Born in Sydney Australia, 1941. Educated at North Sydney High, then Sydney University (B.A. in Philosophy, first class honours). Commonwealth Scholarship to Oxford University UK,leading to D.Phil. 1965 with thesis on "Rules of truth for modal logic". From 1965 to 1982 worked at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon (Assistant, Associate, Full Professor in the Philosophy Department), then from 1980 to 2000 as Programme Specialist in Unesco (Philosophy Division). From 2001 to 2006 Professor at King's College London (Computer Science Department), then from 2007 to 2019 Guest Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method, London School of Economics (LSE). Currently living in Paris, and since September 2022 Honorary Associate Professor in the School of Historical and Philosophical Inquiry, University of Queensland.
An intellectual autobiography entitled "A tale of five cities" was published in S.O. Hansson ed., David Makinson on Classical Methods for Non-Classical Problems (Series: Outstanding Contributions to Logic) Springer 2014, pp 19-32, with recollections also in an interview in The Reasoner 2014, also available at personal website mentioned below..
My work has always been in mathematical logic and its relations with neighbouring disciples, notably philosophy and computer science. Its direct impact is on professionals in those disciplines and a generation or two of undergraduate and graduate students, mainly in philosophy but also in computing and mathematics, helping them structure their thinking and work in those disciplines on sound logical bases.
Journal Article: First-order friendliness
Badia, Guillermo and Makinson, David (2023). First-order friendliness. Review of Symbolic Logic, 1-13. doi: 10.1017/S175502032300014X
Badia, Guillermo and Makinson, David (2023). First-order friendliness. Review of Symbolic Logic, 1-13. doi: 10.1017/S175502032300014X