A. C Grayling

The story of philosophy is an epic tale - an exploration of the ideas, views and teachings of some of the most creative minds known to humanity. But since the long-popular classic, Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy, first published in 1945, there has been no comprehensive and entertaining, single-volume history of this great intellectual journey. With his characteristic clarity and elegance A. C. Grayling takes the reader from the world-views...

The foundations upon which our democracies stand are inherently flawed, vulnerable to corrosion from within. What is the remedy? A. C. Grayling makes the case for a clear, consistent, principled and written constitution, and sets out the reforms necessary - among them addressing the imbalance of power between government and Parliament, imposing fixed terms for MPs, introducing proportional representation and lowering the voting age to 16 (the age...

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was an extraordinarily original thinker, whose influence on twentieth-century thinking far outside the bounds of philosophy alone. In this engaging Introduction, A. C. Grayling makes Wittgenstein's thoughts accessible to the general listener by explaining the nature and impact of Wittgenstein's views. He describes both his early and later philosophy, the differences, and connections between them, and gives a fresh assessment...

A lucid and inspiring consideration of the challenges we and our world now face, and a proposal for a way to overcome them. Can we human beings agree on a set of values which will allow us to confront the numerous threats that we and our planet face? Or will we continue our disagreements, rivalries, and antipathies, even as we collectively approach what, in the not-impossible extreme, might be extinction? To answer these questions, A. C. Grayling...

"Prompted by the EU referendum in the UK and the presidential election in the USA, A.C. Grayling investigates why the institutions of representative democracy seem unable to hold up against forces they were designed to manage, and why, crucially, it matters. First he considers moments in history--Periclean Athens, the English Civil War, the American and French Revolutions, among them--in which the challenges we face today were first encountered and...

Do we take our liberties for granted at the risk of losing them in the war on terror? Grayling (Descartes: The Life and Times of a Genius), a professor of philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London, and a leading British public intellectual, believes so. This book is, in some respects, an old-fashioned, triumphalist history of the rise of Western liberty since the 16th century (with Martin Luther, John Locke and Elizabeth Cady Stanton playing...

What is the nature of friendship, and what is its significance in our lives? How has friendship changed since the ancient Greeks began to analyze it, and how has modern technology altered its very definition? In this fascinating exploration of friendship through the ages, one of the most thought-provoking philosophers of our time tracks historical ideas of friendship, gathers a diversity of friendship stories from the annals of myth and literature,...