The Work of Reason

Jim Thornton taught philosophy at the University of Canterbury from 1961, when he joined the Department of Philosophy as an assistant lecturer, until his retirement as a senior lecturer in 1988 from the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies. Jim started his academic career as a student of theology, becoming an ordained Anglican minister in 1954. His philosophical studies had a profound influence on his subsequent career, leading him to abandon both his Christian beliefs and his clerical role. A superb account of this abandonment is contained in ‘A Sceptic’s Tale’, the final chapter of this collection of Jim’s philosophical papers. Jim was one of those academics, increasingly rare, who devote their main efforts to teaching rather than research, and there is no doubt that he excelled as a teacher of moral philosophy and the philosophy of religion. His publications, collected in this volume, are few in number but outstanding in content.