J. L. Mackie
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John Leslie Mackie FBA (25 August 1917–12 December 1981) was an Australian philosopher. He made significant contributions to the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language, and is perhaps best known for his views on metaethics, especially his defence of moral scepticism. He wrote six books. His most widely known, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), opens by boldly stating, "There are no objective values." It goes on to argue that because of this ethics must be invented rather than discovered. He posthumously published The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1983), has been called "a tour de force" in contemporary analytic philosophy. Many considered Mackie one of the best defenders of philosophical atheism. In the 1980s, Time magazine called him the "ablest of today's atheistic philosophers", and he regularly debated Christian philosophers such as Richard Swinburne and Alvin Plantinga.
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| Born |
25 August 1917 Sydney, Australia
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| Died |
12 December 1981 (aged 64) Oxford, England
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| Zodiac | Virgo |
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