Kai Nielsen (May 15, 1926 – April 7, 2021) was an American professor of philosophy at the University of Calgary. He specialized in naturalism, metaphilosophy, ethics, analytic philosophy, social and political philosophy. Nielsen also wrote about philosophy of religion, and was an advocate of contemporary atheism. He was also known for his defense of utilitarianism, writing in response to Bernard Williams's criticism of it.
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Kai Nielsen (philosopher) in the context of J. L. Mackie
John Leslie Mackie FBA (25 August 1917 – 12 December 1981) was an Australian philosopher. He made significant contributions to ethics, the philosophy of religion, metaphysics, and the philosophy of language. Mackie had influential views on metaethics, including his defence of moral scepticism and his sophisticated defence of atheism. He wrote six books. His most widely known, Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), opens by boldly stating, "There are no objective values." It goes on to argue that because of this, ethics must be invented rather than discovered.
His posthumously published The Miracle of Theism: Arguments For and Against the Existence of God (1982) has been called a tour de force in contemporary analytic philosophy. The atheist philosopher Kai Nielsen described it as "one of the most, probably the most, distinguished articulation of an atheistic point of view given in the twentieth century." In 1980, Time magazine described him as "perhaps the ablest of today's atheistic philosophers".