Early Life

(The following autobiographical material is derived largely from Findlay's "My Life,"  which appeared in R. S. Cohen, R. M. Martin, and M. Westphal, Studies in the Philosophy of J. N. Findlay, Albany: SUNY Press, 1985.)

 

J. N. Findlay was born November 25, 1903 in Pretoria, South Africa, in the then Crown Colony of the Transvaal, the son of a lawyer, who for a time served as the Government attorney to Lord Milner.

Findlay recounts a rather idyllic childhood in a large bungalow on a suburban estate, attended to by nannies and surrounded by a large extended family and very hospitable neighbors. 

He recalls how at age three he was told that bacon, of which he had been very fond, derived from slaughtered pigs and how he was horrified “at the discovery of this moral enormity underlying our whole way of life, this gorging of ourselves on our fellow animals” (My Life, p. 5); this leading him by age seven to adopt the stance of a moral vegetarianism, which with few exceptions he adhered to throughout the remainder of his life.

In his autobiography Findlay recalls “King Edward’s death in 1910, also the glorious apparition of Halley’s Comet, spread out golden in the early morning sky as in the Bayeux Tapestry.”