Thursday 15 April 2010

Antony Flew

died last week, I learned from Oliver Kamm's blog.  As any fule kno, he was a philosopher who lived in Reading (East - he came to see me on several occasions and our discussions were always interesting), and whatever else, he made a significant contribution to philosophical thought.  He is probably most remembered for having moved in his last years from atheism to belief in intelligent design - Oliver Kamm hints that he was not perhaps gifted with the intellectual acuity of his earlier years when he made this step - but there was more to him than that, and I am glad I had the opportunity to get to know him and his wife a little some years ago.  I hope he will be remembered in Reading.  I do not hold my breath for the Reading Evening Post to publish an obituary of course, they have not had a press release from Martin Salter to guide them, but it would be nice to be able to think that Reading remembers all its eminent figures, not just the cheap demagogic ones.  Antony Flew was very much on the right politically, and I do not think there are many other philosophers who support UKIP, but partly through some things he said to me I have tried to read Sidney Hook, who wrote among other things Towards the Understanding of Karl Marx: A Revolutionary Interpretation - I even bought a book of his essays, but I am not clever enough to understand them.  Any readers who can help will be thanked.

1 comment:

Augustus Carp said...

I used to live around the corner from Prof. Flew; on one occasion the Postman delivered my copy of Liberal News to his house. He re-directed it by adding some singularly pithy epithets on the wrapper about what would happen if the Postman made such a mistake again.