David Braine (philosopher)

rdf:langString David Braine (philosopher)

rdf:langString 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. 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.