Professor A. C. Grayling

A. C. Grayling, M.A., D.Phil, FRSL, FRSA is a British philosopher and author. He is Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London and a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne’s College, Oxford. He earned his M.A. and D.Phil from Oxford.
 
Anthony also often writes for the Guardian, the Observer, Economist, Times Literary Supplement, Independent on Sunday, and New Statesman, and is a frequent broadcaster on BBC Radios 4, 3 and the World Service. He is the Editor of Online Review London and is Contributing Editor of Prospect magazine. In addition he sits on the editorial boards of several academic journals, and for nearly ten years was the Honorary Secretary of the principal British Philosophical Association, the Aristotelian Society. He is a past chairman of June Fourth, a human rights group concerned with China, and has been involved in UN human rights initiatives.
 
He is a Fellow of the World Economic Forum, and a member of its C-100 group on relations between the West and the Islamic world. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and also a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and in 2003 was a Booker Prize judge.
 
Anthony was born in Luanshya, Zambia and spent his formative years in the British expatriate community of East Africa. His first exposure to philosophical writing was at the age of twelve when he read an English translation of Plato’s Charmides dialogue. At fourteen he read G. H. Lewes’ Biographical History of Philosophy. This work was instrumental in confirming his ambition to study philosophy. He later remarked on the text, “It superinduced order on the random reading that had preceded it, and settled my vocation.”
 
After moving to England in his teens Anthony studied at Sussex University (while there he simultaneously studied for an undergraduate degree of the University of London as an external student), and Magdalen College, Oxford where he obtained his doctorate in 1981. The subject of his thesis was “Scepticism and Transcendental Arguments”. This was supervised by the philosophers P. F. Strawson and A. J. Ayer. He lectured in philosophy at St Anne’s College, Oxford before taking up a post at Birkbeck, University of London in 1991, where he subsequently became Reader in Philosophy (1998), and then Professor of Philosophy (2005). Anthony is also a director of and regular contributor to Prospect Magazine.
 
His main areas of interest in technical philosophy lie at the intersection of theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and philosophical logic. He brings these subjects together in an attempt to define the relationship between mind and world, and in so doing he is among other things challenging philosophical scepticism. His arguments are elucidated in a number of publications, including The Refutation of Scepticism (1985), Berkeley: The Central Arguments (1986), Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction (1988), Russell: A Very Short Introduction (1996), Truth Meaning and Realism (2007), Scepticism and the Possibility of Knowledge (2008).
 
Anthony uses philosophical logic to counter the arguments of the sceptic, thereby shedding light on the traditional ideas of the realism debate and developing associated views on truth and meaning. His ideas are described in the later chapters of An Introduction to Philosophical Logic (1982, 3rd Ed 1998), and advanced in a series of papers including Epistemology and Realism (1991–2), and Independence and Transcendence: The Independence Thesis and Realism (1998).
 
In these publications he puts forward the idea that we should consider realism as a primarily epistemological — rather than a metaphysical or a semantic — conception of the relations between mind and world. He sees these questions about the relation of thought to its objects as among the deepest and most important in technical philosophy. He argues that different aspects of this relation figure in philosophical debate in different ways: as the relation of experience to its accusatives, as the relation of language to the world, and as the relation in general of mental states and acts to their objective targets (to what they “intend”). Although these are by no means merely variant expressions for the same problematic nexus, he says, they denote closely related sides of it.
 
Anthony authored Toward the Light of Liberty: The Struggles for Freedom and Rights That Made the Modern Western World, Ideas That Matter: A Personal Guide for the 21st Century, The Meaning of Things: Applying Philosophy to Life, Against All Gods: Six Polemics on Religion and an Essay on Kindness, Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life without God, The Choice of Hercules: Pleasure, Duty, and the Good Life in the 21st Century, The Mystery of Things, Meditations for the Humanist: Ethics for a Secular Age, What is Good?: The Search for the Best Way to Live, Liberty in the Age of Terror: A Defence of Civil Society and Enlightenment Values, Among the Dead Cities: The History and Moral Legacy of the WWII Bombing of Civilians in Germany and Japan, and The Form of Things: Essays of Life, Ideas, and Liberty in the 21st Century, and edited Philosophy 1: A Guide through the Subject (Vol 1).
 
Watch AC Grayling at Hay on Sky 2008, AC Grayling’s Bedside — The Book Show Episode 14, The Science Studio with AC Grayling, Religion Debate: Hitchens-Dawkins vs. (part V) [AC Grayling], Darwin, Humanism, and Science — A C Grayling, and AC Grayling in conversation with Andro Linklater. Read his latest Guardian columns. Read his selected papers and selected articles.