
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.