Papers by Anthony Grayling
'He sends well-headed and well-feathered thoughts straight towards the mark with a twang of t... more 'He sends well-headed and well-feathered thoughts straight towards the mark with a twang of the bow-string.' S.T. Coleridge 'Hazlitt was not one of those non-committal writers who shuffle off in a mist and die of their own insignificance. His essays are emphatically himself ...So thin is the veil of the essay as Hazlitt wore it, his very look comes before us.' Virginia Woolf William Hazlitt is England's greatest essayist. He was also a philosopher, a painter, a controversialist and a radical, whose critical writings about literature, the theatre and art were ardently admired in his day. He is the author of the first confessional autobiography of sexual passion, a biographer of Napoleon, a friend of, and profound influence upon, Keats, Stendhal, and Charles Lamb, a friend and later enemy of Coleridge, Wordsworth, and De Quincy, and a key figure in the intellectual life of Regency England. His life was lived against the backdrop of the French Revolution and subsequent Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, with their associated political and literary radicalism in England. A. C. Grayling, himself a philosopher, critic and essayist, tells the story of Hazlitt's life and work in the setting of its disturbed times, making a great writer once again accessible by showing how his work and life interpret each other. His disastrous love-life and his passionate philosophical convictions are closely allied, making him a complex writer of great power.
... Johnjoe McFadden is Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey where his res... more ... Johnjoe McFadden is Professor of Molecular Genetics at the University of Surrey where his research is focused on developing new ... For when in 1946 Eleanor Roosevelt con-vened the highly international committee that drafted the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights ...
... Jack will act in ways which recognise, and are sensitive to, Jill's interests, only ... more ... Jack will act in ways which recognise, and are sensitive to, Jill's interests, only if he is able to grasp how things are for Jill, and understands why they matter to her; and, further, recognises that things being that way for Jill makes a claim on some of his own attitudes and behaviour ...
Araucaria, 2020
The EU's values of transnational peace, cooperation, secularism, rationality, and protection ... more The EU's values of transnational peace, cooperation, secularism, rationality, and protection of civil liberties and human rights are amongst the most valuable legacies of the Enlightenment. The European project has weathered several crises in the first third of the 21st century, including a change of political direction in the United Kingdom. Brexit is viewed as a consequence of the UK's flawed electoral system, exposed as susceptible to hijacking by militant and disruptive minorities. The future of European values must be protected from politically unreliable systems such as the UK's FPTP.
The Wiley Blackwell Handbook of Humanism, 2015
Metaphysical Hazlitt, 2006
If China had not been there, wrote Lord Dunsany, this land of dragons, peachtrees, peonies and pl... more If China had not been there, wrote Lord Dunsany, this land of dragons, peachtrees, peonies and plum blossoms, with its ages and ages of culture, slowly storing its dreams in green jade, is just the land that poets would have invented. China has indeed been invented many times, in the astonishment of visitors and the dreams of poets; but because of its historical and geographical vastness it accommodates all the inventions as truths. For centuries the elite of China's civil service was a class of scholar-gentlemen who gained preferment through education in China's literary classics. In consequence it has one of the world's richest literatures. Its dramatic landscapes and populous cosmopolitan cities invited the wonderment of visitors as various as Marco Polo, Lord Macartney and Noel Coward; but some of the sharpest as well as the most lyrical observations come from the calligraphy brushes of its own writers.;In this book a gallimaufry of missionaries, travellers, exiles, ...
Constitution in Crisis, 2017
Editor's Introduction 1. Epistemology 2. Philosophical Logic 3. Methodology: The Elements of ... more Editor's Introduction 1. Epistemology 2. Philosophical Logic 3. Methodology: The Elements of the Philosophy of Science 4. Metaphysics 5. The Philosophy of Mind 6. Ancient Greek Philosophy I: The Pre-Socratics and Plato 7. Ancient Greek Philosophy II: Aristotle 8. Modern Philosophy I: The Rationalists 9. Modern Philosophy II: The Empiricists 10. Ethics 11. Aesthetics Index
In an extract from his new book, Democracy and Its Crisis, AC Grayling (New College of the Humani... more In an extract from his new book, Democracy and Its Crisis, AC Grayling (New College of the Humanities) argues that MPs were made fully aware the referendum result was non-binding. In addition, the franchise deliberately excluded groups with a direct interest in the result. Only 37 of those eligible to vote in the referendum backed Brexit. The EU referendum, he ...
How Compassion Can Transform Our Politics, Economy, and Society, 2021
The Philosophers' Magazine, 2007
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement, 1990
In the first and shorter part of this essay I comment on Wittgenstein's general influence on ... more In the first and shorter part of this essay I comment on Wittgenstein's general influence on the practice of philosophy since his time. In the second and much longer part I discuss aspects of his work which have had a more particular influence, chiefly on debates about meaning and mind. The aspects in question are Wittgenstein's views about rule-following and private language. This second part is more technical than the first.
BMJ, 2016
Conservative moral attitudes are fruitful in causing social problems. The question of the use of ... more Conservative moral attitudes are fruitful in causing social problems. The question of the use of drugs such as cannabis and heroin is a prime illustration of this fact. Arguably, neither the use nor the misuse of mind altering substances is a moral problem, though both, and especially misuse, can cause practical problems. But if in addition their use is criminalised, those problems are exacerbated and the cost to society balloons. By "drugs" in what follows I mean opium and its derivatives, cocaine, various forms of cannabis, LSD, "ecstasy," amphetamines, solvents, tranquillisers, and anything else people use to alter their states of consciousness and emotion, whether or not they become addicted to them.
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Papers by Anthony Grayling