Ullin Thomas Place

Ullin Thomas Place was born on 24 October 1924 in Northallerton, Yorkshire, England.

He received a B.A., Philosophy and Psychology, from Oxford in 1949, an M.A. and Diploma in Anthropology, also from Oxford in 1950, and a D.Litt. (Philosophy), Adelaide, South Australia, 1972.

He was introduced to behaviorism by the philosopher, Gilbert Ryle.

Place became the first Lecturer in Psychology, Department of Philosophy, University of Adelaide in 1951 and until 1954 was the only full time psychologist on the faculty. He was responsible for the establishment of the first psychological laboratory at Adelaide, c. 1953, with advice and assistance from Norman Munn. He was also responsible for securing the appointment of S. H. Lovibond as the second Lecturer in Psychology at Adelaide and for the inauguration of a second year unit in Psychology in 1954. Place initiated a research program on the conditioning treatment of nocturnal enuresis, which Lovibond took over after Place left Adelaide in January 1955 and made into his Ph.D. thesis which was published as Conditioning and Enuresis in 1964.

Place’s paper  “Is consciousness a brain process?”, British Journal of Psychology, 1956 is the primary source of the Australian version of the mind-brain identity theory, subsequently developed by J. J. C. Smart and David Armstrong.

Place served as a clinical psychologist in the British National Health Service in the 1960s, and taught clinical psychology and then philosophy at Leeds University in the 1970s.

He retired from teaching in the early 1980s, devoting himself to full-time philosophic research until his death from cancer on 2 January, 2000.