Macmurray, John

Person

Macmurray, John

1891-1976

John Macmurray was born at Maxwellton in the Scottish borders in 1891. He moved (with his family) to Aberdeen at around the age of ten and attended Aberdeen Grammar School and Robert Gordon's College before proceeding to Glasgow University, from which he graduated. After completing his Honours Classics work at Glasgow in September 1913, he follow in the long tradition of Snell Exhibitioners, exceptional Glasgow graduates awarded scholarships to Balliol College, Oxford. There he studied history and philosophy, but his tutor, the philosopher A.D. Lindsay, helped strengthen his interest in philosophy by bringing him to see it as a preparation for life and service.

During the First World War Macmurray served with the British army in France, first with the Royal Army Medical Corps and later as a lieutenant with the Queen's Own Cameron Highlanders with whom he was awarded a Military Cross, 1918. Early in 1917, he wrote his first known published piece of writing, a short reflection on a soldier's image of God in the midst of the carnage at the front, called ‘Trench Religion', which was published in a book edited by Prof David Cairns entitled The Army and Religion , 1919. That same year (1919) he returned to Balliol where his academic career properly began with his appointment to the John Locke Scholarship, graduating M.A. with distinction in litterae humaniores .

His first academic post was a lectureship in philosophy at Manchester University, but before long he accepted an invitation to become Professor of Philosophy at Witwatersrand University in Johannesburg. His time in South Africa lasted only eighteen months before he returned to Oxford and to Balliol as Jowett Lecturer and Classical Tutor, a position he held from 1922 to 1928. In 1928 he moved again, this time to become a professor of philosophy at London University College, succeeding Dawes-Hicks in the position of Grote Professor of Mind and Logic. There he remained until 1944 when he finally returned to Scotland as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh in succession to A E Taylor, who had also preceded him at Manchester.

Macmurray remained largely outwith the fashions of professional British philosophy, and partly for this reason his identification as a philosopher in the Scottish tradition is questionable. But one aspect of the kind of philosophy he learnt at Glasgow persisted throughout his career, namely the belief that philosophy should address itself to broader human concerns and be practised in a wider cultural context than simply that of professional colleagues. As a result, his work received wide public recognition from his numerous writings, and especially his radio broadcasts of the 1930s. It is also true that from the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh he influenced the life and thought of successive generations of students. His conception of philosophy and its affinity with Scottish intellectual traditions is most evident in the Gifford Lectures he gave at the University of Glasgow in 1953.

Macmurray retired from the Chair of Moral Philosophy at Edinburgh in 1957. Having for most of his life been a somewhat reluctant Christian, in retirement he became a member of the Society of Friends. He died in 1976.

Source: ‘The life and Thought of John Macmurray' by Jack Costello, in John Macmurray: Critical Perspectives , (eds.) David Fergusson and Nigel Dower.

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