David Braine 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 paralysed from the chest down. Braine was opposed to the legalisation 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.
Books
David Braine,, Medical Ethics and Human Life, Palladio.
David Braine,, The Reality of Time and the Existence of God, OUP.
David Braine, 'Reply to David Cockburn's Discussion', Religious Studies.
David Braine, 'The Active and Potential Intellects: Aquinas as a Philosopher in his own right.' In John Haldane, Mind, Metaphysics, and Value in the Thomistic and Analytical Traditions. University of Notre Dame Press.
Papers in Ethics
David Braine,, 'Why Abortion?', in Light in the Darkness, Unity Press, Mowbray.
David Braine,, 'Human animality: its relevance to the shape of ethics.' In David Braine and Harry Lesser Ethics, Technology and Medicine, Avebury.
David Braine,, 'Human life: its secular sacrosanctness.' In David Braine and Harry Lesser Ethics, Technology and Medicine, Avebury.
David Braine,, 'The Human and the Inhuman in Medicine; Review of Issues concerning Reproductive Technology.' In Luke Gormally Moral Truth and Moral Tradition, Four Courts, Dublin.
David Braine,, 'God, Eternity and Time', Evangelical Quarterly 66.
David Braine,, 'Cosmological Arguments', in Brian Davies, Philosophy of Religion, Cassell.
David Braine,, 'Philosophy and Cultures', Reflections on Fides et Ratio, no. 14, English trans. in L'Osservatore Romano, 4 August.
David Braine,, 'Aquinas, God and Being'. In Craig Paterson and Matthew Pugh Analytical Thomism: Traditions in Dialogue.
Papers in Theology
'Observations on the Trinity: a reply to Professor Lochman.' 1976. Theology, 1976.
'The Place of the Virgin Mary in Dogmatics.' 1984. Scottish Journal of Theology.
'The Inner Jewishness of St John's Gospel as the clue to the Inner Jewishness of Jesus.' 1998. Studien zum Neuen Testament und Seiner Umwelt, 13: 101–157.
'What Makes a Christology into a Christian Christology?' 1996. New Blackfriars 70.
Reviews
David Braine,, Review of Anselm's discovery: a re-examination of the ontological proof for God's existence by Charles Hartshorne. in Mind.
David Braine,, Review of From Existence to God by Barry Miller in New Blackfriars 75: 228–30.
David Braine,, Review of Redirecting Philosophy: Reflections on the Nature of Knowledge from Plato to Lonergan by Hugo A. Meynell, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998 in International Philosophical Quarterly, 40.
