David Braine (philosopher)

David Braine (2 September 1940 – 17 February 2017 ) was a British analytic philosopher with interests in analytic philosophy of religion and metaphysics, who sought to marry the techniques and insights of analytical philosophy and phenomenology to the metaphysics of classical Thomism.

His The Reality of Time and the Existence of God set out to prove the existence of God from the fact that the world enjoys continuity in time.

He argued that nothing in the world could be the cause of this continuity, whence God came into the picture.

His book The Human Person: Animal and Spirit attempts to provide a philosophical analysis of human beings which makes life after death possible.

At Oxford, he completed Honour Moderations in Physics (1959) and degrees in history (B.A.1962; M.A. 1965) and Philosophy (B.Phil. 1965).

From 1965 to 1989, he was a lecturer in the School of Divinity, History and Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen.

Braine was the son of Edith Braine, a teacher, and Charles Dimond Conway Braine, a civil engineer.

His older brother was the British-American psychologist Martin Braine.

Braine is buried in the Pluscarden Abbey, near Elgin, Scotland.

Due to a car accident in 1977, he became paralyzed from the chest down.

Braine was opposed to the legalization of euthanasia, and based some of that opposition on his own personal experience of living with a disability.

Braine was an important, if insufficiently well-known, contributor to the renaissance of analytical philosophy of religion.

His work addressed issues including the nature of God's presence in the world, secondary causation, and the compatibility between an eternal God and the idea that God created time.

Braine attended Magdalen College, Oxford University, where he was influenced by the analytic philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe.

______________ (1994) University of Notre Dame Press, paperback edition.