Simon Walter Blackburn was born on 12 July 1944 in Chipping Sodbury, England. A major contemporary neo-Humean philosopher, he is a proponent of quasi-realism in metaethics. Educated at Trinity College, Cambridge from 1962 to 1965, he became Junior Research Fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge in 1967 and Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Pembroke College, Oxford in 1969. From 1990 to 2001, he was Edna J. Koury Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at UNC Chapel Hill. He retired as Bertrand Russell Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge in 2011.
Blackburn has held visiting appointments at the University of Melbourne, University of British Columbia, Princeton, Ohio State University, and Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. President of the Aristotelian Society, he was also Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Notable works include Reason and Prediction (1973), Spreading the Word (1984), Essays in Quasi-Realism (1993), Ruling Passions (1998), Being Good (2002), Plato’s Republic: A Biography (2006), and Mirror, Mirror (2014). He has also appeared in multiple episodes of Closer to Truth.
