy (sic) pontificating on the methodology of economics, with which his acquaintance was zero, was to gain new conceptions of human absurdity.
In Sir Roy Harrod's The Prof, London: Macmillan, 1959: 18–21, there is a sharply observed if unsympathetic account of Smith's contribution to a debate on relativity theory with F.A.
There is a good account of Smith's life and career in Sir David Ross' entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, 1931–40 (Oxford: OUP).
A different side of Smith's personality from that experienced by Lionel Robbins was seen by A.D. Lindsay (Master of Balliol 1924-49): 'On Saturday night I was in J.A.. Smith's room playing bridge with him and Cyril Bailey ... and an undergraduate whose name I didn't catch but who looked very nice and beautiful - there-and-back flannel collar with a gold safety-pin - that sort of thing.
"Oh I just looked in to see if you were doing anything" - and five more beautiful young men stroll in and lie about in chairs or prepare drinks for the whole party, making genial remarks on everyone's play and called the venerable J.A.
In Sir Roy Harrod's The Prof, London: Macmillan, 1959: 18–21, there is a sharply observed if unsympathetic account of Smith's contribution to a debate on relativity theory with F.A.