Frank Cameron Jackson AO took mathematics and philosophy at the University of Melbourne and a PhD in philosophy at La Trobe University. He taught at Adelaide for a year (1967) before moving to La Trobe and then to a chair at Monash (1978). He joined the ANU in 1986 as Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Philosophy Program, Research School of Social Sciences. Each Fall from 2007 to 2013, he was a visiting professor at Princeton University.

At ANU Jackson has served as Director of the Institute of Advanced Studies (1998-2001), Deputy Vice-Chancellor (Research) (2001) and Director of the Research School of Social Sciences (2004-2007). He was appointed as Distinguished Professor at ANU in 2003. He became an emeritus professor on 1 Augsut 2014.

He is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Australian Academy of Humanities, and the Australian Academy of Social Sciences. He gave the Locke lectures at Oxford in 1995, the Blackwell/Brown lectures in philosophy in 2006, the Gavin David Young lectures at Adelaide in 2012, the Carnap Lectures at Bochum in 2017, was a visiting Leverhulme Professor at Cambridge University in 2011, and was Lim Chong Yah Visiting Professor, National University of Singapore in 2017.