3 Quotes & Sayings By Antony Flew

Antony Flew was Professor of Philosophy at the University of Adelaide from 1964 until his retirement in 1988. He is an Australian philosopher and academician, a leading figure in the analytic movement in philosophy in the 1960s, and one of the most articulate and effective critics in the philosophical literature. He has been a major figure in British and American analytic philosophy since he introduced a distinction between metaphysical and analytical philosophers in a 1962 lecture, "Flew's Fallacy" (published as "The Presumption of Atheism" in The Philosophical Review, vol. 71) Read more

He was well known for his work on time perception, illusion, and other topics in epistemology. In his later years he became famous for his atheism. In 1998 Flew left atheism to become a Christian.

1
Prior to Flew, major apologies for atheism were those of Enlightenment thinkers (David Hume, Arthur Schopenhauer, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Friedrich Nietzsche).Major philosophers of Flew’s generation who were atheists: W. V. O. Quine and Gilbert Ryle. But none took the step of developing book-length arguments to support their personal beliefs. In later years, atheist philosophers who critically examined and rejected the traditional arguments for God’s existence: Paul Edwards, Wallace Matson, Kai Nielsen, Paul Kurtz, J. L. Mackie, Richard Gale, Michael Martin. But their works did not change the agenda and framework of discussion the way Flew’s innovative publications did. Antony Flew
2
Generations of Humeans have… been misled into offering analyses of causation and of natural law that have been far too weak because they had no basis for accepting the existence of either cause and effect or natural laws… Hume’s scepticism about cause and effect and his agnosticism about the external world are of course jettisoned the moment he leaves his study. Antony Flew