Anthony Clifford Grayling is a British philosopher. He was born and raised in Luanshya, Zambia (then Northern Rhodesia) within the British expatriate community. His father worked for the Standard Chartered Bank. Grayling attended several boarding schools, including Falcon College in Zimbabwe, but he ran away from there after being caned.
At the age of twelve, he found an English translation of the Charmides, one of Plato's dialogues, in a local library- that marked his first tryst with philosophical writing. At fourteen, he read G. H. Lewes's Biographical History of Philosophy (1846), which confirmed his ambition to study philosophy. He confessed it "superinduced order on the random reading that had preceded it, and settled my vocation."
Grayling was the third sibling. When he was 19, his older sister Jennifer was murdered in Johannesburg and this affected him deeply. She had been born with brain damage, and after brain surgery to alleviate it at the age of 20 had experienced personality problems that led to several inappropriate affairs and a premature marriage. Shortly after marriage she was found dead in a river with stab wounds. When her parents went to identify her, her mother, already ill, suffered a heart attack and died.
He moved to England in his teens, and spent three years at the University of Sussex.
He felt that the university believed in educating generalists, rather than scholars, so in addition to his BA from Sussex, he enrolled with the University of London as an external student and took up philosophy.
He obtained an MA from Sussex, then attended Magdalen College, Oxford, where he was taught by P. F. Strawson and A. J. Ayer. He obtained his doctorate in 1981 for a thesis on "Epistemological Scepticism and Transcendental Arguments.”
His principal interests in technical philosophy lie at the intersection of theory of knowledge, metaphysics, and philosophical logic, through which he attempts to define the relationship between mind and world, thereby challenging philosophical scepticism. Grayling uses philosophical logic to counter the arguments of the sceptic in order to try to shed light on the traditional ideas of the realism debate and developing associated views on truth and meaning.
He is also interested in both practical and theoretical questions of human rights and related ethical problems, and has been a contributor to philosophical pedagogy and scholarship through writing and editing.
He is also associated in the UK with the new atheism movement.
In 2011, he founded and became the first Master of New College of the Humanities, a private undergraduate college in London. He was Professor of Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London from 1991 to 2011. He is also a supernumerary fellow of St Anne's College, Oxford.
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