Findlay read classics and philosophy first at Pretoria High School for Boys, then from 1919 as an undergraduate at Transvaal University College,[3] where he became fascinated with the Theosophical Society’s blend of Oriental religious beliefs, which developed into a serious study of Hindu, Buddhist, and Neoplatonist writings.

[9] During this time Findlay made a number of visits to Europe and North America - briefly to Berlin and Cambridge and more extensively to Graz in Austria and to Berkeley, Chicago, New York and Harvard.

Findlay betrayed a great commitment to the welfare and formation[19] of generations of students (Leroy S. Rouner was fond of introducing him as "Plotinus incarnate"),[citation needed] teaching philosophy in one college classroom after another for sixty-two consecutive academic years.

On 10 September 2012 Findlay was voted the 8th "most underappreciated philosopher active in the U.S. from roughly 1900 through mid-century" in a poll conducted among readers of Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog, finishing behind George Santayana, Alfred North Whitehead, and Clarence Irving Lewis.

[22] At a time when scientific materialism, positivism, linguistic analysis, and ordinary language philosophy were the core academic ideas in most of the English-speaking world, Findlay championed phenomenology, revived Hegelianism, and wrote works that were inspired by Theosophy,[23] Buddhism, Plotinus, and Idealism.

[25] Findlay translated into English Husserl's Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations), which he regarded as the author's best work, representing a developmental stage when the idea of phenomenological bracketing was not yet taken as the basis of a philosophical system, covering in fact for loose subjectivism.

To Findlay, the work was also one of the peaks of philosophy generally, suggesting superior alternatives both for overly minimalistic or naturalistic efforts in ontology and for Ordinary Language treatments of consciousness and thought.