Abstract

John Macmurray, Emeritus Professor of Philosophy of Edinburgh University, is best known for his Gifford Lectures delivered at the University of Glasgow in 1953-54. In those lectures, Self As Agent and Persons in Relation, Macmurray develops the thesis that the form of the personal is the agent and that the self as agent is constituted in its relation to the other. For Macmurray this means that one should no longer conceive the self primarily as a knower set over against objects and as an individual set over against other individuals. He begins with the self understood practically as agent and as an agent who can understand and fulfill himself only through a mutuality of relationships. Universal human community is the ideal norm of human activity and, because community requires relations with a personal other, the notion of universal community ultimately requires a universal and personal other which in its fullest development is the idea of God. It is in religion, then, that the personal finds its fullest expression.