Anthony Clifford Grayling CBE (/ˈɡreɪlɪŋ/; born 3 April 1949) is a British philosopher and author. He was born in Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) and spent most of his childhood there and in Malawi. In 2011 he founded and became the first Master of New College of the Humanities, an independent undergraduate college in London. Until June 2011, he was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London, where he taught from 1991. He is also a supernumerary fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford.
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).
He was a Trustee of the London Library and a Fellow of the World Economic Forum, and is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. For a number of years he was a columnist on The Guardian newspaper, and presented the BBC World Service series Exchanges at the Frontier on science and society. In 2013 he was awarded the Forkosch Literary Prize, and in 2015 he received the Bertrand Russell Award.
Grayling was a director and contributor at Prospect Magazine from its foundation until 2016. He is a Vice-President of Humanists UK and Honorary Associate of the National Secular Society, and Patron of the Defence Humanists. His main academic interests lie in epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophical logic and he has published works in these subjects. His political affiliations lie on the centre-left, and he has defended human rights and politically liberal values in print and by activism. He is associated in Britain with other new atheists. He frequently appears in British media discussing philosophy and public affairs.
