Mark Sacks, the founding editor of the European Journal of Philosophy (EJP), was one of the leading philosophers of his generation, and played an important role in changing the shape of philosophy in Britain. He was an integral figure in a group of young philosophers, many of them trained at Cambridge in the 1980s, who were determined to broaden the range of philosophical discourse in Britain by engaging across the divide between continental European philosophy and the analytic tradition that predominated in the English-speaking world during the 20th century.

Sacks sought to combine the standards of rigour and precision prized in the analytic tradition with what he saw as the richer range of existential issues and insights explored in the post-Kantian European tradition.

He was born in South Africa in 1953. He and his family emigrated to Israel in his youth, and he served for three years in the Israeli army. This included a posting in the adjutant’s office of Central Command during the Yom Kippur War of 1973. He took his first degree at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, but left Israel to pursue graduate studies in philosophy, first at Columbia University in New York

and then at King’s College, Cambridge, where he took his PhD under the supervision of the late Sir Bernard Williams. He was part of a generation of young graduate students — others included Sebastian Gardner and Robert Stern — all influenced by the legacy of P. F. Strawson, and all determined to reopen serious analytic engagement with the post-Kantian forms of idealism and phenomenology that had been largely disregarded in British philosophy for much of the 20th century.

It was this ambition that ultimately led to the founding of the EJP, which was born at a conference organised by Sacks at Liverpool in 1990. He orchestrated the launch and served as general editor for the first seven volumes. The journal has become an essential point of reference in philosophy, and has played a crucial role in bringing such figures as Hegel and Heidegger into the mainstream of contemporary British philosophical discourse.

In 1992 Sacks joined the philosophy department at the University of Essex, where he went on to become professor and head of department. From early on, Sacks was compulsively interested in philosophy, which he once described as “sculpture with ideas”. But his interests and passions ran far beyond the academy, and he was always partly distrustful of philosophy, which is in perpetual danger of descending into a dry and lifeless scholasticism.

He was musical; he wrote poetry; he was intensely interested in politics — born of growing up in two divided worlds. He was fascinated by the possibilities and complexities of modern urban life. He took a serious interest in the history of painting, and among his unpublished papers he leaves behind a substantial manuscript on power and portraiture in the works of Hans Holbein the Elder.

But one of his most enduring interests was in the theatre. As a young soldier in the Israeli army he spent idle hours working on scripts, and for a time envisaged a literary career. He confessed to a kind of addictive fascination with theatre, even bad theatre — a curiosity born in part of the intricate play between the real and the imaginary that constitutes the distinctive space inside a theatre and makes the art form possible.

This interplay of the real and the fictional was also central to his philosophical work, which addressed the problem, inherited from Kant, of understanding how we find ourselves in a genuinely objective world which is nonetheless in part a constructed, even fictional, projection of our own cognitive and practical activity. His books, The World We Found (1989) and Objectivity and Insight (2000), both explore this problem, together with the sceptical anxieties and consolations wrapped up with it. He was convinced that no uncritical metaphysical realism could survive a serious consideration of the fictional force at work in our experience. But at the same time he sought to resist any slide into relativism or scepticism by identifying certain inescapable transcendental constraints that structure our fictive construction of an objective world.

At the time of his death he was serving as principal investigator for a large research project, organised at the University of Essex and funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, which brought together an international group of scholars exploring these themes. The culminating event of this three-year project will take place in London in September, a fitting emblem for the continuing legacy left behind by his premature death.

Sacks is survived by his wife, the philosopher Lucy O’Brien, and their son and daughter.

Mark Sacks, philosopher, was born on December 29, 1953. He died of cancer on June 17, 2008, aged 54