Background
Jackie, John Leslie was born in 1917 in Sydney, Australia.
Jackie, John Leslie was born in 1917 in Sydney, Australia.
Universities of Sydney and Oxford. h>fls: British Empiricists.
1946-1951. Lecturer,
University of Sydney. 1951-1954, Senior Lecturer, University of Sydney. 1955-1959, Professor of Philosophy.
UniversityofOtago; 1959-1963, Challis Professor of Philosophy, University of Sydney. 1963-1967, Professor of Philosophy, University of York: 1967-1981, Fellow and Praelector in Philosophy, University College, Oxford. 1978-1981, University Reader.
1974, Fellow of the British Academy.
Mackie’s work is a consistent, uncompromising and sophisticated empiricist approach to a wide range of philosophical problems. This is nowhere more evident than in Ethics (1977), which, though certainly not his best, is probably Mackie's most influential book, and has largely been responsible for the widespread philosophical concern with the objectivity of ethics in the 1980s and 1990s. He argues that our everyday ethical thought is committed to the existence of objective values which simply do not exist. He thus embraces a sort of scepticism, though a scepticism mitigated by his acceptance of the need to create a code of behaviour to enable people to live together in communities, a code which he adumbrates in the second part of the book. His positive suggestions here are much in the tradition of Hobbes and Hume; and Mackie’s writing constantly draws illuminatingly, though not uncritically, on the history of philosophy. His works on Locke and Hume for example, are motivated by the belief that their arguments, when suitably reconstructed, contain more of the truth than is often recognized. The Cement of the Universe (1974), possibly Mackie’s best book. develops a broadly Humean theory of causality, arguing that causal statements are to be understood in terms of counterfactuals. As against Hume, however, he argues that singular causal statements are conceptually prior to any generalizations. Mackie was suspicious of the technicality which is characteristic of much modem philosophy, and his writing, though no less complex than the subject demands, is always admirably clear. Sources: The Times, 15 Dec 1981; John McDowell (1982) ‘John Leslie Mackie', Proceedings of the British Academy, 76; Simon Blackbum (1982) ‘A memorial address'. University College Record; G. L. Cawkwell (1982) ‘A memorial address’, University College Record; personal communication with Penelope Mackie.