Simon Blackburn

Blackburn was born on 12 July 1944 in Chipping Sodbury, England. He attended Clifton College and went on to receive his bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1965 from Trinity College, Cambridge. He obtained his doctorate in 1969 from Churchill College, Cambridge. He retired as the professor of philosophy at the University of Cambridge in 2011, but remains a distinguished research professor of philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, teaching every fall semester. He is also a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and a member of the professoriate of New College of the Humanities. He was previously a Fellow of Pembroke College, Oxford and has also taught full-time at the University of North Carolina as an Edna J. Koury Professor. He is a former president of the Aristotelian Society, having served the 2009–2010 term. In 2004, he delivered the Gifford Lectures on ''Reason's Empire'' at the University of Glasgow. He was elected a Fellow of the British Academy in 2002 and a Foreign Honorary Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2008. He is a former editor of the journal Mind. ==Philosophical work==

In philosophy, he is best known as the proponent of quasi-realism in meta-ethics and as a defender of neo-Humean views on a variety of topics. "The quasi-realist is someone who endorses an anti-realist metaphysical stance but who seeks, through philosophical maneuvering, to earn the right for moral discourse to enjoy all the trappings of realist talk." ==Public philosophy==

He makes occasional appearances in the British media, such as on BBC Radio 4's The Moral Maze. He is a patron of Humanists UK (formerly the British Humanist Association), and when asked to define his atheism, he said he prefers the label infidel over atheist: He was one of 55 public figures to sign an open letter published in The Guardian in September 2010, stating their opposition to Pope Benedict XVI's state visit to the UK, and has argued that "religionists" should have less influence in political affairs. In a televised debate, Blackburn argued against the position of the author and podcaster Sam Harris that morality can be derived straightforwardly from science. == Books ==

• Reason and Prediction (1973). . • Spreading the Word (1984) – a text. . • Essays in Quasi-realism (1993). – a defence of quasi-realism as applied to ethics ISBN 0-19-508041-6 and . • The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy ([1994] 2015), 3rd ed. . • Ruling Passions (1998) A defence of a NeoHumean theory of reasons and moral motivation. . • Truth (1999) (edited with Keith Simmons) – from Oxford Readings in Philosophy series. . • Think: A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy. (1999) and . • Being Good (2001) – an introduction to ethics. . • Reprinted as Ethics: A Very Short Introduction in Oxford University Press' Very Short Introductions series. . • Lust (2004) – one of an Oxford University Press series covering the Seven Deadly Sins. . • Truth: A Guide (2005). . • ''Plato's Republic: A Biography'' (2006) – from Atlantic Books' Books That Shook the World series. . • How to read Hume (2008) – Granta Publications. . • What do we really know?: The Big Questions of Philosophy – (2009) from Quercus. . • • Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014) • On Truth (2018) ==References==