|
The focus
of Anthony Grayling's interests in technical
academic philosophy is the overlap between
theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and philosophical
logic. In summary, they concern the relation
between thinking and theorising about the
world, and the knowledge and meaning constraints
which govern them. In one way or another
all his main philosophical publications
relate to the questions arising from this
concern.
In The
Refutation of Scepticism and Berkeley:
The Central Arguments he explores some aspects
of these questions, and in the final chapters
of Introduction to
Philosophical Logic he sketches views,
to be set out in greater detail in forthcoming
work, on the main problems involved.
Anthony
Grayling's two Past Master volumes, Russell
and Wittgenstein,
were written not only for students but for
a wider general readership. This applies
particularly to a short book contributed
to Weidenfeld & Nicolson's Predictions
series, Moral Values,
and to his Guardian "last Word" column and
its collected book form. He edited Philosophy
1: A Guide Through the Subject and
Philosophy 2: Further
Through the Subject , in the first
volume contributing the chapters on Scepticism
and on Locke, Berkeley and Hume, and in
the second, in collaboration with Bernhard
Weiss, the chapter on Frege, Russell and
Wittgenstein.
Anthony
Grayling is General Editor of the Russell
series published by Routledge, and a frequent
manuscript referee for academic publishers.
Links
with philosophical colleagues both in the
Far East and in central and eastern Europe
has been an abiding interest. He went as
British Academy visitor to the Institute
of Philosophy at the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences in 1986, having lectured
there in 1984; and in 1988 and again in
1993 he served as Director of the Sino-British
Summer School in Philosophy in Beijing.
As a means of maintaining these links he
is a Contributing Editor to the Philosophical
Annual of the Chinese Academy of Social
Sciences.
In the
autumn of 1997 Anthony Grayling was Visiting
Professor at the University of Tokyo, during
the course of his stay lecturing also at
the universities of Chiba, Nagoya and Hokkaido.
In 1993 he visited Lublin University in
Poland to give a series of lectures, and
has twice been Jan Hus Visiting Fellow at
the Institute of Philosophy at the Czech
Academy of Science (1994 and 1996), to lecture
in Prague and Brno.
In 1997
he was elected a Supernumary Fellow of St
Anne's College, Oxford (where he previously
taught as College Lecturer 1985-1991 and
was a Senior Research Fellow 1991-1997;
this fellowship was, and the supernumary
fellowship is, honorary). In 1998 he held
a one-year Leverhulme Trust Research Fellowship.
From 1993 to 2001 he was Honorary Secretary
of the Aristotelian Society.
|
