Donald MacKinnon was born in Oban on 27 August 1913. and died in 1994.

He was educated at Cargilfield Preparatory School in Edinburgh and Winchester College in Hampshire. He then studied divinity 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 Regius Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Aberdeen, and in 1960 became the Norris–Hulse Professor of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. He retired from full-time academia 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.

He was an Episcopalian.

(Source: Wikipedia)