John Smithin Interviewed by Viktoriya Korchikova-Malovichko, 09.01.2025

John Smithin interviewed by Viktoriya Korchikova-Malovichko for the ‘Kak Tee Kat Tuss’ YouTube Channel  - 09.01.2025

1/ Please, introduce yourself and your main projects;

My name is John Smithin and I am the Research Director of the Aurora Philosophy Institute, here in Aurora, Ontario, Canada. I have just stepped down as the Executive Co-Director of the API, and am looking forward to the new role. I am also Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar at York University, Toronto. Emeritus basically means old and retired. But, in fact, scholars never retire. (They do unfortunately get old).

I started life as a professional economist, a monetary theorist. But one cannot understand money without understanding (what a philosopher would call) the ontology of money (the nature of money). And this inevitably means that you also have to understand philosophy itself.

Projects

Well, it is 2025 now, fifty years since I first came to Canada. I have to complete four projects in the next 11 years by which time I will 85 years old. The 4 projects (books) are:

A: Coping with Reality: Can Philosophy Help?

B: Ten Controversial Topics in Philosophy

C:  Selected Essays in Monetary Macroeconomics, Philosophy, and Political Economy

D: Political Economy & Philosophy a Century After Keynes

Keynes’s General Theory was published in 1936, so that has to be done by 2036.

 

2/ Which of your books is the most influential in your opinion in terms of meaningfulness , significance and common sense about Money?

That is very difficult to say. I have single-authored or co-authored 11 books, and edited or co-edited 7 of them. My most recent co-authored book was called Beyond Barter: Lectures on Monetary Macroeconomics after Re-thinking, in 2022. The main title, Beyond Barter, is highly significant.

 

3/ Why do we need money and is it possible to live without money?

The mainstream economics profession, and really everyone in the contemporary world, totally misunderstands money. Think, for example, of all those people who are trying to persuade us that Bitcoin is a substitute for money – which is nonsense. The idea is that money itself is a ‘medium of exchange’, in turn a substitute for barter. It is not that at all. Money is a social relation, an essential social relation. It is the means by which we can unambiguously pay off debt, that is free ourselves from debt. Without it would not be possible to have the advanced society, and the standard of living, that we do have.

No, we cannot live without it. Not if we want to pursue what philosophers (again) call Eudamonia or human-flourishing.

 

4/ Who is most influential person in your life?

That is an easy question to answer. The most influential person in my life was my late wife, Hana Hermanska, Hanicka Hermanska. She was from Brno, Moravia, in the Czech Republic.

She was a writer, a linguist and, of course, a philosopher.

She was my lover, my best friend, my muse, my intellectual sparring partner, everything really. I miss her very much but try to carry on for her sake.

 

5/ Your advice for young philosophers who are dealing with the issues like: being, human being, and sense of life.

If you look at a philosophy textbook, they will tell you that the main dispute is between idealism and materialism. Idealism asserts something like the primacy of consciousness and materialism more-or-less the opposite. (That is, that all of our actions are pre-determined, there is no free will, etc.)

But all this is false. Idealism and materialism both fail. The answer would be something like (so-called) metaphysical realism. In a book from 2020, this is defined as follows.

            "Metaphysical realism involves both an ontological and an epistemological thesis –  namely

             that there are beings that exist and are what they are apart from our cognition of them and that

             we can know both the nature and existence of these beings".

The problem with this is that most (nearly all?) modern and post-modern philosophers have been taught (or brainwashed) to reject metaphysics entirely (to reject reality itself, you might say). This has been going on 300 years and was particularly bad in the twentieth century.

I think it is important to stress that realism is not co-extensive with materialism. There are certainly beings which exist that are immaterial, but are nonetheless entirely real and do have causal effects. Social relations (including money) are an obvious example, which bring us back to economics.