Anthony Kenny (1931-2026)

Sir Anthony Kenny died on August 3.  Of philosophers of his generation, Kenny was among those I most admired.  He made important contributions to the philosophy of mind, philosophy of religion, and other areas of philosophy.  He was also a formidable historian of philosophy, and his work on various problems in the field was greatly deepened by this historical perspective.  He was especially influenced by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Wittgenstein, which made him one of the founding thinkers of “analytical Thomism” (though I don’t recall whether that was a label he ever used himself).

Kenny famously left the priesthood and the Church in the 1960s, and became a longtime defender of agnosticism, often critical of dogmatic atheism no less than of theism.  He was not a hostile critic of the faith, however, and retained an interest in the Catholic intellectual tradition and in philosophical issues connected to religion.  His memoir A Path from Rome remains an engaging account of his days as a seminarian, priest, and young academic, and of the transformation of his views during that time.

I have long thought that Kenny’s criticisms of arguments for the existence of God and the immortality of the soul were the weakest aspects of his work.  This is not just because I happen to disagree with his conclusions.  It is because, in my view, on these particular topics he simply happened not to consider the strongest possible readings of the arguments he engaged with (for example, in his book on the Five Ways).  All the same, even what he says about these matters is interesting and worth engaging with, and he never resorted to cheap shots or glib dismissals.

I knew Kenny only through email and regret that I never had a chance to meet him in person.  One of the most gratifying experiences of my early academic career was reading the very kind review of my book The Last Superstition that he wrote for the Times Literary Supplement.  I first learned of the review from a reader who had heard about it but hadn’t seen it himself.  I scrambled that day to get hold of it, not without trepidation.  The book is a confident defense of theism, and Kenny was a firm agnostic; it makes very bold claims about the history of philosophy, and Kenny was an eminent historian of the subject; it is vituperative toward the New Atheists, whereas Kenny’s style was genteel.  Might he not hate the book?  Quite the opposite, as it turned out.  (The review is not available online, but you can read excerpts from it here.)

The Metaphysics of Mind and What is Faith? may have been the first works of Kenny’s that I came across.  For any readers interested in getting an idea of the character of his work, they remain good entry points and, like Kenny’s writings in general, well worth reading.  Requiescat in pace.