The Queen’s community is remembering D.L.C. (Lorne) Maclachlan, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Philosophy, who died Thursday, Oct. 22, in his 88th year.
Born in Denny, Scotland, a small town near Stirling, Dr. Maclachlan completed his undergraduate studies at University of Glasgow, after which he pursued graduate studies in philosophy, earning a Master’s from Yale and a PhD from Glasgow.
Dr. Maclachlan joined the Queen’s Department of Philosophy in 1960, and remained there until his retirement in 1998, teaching and influencing many students in his specialty areas of epistemology, the theory of perception, and the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Dr. Maclachlan published Philosophy of Perception (1989) in the prestigious Prentice-Hall ‘Foundations of Philosophy’ series, as well as Why Consciousness is Reality (2010) and The Enigma of Perception (2013), the latter through McGill-Queen’s Press. Following his 38-year career he would be appointed Professor Emeritus.
He remained philosophically active in retirement and continued to teach at Queen’s for another 20 years, giving his final course in 2018. Last November Dr. Maclachlan gave a paper in the Department of Philosophy’s colloquium series. In recent years he was hard at work on a commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, putting the final touches on the manuscript during his last few weeks while in palliative care. The work will be printed locally and made available for future students in the Kant course he taught for more than 50 years.
Dr. Maclachlan and his wife Janet Faddies Maclachlan established the Janet Faddies Award, named after his wife’s grandmother, to help support graduate students.