Philosopher
J. L. Mackie
Overview
John Leslie Mackie (25 August 1917 – 12 December 1981) was an Australian philosopher. He made significant contributions to ethics, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. Mackie had influential views on metaethics, including his defence of moral scepticism and his sophisticated defence of atheism. He wrote six books. His most widely known, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), opens by stating, "There are no objective values." It goes on to argue that because of this, ethics must be invented rather than discovered.
His posthumously published The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1982) has been called a tour de force in contemporary analytic philosophy. The atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen described it as "one of the most, probably the most, distinguished articulation of an atheistic point of view given in the twentieth century." In 1980, Time magazine described him as "perhaps the ablest of today's atheistic philosophers".
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Philosophers who discussed J. L. Mackie
Ideas J. L. Mackie discusses
- Moral nihilism
- Italy
- Atheism
- Intuition
- Philosophy (journal)
- Kai Nielsen (philosopher)
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding
- Metaphysics
- Metaethics
- Middle East
- Monotheism
- Oxford
- Omnipotence
- Psychological egoism
- Philosophy of religion
- Wayback Machine
- John Anderson (philosopher)
- University of Nottingham
- Rice University
- Richard Dawkins
- British Academy
- Sydney
- Problem of evil
- Theodicy
Place in the tradition
Part of Analytic philosophy.