The Catholic academic David Braine, who has died aged 76, exerted a major influence on philosophy and theology, and became a celebrated figure in Aberdeen for his courage in facing severe disability. His three major works - The Reality of Time and the Existence of God, The Human Person, and Language and Human Understanding – established him as a pioneer in the movement known today as Analytical Thomism.
David Dimond Conway Braine was born in 1940, the son of Edith Braine, a secondary school teacher, and Charles Dimond Conway Braine, a civil engineer. He had a conventional Anglican upbringing, attending a traditional public school. His conversion to Catholicism occurred in his early teens. Although he was eloquent on the invalidity of Anglican Orders, he liked to point out that in a technical sense he never converted. When he approached a Catholic priest to be received into the Church, he was (correctly) informed that a child who is validly baptised automatically becomes a Catholic, and so until the age of fourteen a child baptised by an irregular minister is presumed to be in good faith. All David thus needed to do was to make his first confession and first communion and be added to the register.
