OBITUARY

PROFESSOR H. J. PATON

Noted philosophical scholar and

interpreter of Kant

Professor Herbert James Paton. Emeritus Professor, University of Oxford, White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford and Fellow of Corpus Christi College, 1937-52, died on Saturday. He was 82.

Paton was born on Mlarch 30, 1887, and educated at Glasgow High School and Glasgow University before going up to Balliol in 1907 as Snell E-ibitioner and Newlands Scholar. After taking firsts in Classical Moderations and Lit. Hum. he was appointed in 1911 to a fellowship at Queen's to teach classics and philosophy. During the First World War he served in the Intelligence Division of the Admiralty and was the British represcntative on the sub-commission for Polish affairs which sat in Paris in 1919.

Returning to Oxford after ithe war, Paton quickly established a reputation both as a teacher and an administrator. He was Dean of Queen's from 1917 to 1922. and Junior Proctor in 1920. His philosophical work at this time was deeply iniluenced by the writins of the Italian Idealists Croce and Gentile. Their impact is seen in the reflections on moral philosophy which were slowly worked out in his lectures. and finally developed in book form in Califomia. where be spent the academic year 1925-26 as Laura Spelnan Rockefeller Fellow at Berkeley. The resulting work, published in 1927 as The Good WMU, showed that for Paton ethics was essentially the study of goodness, on the unity of which in spite of the variety of its realizations he was careful to insist.

In 1927. Paton was appointed to the chair of Logic and Rhetoric at the University of Glasgow. His