Jack Smart believed consciousness was a direct result of brain processes

Jack Smart, who has died aged 92, changed the course of contemporary philosophy.

He was most prominent in the philosophy of mind, but also influenced many other thinkers in their approach to physical science. He was a pioneer of physicalism - the set of theories that hold that consciousness, sensation and thought do not, as they seem to, float free of physicality, but can be located in a scientific material worldview.

His article "Sensations and Brain Processes" (1959) put forward his identity theory of mind - that consciousness and sensations are nothing over and above brain processes. Invariably included in any collection of mind-body problem papers, it is now part of the canon. 

Smart studied maths, physics and philosophy at Glasgow University, and during the second world war served in India and Burma. He gained a BPhil  at Queen's College, Oxford, in 1948, under the behaviourist Gilbert Ryle, and in 1950 became professor at Adelaide, where he stayed until 1972.

Away from the language-centred philosophy of Britain, Smart was freer to draw the implications that science had for philosophy. He began to ask why consciousness alone should remain exempt from physico-chemical explanation.

The behaviourist view he had espoused at Oxford got round this question by denying that mental states, like anger, pain or believing, can even qualify as things or events, whether physical or non-physical. Rather, to talk about mental states is, for behaviourism, simply to talk about collections of actual or potential behaviour.