John Leslie Mackie was born in Sydney, Australia, and educated under John Anderson at the University of Sydney, and at Oxford, where he graduated with a First in Literae Humaniores in 1940. After the war, he returned to an academic position in the University of Sydney, and in 1955 he took up the Chair in Philosophy at the University of Otago, in Dunedin, New Zealand. In 1959 he returned to the University of Sydney to replace Anderson in the Challis Chair. After five years he left for Great Britain, going first to fill the foundation Chair of Philosophy at the new University in York. In 1967 he became Fellow of University College, Oxford, and University Reader in 1978. He remained at Oxford until his death in 1981.

Mackie's work is characterized by an acute, unwearied, and always dispassionate analysis of alternative solutions to specific philosophical problems. Striving first...