D. M. Mackinnon

Donald Mackenzie MacKinnon DD FRSE (27 August 1913 – 2 March 1994) was a Scottish philosopher and theologian.

He was born in Oban on 27 August 1913, the son of Donald M. MacKinnon, Procurator Fiscal and his wife, Grace Isabella Rhynd.

He was educated at Cargilfield Preparatory School in Edinburgh then Winchester College in Hampshire. He then studied Divinty at New College, Oxford graduating MA in 1935. From 1940 he began tutoring at Oxford University becoming a lecturer in Philosophy in 1945. In 1947 he became Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen and in 1960 became the Norris-Hulse Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge retiring in 1978. MacKinnon delivered the Gifford Lectures in 1965 and 1966 on ‘The Problem of Metaphysics’. A revised version of the lectures was published under the same name in 1974.

He was President of the Aristotelian Society 1976/77 and President for the Society for the Study of Theology 1981/82. In 1984 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. His proposers were Thomas F. Torrance, J. MacIntosh, G, Donaldson, David Daiches, G. W. Anderson, Sir Thomas Broun Smith, Rev Ronnie Selby Wright and G. P. Henderson.

He was a Scottish Episcopalian.

He died in Aberdeen on 2 March 1994.

In 1939 he married Lois Dryer.

MacKinnon is noted for his contributions to philosophical theology. He is particularly noted for the depth of analysis he applied to intractable theological problems, not least the refusal to simplify difficult questions in order to produce tidy or conclusive answers. His insistence on truth over tidiness is evident in his method of thought, an approach which some have labelled ‘open-textured’. The label derives from MacKinnon's use of literary, artistic, and political sources in his work - modes of enquiry which operate in contrast to the systematic and epistemologically narrow approach of some theology and philosophy.

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