Anthony Gottlieb


Anthony John Gottlieb is a British writer, former Executive Editor of The Economist, historian of ideas, and the author of The Dream of Reason. A Two-Year Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford from October 2017, he has previously held visiting fellowships at All Souls, and Harvard University, and taught at the CUNY Graduate Center and the New School in New York, and been a visiting scholar at New York University and fellow at the Cullman Centre for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. He is a fellow of the New York Institute for the Humanities and the series editor of The Routledge Guides to the Great Books. He was educated at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, and University College London. He was formerly married to the British author Miranda Seymour.

''The Economist''

Gottlieb was a member of the editorial staff of The Economist from 1984 to 2006, and its Executive Editor and editor of "Economist.com" from 1997 to 2006. His earlier posts at the magazine included Britain Correspondent, Science and Technology Editor, and Surveys Editor. He describes his having taken up journalism as being "y accident" and that he "was looking for distractions from academic philosophy."

Works

Gottlieb's published books include ', ' and Socrates. He has published many articles and book reviews in The New York Times since 1990 on subjects ranging from philosophy and history to the role of talking parrots in literature and the significance of sex with robots, and in The New Yorker on the Wittgenstein family, René Descartes, works on atheism, the theory of voting, and evolutionary psychology. His work also appears in Intelligent Life and The Wall Street Journal. He is currently working on a third volume in his history of western philosophy that will cover Kant and the schools that followed him up to the present day.