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“... sense, John Gray tells us that ‘a liberal political philosophy is an impossibility,’ and Ted Honderich announces that Conservatism is a nullity. If both of them are right and can be taken at face value, there does not seem to be much left. Dr Gray’s original intention was to define liberalism and give it a foundation, but that ‘enterprise ...”

“... of philosophy. I doubt if any of them has been the product of such intense research as Professor Honderich has devoted to the construction, the defence and the evaluation of his theory of determinism. Agreement among philosophers, especially on fundamental questions, is difficult to reach, and I shall be arguing against ...”

“... headline of Roger Scruton’s obituary in the Sunday Telegraph). But Ayer’s friend and pupil Ted Honderich, now himself the professor at University College, was more charitable and also nearer the mark when he spoke of Ayer as a philosopher ‘whose audacity was being true to ...”

“... The concerns of academic philosophy are to some degree the concerns of everybody. At the same time, they often appear to plain pre-philosophical men and women – including those perhaps not so plain persons who are professors of English or History or Physics – as vaguely ludicrous. On the one hand, academic philosophy is centrally concerned with such all-pervasive concepts as those of truth, rationality and goodness: and who, whether in other academic disciplines or in the transactions of everyday life, can disown an implicit commitment, at the very least, to some view of what rational justification consists in, and of what constitutes sound evidence for a belief, and who, consequently, can avoid admitting to a certain vulnerability to the conclusions of professional philosophers on these matters? Yet, on the other hand, the level at which academic philosophers treat these questions often appears to outsiders – including some philosophers themselves in their off-duty moments – as disturbingly abstract and unrealistic ...”

“... a game indicates. The trouble is: it is not a sport. The Meaning of Life has an introduction by Ted Honderich that is ill-written, plodding, and faintly nauseating in places. It adds nothing to the essays that follow; and the book itself is poorly ...”