Grayling is the author of about 30 books on philosophy, biography, history of ideas, human rights and ethics, including The Refutation of Scepticism (1985), The Future of Moral Values (1997), Wittgenstein (1992), What Is Good? (2000), The Meaning of Things (2001), The Good Book (2011), The God Argument (2013), The Age of Genius: The Seventeenth Century and the Birth of the Modern Mind (2016) and Democracy and its Crises (2017).
Grayling was a director and contributor at Prospect magazine from its foundation until 2016. He is a vice-president of Humanists UK, honorary associate of the National Secular Society,[6] and Patron of the Defence Humanists.[7] His main academic interests lie in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophical logic and he has published works in these subjects.[3] His political affiliations lie on the centre-left, and he has defended human rights and politically liberal values in print and by activism.[8] He is associated in Britain with other New Atheists.[9] He frequently appears in British media discussing philosophy and public affairs.[10] In his book, Democracy and Its Crisis, Grayling argues that voting systems must be reformed to prevent certain results, such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.[11][12]
Son of Henry Clifford and Ursula Adelaide Grayling (née Burns),[13][14] Grayling was born and raised in Luanshya, Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia), within the British expatriate enclave, and raised there and in Nyasaland (now Malawi)[1] where his father worked as manager[15] for the Standard Bank.[16] He attended several boarding schools, including Falcon CollegeinSouthern Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), from which he ran away after being regularly caned.[17] His first exposure to philosophical writing was at the age of twelve, when he found an English translation of the Charmides, one of Plato's dialogues, in a local library.[16] At age fourteen, he read G. H. Lewes'sBiographical History of Philosophy (1846), which confirmed his ambition to study philosophy; he said it "superinduced order on the random reading that had preceded it, and settled my vocation".[18]
Grayling had an elder sister Jennifer and brother John.[19] When he was 19 years old, his elder sister Jennifer was murdered in Johannesburg. She had been born with brain damage, and after brain surgery to alleviate it at the age of 20 had experienced personality problems that led to emotional difficulties[19] and a premature marriage. She was found dead in a river shortly after the marriage; she had been stabbed. When her parents went to identify her, her mother—already ill—had a heart attack and died. Grayling said he dealt with his grief by becoming a workaholic.[20]
After moving to England in his teens, he spent three years at the University of Sussex, but said that although he applauded their intention to educate generalists, he wished to be a scholar, so in addition to his BA from Sussex, he also completed one in philosophy as a University of London external student.[21] He went on to obtain an MA from Sussex, then attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was taught by P. F. Strawson and A. J. Ayer, obtaining his doctorate in 1981 for a thesis on Epistemological Scepticism and Transcendental Arguments. A part of that thesis is published as The Refutation of Scepticism (1985) and its themes are further developed in Scepticism and the Possibility of Knowledge (2008).[22]
Grayling lectured in philosophy at Bedford College, London, and St Anne's College, Oxford,[2] before taking up a post in 1991 at Birkbeck, University of London, where in 1998 he became reader in philosophy, and in 2005 professor.[23] In addition to his work on Berkeley, philosophical logic, the theory of knowledge, and the history of ideas,[24] the latter including (as chief editor) the four-volume The Continuum Encyclopedia of British Philosophy,[25] he wrote and edited several pedagogical works in philosophy, including An Introduction to Philosophical Logic (3rd ed., 1999)[26] and the two volumes Philosophy: A Guide Through the Subject (1995)[27] and Philosophy: Further Through the Subject (1998).[28]
In his philosophical work, Grayling connected solutions to the problem of scepticisminepistemology with the questions about assertability and the problem of meaning in the philosophy of language and logic. A principal theme in his work is that considerations of metaphysics, which relate to what exists, has to be kept separate from the two connected questions of the relation of thought to its objects in the variety of domains over which thought ranges, and the mastery of discourses about those domains, where a justificationist approach is required.[29]
Grayling resigned from Birkbeck in June 2011 to found and become the first master of New College of the Humanities, an independent undergraduate college in London. In February 2019, Northeastern University, a private research university in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, purchased the New College of the Humanities.[30] He is a Supernumerary Fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford. He was a judge on the Man Booker prize 2003[31] and Chairman of the Judges for the 2014 Man Booker Prize.[32] He has also been a judge on the Wellcome Trust Book Prize[33] and the Art Fund prize.[34]
For Grayling, work on technical problems is only one aspect of philosophy. Another aspect, one which has been at the centre of philosophy's place in history, has more immediate application to daily life: the questions of ethics, which revolve upon what Grayling calls the great Socratic question, 'How should one live?'. In pursuit of what he describes as 'contributing to the conversation society has with itself about possibilities for good lives in good societies', Grayling writes widely on contemporary issues, including war crimes, the legalisation of drugs, euthanasia, secularism, human rights and other topics in the tradition of Polemics. He has articulated positions on humanist ethics and on the history and nature of concepts of liberty as applied in civic life. In support of his belief that the philosopher should engage in public debate, he brings these philosophical perspectives to issues of the day in his work as a writer and as a commentator on radio and television.[38]
Among his contributions to the discussion about religion in contemporary society he argues that there are three separable, though naturally connected debates:
(a) a metaphysical debate about what the universe contains; denying that it contains supernatural agencies of any kind makes him an atheist;
(b) a debate about the basis of ethics; taking the world to be a natural realm of natural law requires that humanity thinks for itself about the right and the good, based on our best understanding of human nature and the human condition; this makes him a humanist;
(c) a debate about the place of religious movements and organisations in the public domain; as a secularist Grayling argues that these should see themselves as civil society organisations on a par with trade unions and other NGOs, with every right to exist and to have their say, but no greater right than any other self-constituted, self-selected interest group.
On this last point, Grayling's view is that for historical reasons religions have an inflated place in the public domain out of all proportion to the numbers of their adherents or their intrinsic merits, so that their voice and influence is amplified disproportionately: with the result that they can distort such matters as public policy (e.g. on abortion) and science research and education (e.g. stem cells, teaching of evolution). He argues that winning the metaphysical and ethical debates is already abating the problems associated with (c) in more advanced Western societies, even the US. He sees his own major contribution as being the promotion of understanding of humanist ethics deriving from the philosophical tradition.[39]
Between 1999 and 2002 Grayling wrote a weekly column in The Guardian called "The Last Word", on a different topic every week. In these columns, which also formed the basis of a series of books for a general readership, commencing with The Meaning of Things in 2001, Grayling made the basics of philosophy available to the layperson. He is a regular contributor to The Guardian's "Comment is free" group blog, and writes columns for, among others, the Prospect and New Scientist magazines.
A. C. Grayling was one of the contributors to the book, We Are One: A Celebration of Tribal Peoples, released in October 2009.[48] The book explores the cultures of peoples around the world, portraying both their diversity and the threats they face. Other contributors included not only western writers, such as Laurens van der Post, Noam Chomsky, Claude Lévi-Strauss, but also indigenous people, such as Davi Kopenawa Yanomami and Roy Sesana. The royalties from the sale of this book go to the indigenous rights organisation, Survival International.
In recent years Grayling has been campaigning against the UK Government's response to the 2016 United Kingdom European Union membership referendum result. In his book, Democracy and Its Crisis, Grayling argues that voting systems must be reformed to prevent certain results, such as Brexit and the election of Donald Trump.[11][12] Grayling has tweeted that Brexit must be made to disappear like a "nasty, temporary, hiccup, soon forgotten".[49][50]
Grayling lives in central London. He has two children from his first marriage, Anthony Joslin Clifford Grayling and Georgina Eveline Ursula Grayling, and one daughter, Madeline Catherine Jennifer Grayling, from his second marriage to novelist Katie Hickman.[51]
Vice-president, British Humanist Association. In June 2011, it was announced that he had decided not to take up the position of President of the BHA.[52]
Member of the C1 World Dialogue group on relations between Islam and the West
^For his teachers, see Life, Sex, and Ideas: The Good Life Without God (2003), p. 226. For the thesis, see Grayling, A.C. Epistemological Scepticism and Transcendental Arguments. Oxford University Press, 1983.
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