Anthony Grayling teaches philosophy at Birkbeck College, London and is a Fellow of St Anne's, Oxford. He reviews regularly in the Financial Times. He has a regular column in Prospect and the Guardian.
In What Is Good? Grayling explores the long history of humanity's search for answers to questions such as, 'What values should we live by in order to live the genuinely good life?' Starting with the ancient Greeks and finishing with the moral complexity of the 20th century, Grayling sees the search for truths about 'the good' as a tussle between an enlightened, rational humanism and the 'religions of the book' - Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Grayling's philosophical survey is vast in scope, encompassing classical philosophers such as Socrates, the birth of Christian morality, the Reformation, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the final triumph of science in the past two centuries. Perhaps surprisingly for a book that covers so much ground, one of its strengths is the amount of detail Grayling manages to pack in: his chapter on the Greek philosophers, for example, includes a discussion of Homeric ideals as well as those of the great thinkers of the age. This is that rare and wonderful thing: a book on philosophy that is readable without being patronising. Indeed, it is one of Grayling's central contentions that philosophy should attempt to address the problems the world currently faces, instead of hiding behind dry, logical analysis of terms and concepts. This inevitably involves communicating philosophical ideas to people who do not study philosophy, and Grayling is the ideal writer to do this. Although Grayling's book is a historical survey, it is also packed with lively ideas and discussion. Such is his authorial skill, readers may find themselves seduced into believing that the only common-sense view of the world is the humanism that Grayling proposes. For this reason, What Is Good? would ideally be read in conjunction with something like John Gray's Straw Dogs, which attacks this humanist view of the world without resorting to religion. (Kirkus UK)