Anthony Gottlieb

Anthony Gottlieb is a British writer, former Executive Editor of The Economist, historian of ideas, and the author of The Dream of Reason. He has held visiting fellowships at All Souls College, Oxford, 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 Cambridge University, and was formerly married to the British author Miranda Seymour.

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 "[b]y accident" and that he "was looking for distractions from academic philosophy."

Gottlieb's published books include The Dream of Reason: A History of Philosophy from the Greeks to the Renaissance, The Dream of Enlightenment: The Rise of Modern Philosophy 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.