Simon Blackburn

Taught philosophy at Cambridge and North Carolina and spent much of his career trying to get analytic philosophy to speak to people outside the seminar without diluting it.

Think is the introduction, walking through knowledge, mind, free will, God and reasoning without pretending any of them are settled. Being Good does the same for ethics.

His own position, quasi-realism, holds that moral talk behaves like fact-stating even though it expresses attitudes rather than describing moral objects, which is a harder thing to argue than either simple realism or simple relativism and is the work he is known for professionally.