J. L. Mackie

John Leslie Mackie was born in 1916 in Sydney, Australia. He completed his philosophical studies at the University of Sydney and then at Balliol College, Oxford. During his professional career, Mackie taught and conducted research at various universities, including the University of Sydney, the University of Otago in New Zealand, the University of Leeds, and finally as a professor at the University of Oxford. He was one of the most influential analytic philosophers in the fields of metaphysics, moral philosophy, and the philosophy of religion during the 1970s and 1980s.

Mackie's international fame is largely owed to his controversial and classic work, "Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong" (1977). In this book, he proposed the "error theory," arguing that moral judgments claim to describe objective features in the world, but such objective moral features do not actually exist; therefore, all moral judgments are cognitively erroneous, and moral values are products of human invention and agreement rather than discoveries of cosmic facts.

In the philosophy of religion, Mackie also created a major shift with his famous article "Evil and Omnipotence" (1955). In this work, he redefined the logical version of the argument from evil, arguing that the existence of an omnipotent, omniscient, and perfectly good God is logically incompatible with the existence of evil in the world. Among his other important works are "Truth, Probability and Paradox" and "The Miracle of Theism." Mackie remained committed to his skeptical positions and logical analysis until the end of his life and died in 1981.