Simon Blackburn b. 1944

Simon Blackburn is a British philosopher, professor emeritus at the University of Cambridge, and one of the leading defenders of expressivism in contemporary metaethics. Spreading the Word and Ruling Passions developed his quasi-realist program, in which moral judgments are projections of attitudes onto the world that nevertheless deserve to be treated, in practice, as if they tracked moral facts. His widely read Think and Being Good have introduced philosophical reflection to a broad public, defending a sober Humean naturalism against both moral realism and moral nihilism.

Simon Walter Blackburn was born at Chesterfield, Derbyshire, in July 1944. He took his bachelor's at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1965 and his doctorate at Cambridge in 1970 under Casimir Lewy. He was tutor and fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford, from 1969 to 1990, served as editor of Mind from 1984 to 1990, and held the Edna J. Koury Chair at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill from 1990 to 2000 before returning to Cambridge as Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy from 2001 to 2011; he is now a fellow of Trinity and research professor at UNC.

His books include Spreading the Word (1984), Essays in Quasi-Realism (1993), Ruling Passions (1998), the popular introductions Think (1999) and Being Good (2001), Lust (2004), Truth: A Guide (2005), How to Read Hume (2008), Practical Tortoise Raising (2010), and Mirror, Mirror (2014); his Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy (1994) is in wide university use.

Blackburn is the leading contemporary defender of quasi-realism, an anti-realist projectivist metaethics in the Humean tradition that 'earns the right' to the ordinary realist-sounding language of moral truth, knowledge, and progress without metaphysical commitment to mind-independent values. His writing combines technical argument with a steady popularising voice that has made him one of the most widely read contemporary philosophical authors in English.