Herbert James Paton was Professor of Logic and Rhetoric at Glasgow University from 1927 until 1937, and Dean of the Faculty of Arts from 1935 to 1937. In 1937 he left Glasgow to become White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University and a Fellow of Corpus Christi College.
Though best known for his philosophical writings, he spent some ten years in the Admiralty and Foreign Office dealing with emergent European states in the aftermath of the First World War. At the Peace Conference of 1919 he was a member of the British delegation which advised on the Polish settlement, about which he wrote in the six volume History of the Peace Conference of Paris.
Paton was an authority on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and his two-volume commentary on the first half of Kant's Kritik der reinen Vernunft, Kant's Metaphysic of Experience (1936) is an important work of philosophical scholarship.