Janet Farrell Smith passed away, 8 January 2009 after a long illness. Janet, a professor in the Philosophy Department, taught Critical Thinking, Foundations of Philosophy, and Biomedical ethics at various times for the CCT Program. Colleagues, friends, and family gathered at the Brown Funeral Home in Belmont on January 10th, where Janet's UMass colleagues had a chance to meet and share rememberances with Janet's brothers and their families and Janet's daughter, Julie, who is graduating from college this spring specializing in video game production. A Memorial Service will be held later this year.
Janet was a pioneer in philosophy in several ways. Entering graduate school in 1963, she was one of a small number of women in the discipline at that time. She specialized in philosophy of logic and language, an especially rare field for women in philosophy. She came to UMass in 1975 and soon began branching out into feminist topics. She contributed articles to two of the earliest feminist philosophy collections, Mothering, and Beyond Domination. Over the years her philosophical interests broadened into ethics, social, and political philosophy, and she worked on issues of identity and bioethics. She developed a subspeciality in philosophical issues concerning adoption, and was one of the first philosophers to work on that topic, contributing to the collection Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays. Her work became increasingly interdisciplinary over these years. At different times she held fellowships or associateships at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School, Harvard Divinity School, and the DuBois Insttitute on African and African American Research. In recent years she worked on ethics and genetics.
Janet Farrell Smith died on January 8 after battling cancer since 2002. Professor Farrell Smith joined the Philosophy Department at UMass Boston in 1975, after receiving her PhD from Columbia University. She was one of a tiny number of female graduate students in that program, and in philosophy in general in that period (1960s and early 70s). Her early work was in logic and philosophy of language (a particularly unusual field for women within philosophy), and she wrote several important papers on Alexius Meinong and Bertrand Russell. (ãThe Russell-Meinong Debateä was published in the journal Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1985.) Although Professor Smith continued to work on issues in philosophy of language, particularly focusing on the work of Wittgenstein, she began to broaden her interests early on in her career. Farrell Smith was among the first philosophers to work on topics of concern to women, such as reproductive rights, in the 1970s. She was a genuine pioneer in that area, and contributed articles to some of the earliest collections of feminist philosophical writings in the late '70s and early '80s (J. Trebilcotâs Mothering: Essays in Feminist Theory, and C. Gouldâs, Beyond Domination), one of which ("Plato, Irony, and Equality") was subsequently reprinted twice. She also contributed to the premiere feminist philosophy journal, Hypatia: A Journal of Feminist Philosophy.
More recently Farrell Smith brought her incisive analytic skills to bear on issues in ethics, social, and political philosophy more generally, and bioethics, the theory of property, and the emerging field of the philosophy of social identities in particular. Although trained as an analytic philosopher, Farrell Smith was never one to stay put in an intellectual "box"; for example, she became interested in the dialogic ethics of JŸrgen Habermas, published articles in this area, and used Habermasâs framework in other work. Her increasingly interdisciplinary interests and accomplishments led her to work with scholars in disciplines outside philosophy; in recent years she held fellowships, at different times, at Harvard Law School, Harvard Medical School, and Harvard Divinity School. She became a specialist in the ethics of adoption, and especially cross-racial adoption; she wrote several important articles on the latter topic, the most accessible of which appears in the collection Adoption Matters: Philosophical and Feminist Essays (S. Haslanger and C. Witt [eds.], 2005). Her interest in this issue was partly sparked by her own adopting (in China) of a Chinese child in 1988, in a period when the Chinese government created immense bureaucratic hurdles to such adoptions. Janet traveled alone to China and had to live there for several months to overcome these hurdles and bring Julia home. Farrell Smith remained active in the community of adoptive mothers of Chinese girls. Her research on the racial dimension of the adoption issue was further enhanced by an association with Harvardâs DuBois Institute for African and African American Research, and she also began working in the general area of multiculturalism and the philosophy of identity.
Farrell Smith also worked on issues of genetic screening, and ethics and genetics more generally. She organized a large and extremely successful, two-part, remarkably interdisciplinary conference at UMB in 2000 on the ethics of adoption and of genetic screening. The adoption portion of this conference brought together people on opposite sides of a very charged issue, with some condemning any adoption of black children by white couples and others advocating completely race-blind adoption policies. As director and discussion leader of this conference, Farrell Smith did a remarkable job of navigating these conflicts and turned the conference into an extremely productive and unusual discussion of these issues among people who ordinarily would not have spoken to one another. She edited a transcript of the conference, which was published by the McCormack Institute of Public Affairs.
Farrell Smith had a gift for bringing people together. In 1994, drawing on her own research in philosophy of language and discourse ethics, she organized an interdisciplinary conference on ãHate Speech and the Ethics of Communicationä with her colleague Lynne Tirrell. This conference brought scholars of many disciplines together with social workers, law enforcement, and community activists. In 1996, bringing her knowledge of feminist theory to bear on work by psychologists from the Stone Center at Wellesley College, she organized a conference on the relational self with Jennifer Radden, also of the UMB Philosophy Department.
Farrell Smith was promoted to full professor in 2005. Her exceptional range of interests and disciplinary expertise was recognized in her promotion review. The Provostâs report noted that Farrell Smithâs work "embraced law, medicine, politics, sociology, bioethics, history, and sociolinguistics." Outside reviewers admired her combination of close attention to particularity, yet breadth. As one stated, "She moves smoothly from discussions of contract theory to equality of opportunity to democratic discourse theory to parental rights to the rights of cultural minorities to sociolinguistics to the metaphysics of selfhood." Farrell Smith was well on her way to finishing two book manuscripts when she died. One was on Personhood and Property, and the other on Justice and Children: The Ethics of Genetic Testing.
Farrell Smith was a long time resident of Cambridge and was professionally active in the Boston area, as a member of three long-standing local discussion groups, and participated in the American Philosophical Associationâs Society for Women in Philosophy.
As one might expect from the breadth of her professional and personal interests, Farrell Smith taught a wide range of courses at UMB at every curricular level over the years. She was the mainstay of the Departmentâs Philosophy 222 (Moral Issues in Medicine), a course very close to the heart of her scholarship. She also taught Moral and Social Problems, Introduction to Philosophy, Logic and Language, Wittgenstein, the Ethics of Property, a recently developed course on Ethics and Genetics, and occasionally Feminist Philosophy and Social and Political Philosophy. She developed and taught a General Education intermediate seminar, Individual and Community. In recent years, Farrell Smith was a regular contributor to programs beyond the Philosophy Department. In the McCormack Graduate School of Public Policy, she was a member of the core faculty and regularly taught in the core Political Economy course in the PhD Program in Public Policy. She taught courses in Biomedical Ethics, Critical Thinking, and Foundations of Philosophy in the Critical and Creative Thinking (M.A.) Program, housed in GCE.
Farrell Smith was a devoted and beloved teacher. The Deanâs report for her promotion found that ãnumerous students in a variety of settings have found Professor Smithâs instruction, probing questions, and participatory methodologies to be beneficial and even inspiring.ä Farrell Smith was a wonderful colleague to her Philosophy Department colleagues. We benefited from her ability to clarify discussions, cut to the chase and lay out the options. She often kept us on track in meetings, with good humor and a wonderful wit. She made sure we were in rooms with good ventilation, that we took breaks when needed, and that we got the work done. Her judgment about philosophical and personnel matters was important to the growth and development of the department across her 32 years with us.
Farrell Smith is survived by her daughter Julia Farrell Smith, 22, who is a senior at the Savannah College of Art and Design. She is also survived by her brothers, Stephen and James of Somerville, and David of McLean, VA; and seven nieces and nephews. Farrell Smith was a serious student of Buddhist spirituality, and was a member of the Mahasiddha Temple, a Buddhist community. She requested that contributions in her memory be sent to Tshog Dag Foundation, Nubri Fundraising, c/o Helena Hughes, 25 Antrim St., Cambridge MA 02139. (Please write "RMF" in the check memo. Contributions can be made on-line:
http://www.mahasiddha.org/nubri/contactus.html#donate )