John Mair (or Major), who taught at the University of Paris and later at the University of St. Andrews, was a major figure in the flowering of late-terminist logic in the first half of the sixteenth century. Among the many disciplines on which he wrote were logic, moral philosophy, theology, and history. Widely quoted and highly respected, he was at the center of intellectual life in Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century.

Mair was born around 1467 into a farming family in the village of Gleghornie, southeast of Edinburgh. He probably attended a school in the village before going on to the grammar school at Haddington. The assumption by some scholars that he attended the University of St. Andrews is refuted by a passage in his commentary on book 1 of the Sentences of Peter Lombard, published in 1510, which makes it clear that as late as that...