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John Nicholas Gray (born 17 April 1948) is an English political philosopher and author with interests in analytic philosophy, the history of ideas, and philosophical pessimism. He retired in 2008 as School Professor of European Thought at the London School of Economics and Political Science .
Feb 14, 2024 · John Gray, the prolific political philosopher, has long been a figure of intrigue and controversy. Over the past half-century, Gray has navigated the intellectual currents of political thought, never comfortably fitting into a single ideological box. His ability to provoke thought across the political spectrum is perhaps best encapsulated in his latest work, ...
Visions of irreversible progress are, for him, myths, merely “shields against reality”. And so what Gray says of one of his heroes, the American writer HP Lovecraft, could easily be applied to ...
Mar 11, 2013 · Philosopher AC Grayling, reviewing Gray’s book Black Mass for New Humanist in 2007, wasn’t so kind. He opens his stinging review like this: “John Gray is a curious figure whose habitual assaults on humanism are all carried along with such breezy assertion and generalisation that his underlying bitter pessimism is cloaked in motley.”
In typical John Gray style, The Soul of the Marionette (2015) considers a more extreme angle. Like a good determinist, Gray assumes that human freedom (to improve our lives, discover meaning, and to shape our own ends) is an illusion – but more radically than most, that it’s an illusion we’re better off without.
Oct 19, 2020 · The unchanging nation state. While Gray has no time for liberal universalism, he sees one institution as retaining eternal value and allegiance, the nation state, expressing “unchanging human ...
Dec 23, 2020 · I was thinking about this while reading John Gray’s peculiar new book, “Feline Philosophy,” the latest in a provocative oeuvre that has spanned four decades and covered subjects including Al ...
John Gray is a world-renowned philosopher, political theorist and intellectual historian. He has an asteroid named after him and until 2008 he was School Professor of European Thought at the LSE. He now writes principally for the New Statesman and has authored over twenty books including the bestselling Seven Types of Atheism, Straw Dogs, Black Mass, The Soul of the Marionette, The Silence of Animals and Feline Philosophy. ...
Dec 6, 2020 · Philosopher John Gray on why he is critical of prevailing ideas of progress, his friendship with Isaiah Berlin, and the wisdom of cats. The icon indicates free access to the linked research on JSTOR. John Gray is one of our greatest pessimists—and delightfully so. As he has it, our belief in a better future—one that will fashion a higher ...
Sep 21, 2023 · Gray has for some time been associated with a form of realism in political philosophy. This is a form which proceeds not so much from meticulous modal distinction—possibility, probability, potentiality, actuality, normativity, etc.—as from a deep pessimism about the prospects for human life on the planet, and a written style which vividly expresses affects: disgust, contempt, anger, among them.
