Background
Macmurray, John was born on February 16, 1891 in Maxwellton, Kincudbrightshire.
Macmurray, John was born on February 16, 1891 in Maxwellton, Kincudbrightshire.
University of Glasgow and Balliol College, Oxford.
1919-1921, Lecturer in Philosophy, Manchester. 1921-1922, Professor of Philosophy, Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. 1922-1928, Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy, Balliol College, Oxford.
1928-1944. Grote Professor of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, London. 1944-1958, Professor of Moral Philosophy, Edinburgh.
Macmurray emerged from the First World War with the conviction, common to many of his generation, that the philosophical traditions in which he had been educated had proved inadequate to meet the crises of his age. He maintained that the most important task of philosophy was to provide an accurate account of what it was to be a person or self. One mistake made by previous systems of philosophy was to consider people to be analogous either to complex machines or to living organisms. Both accounts were inaccurate: instead, a person is to be regarded as sui generis. What is essential to the self, according to Macmurray, is not the attribute of thought but that of action. The self should thus be conceived primarily as an agent. Action is not a process, but is necessarily intentioned. Furthermore, Macmurray maintained, a proper account of the universe would show that it is the intentional action of God. One reviewer, A. R. C. Duncan, acclaimed Macmurray’s Self as Agent (1957) as a ‘pioneer work of the first importance' (Philosophy 36(1961): 234). Another inaccuracy in traditional philosophyaccording to Macmurray, was to consider the self in isolation from others. In his Persons in Relation (1961) he sought to show that full selfhood can only be achieved in a dialogical relation with at least one other person, to form a community of selves.