Obituary for Antony Flew

Just caught this over at Leiter Report that the Philosopher Antony Flew passed away...

 

You can read an obituary over at the Telegraph:

As an undergraduate, Flew had become an enthusiast for the new linguistic analysis approach to philosophy propounded by JL Austin and Gilbert Ryle and, as a lecturer, was considered one of its leading advocates. In 1955 he edited Logic and Language: First Series, an influential anthology that popularised the new approach.

He soon began applying the new technique to religious questions and, with Alasdair MacIntyre, edited New Essays in Philosophical Theology (1955). In his study of religion, Flew was greatly influenced by David Hume, on whom he became a leading authority. His Hume's Philosophy of Belief (1961) became the standard study of the philosopher's Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

Flew's interests were prolific and wide-ranging, and he applied his linguistic analysis approach to studies of psychoanalysis, psychical research, crime and evolutionary ethics, among other topics.

In political philosophy, Flew defended classical liberalism against the fallacies of egalitarianism, arguing that socialism and social democracy are based on assumptions about the world that are demonstrably false.

He became a leading critic of the Harvard philosopher John Rawls, who had attempted to reconcile liberty and egalitarianism in his critically acclaimed Theory of Justice. In Politics of Procrustes: Contradictions of Enforced Equality (1981), Flew rejected Rawls's claim that, since people do not acquire their natural talents through moral merit, these talents stand at the disposition of "society". Moral qualities, Flew argued, are not needed to entitle us to profit from our abilities.

In Sociology, Equality and Education (1976), Flew attacked the malign influence of the egalitarian ideology in education. In the 1990s he was the author of a series of pamphlets for the Adam Smith Institute calling on the then Conservative government to return to educational selection, to widen parental choice and to embrace a more challenging curriculum for brighter children.

In 2002, in reference to the Labour government's target of getting more working-class children into higher education, he observed that in 1969, when the grammar school system was still in place, the education minister Shirley Williams had proudly boasted that "over 26 per cent of our university population and 35 per cent of students in all institutions of higher learning are of working-class origin". This, he pointed out, was almost double the level of the second-best European performer, Sweden.

From Oxford, Flew went on to lecture in Moral Philosophy at Aberdeen University before being appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Keele in 1954. In 1973 he transferred to Reading University, where he remained until taking early retirement in 1982. Afterwards, he worked on a half-time basis for three years as Professor of Philosophy at York University, Toronto.

Flew was the author of some 23 works of philosophy, including God and Philosophy (1966), Evolutionary Ethics (1967), An Introduction to Western Philosophy (1971), The Presumption of Atheism (1976), A Rational Animal (1978), Darwinian Evolution (1984), Atheistic Humanism (1993) and Philosophical Essays of Antony Flew (1997).

Flew's volte-face on the existence of God was all the more remarkable given the volume of his writing in the atheistic cause and his vehement denial of internet rumours in 2001 that he had renounced his atheism. His response was entitled Sorry To Disappoint, but I'm Still an Atheist! In 2007, however, he was able to publish There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed his Mind.

 

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