Anthony Kenny — From Rome to Balliol, Aquinas to Wittgenstein, Priesthood to Agnosticism (1931– )

Sir Anthony Kenny is a British philosopher — born in 1931, trained as a Roman Catholic priest at the Venerable English College in Rome, ordained in 1955, served as a curate in Liverpool, completed a DPhil at Oxford in 1961, returned to the lay state in 1963 as his faith dissolved, excommunicated in 1965 upon marrying Nancy Gayley, appointed a Fellow of Balliol College Oxford in 1964, Master of Balliol from 1978 to 1989, Warden of Rhodes House, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Oxford, President of the British Academy — who produced, over six decades, one of the most substantial and genuinely readable bodies of philosophical scholarship in the English language: serious work on Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Wittgenstein, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of religion, and free will, capped by a four-volume New History of Western Philosophy that was the first single-author history of comparable scope and quality since Bertrand Russell's in 1945.

His unusual intellectual formation — trained first in scholastic philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome, then in analytic philosophy at Oxford, with deep personal investment in the questions of God, free will, and the nature of mind that both traditions had addressed — gave him a double perspective that most of his contemporaries lacked. He could read Aquinas and Wittgenstein as addressing the same deep problems from different philosophical vocabularies, and could see where each illuminated what the other obscured.

His central concern: the philosophical analysis of action, will, and mind — asking what it means to act, to intend, to believe, to know — with an eye always on the historical tradition that had addressed these questions and on the theological implications that made them urgent.

The Path from Rome — Priesthood and Its Loss

Kenny's 1986 autobiography "A Path from Rome" described what the title announced: the journey from ordination to lay scholarship, from Catholic certainty to philosophical agnosticism, from the Venerable English College to Balliol. It was a journey that many philosophers of his generation made — from religious formation to secular academia — but Kenny made it with unusual philosophical deliberateness and without the bitterness that sometimes accompanied such transitions.

He was ordained in 1955, served as a curate in Liverpool, completed his Oxford doctorate while in the priesthood, and left the active priesthood in 1963 as his engagement with analytic philosophy deepened and his confidence in Catholic doctrine eroded. Canon law remained: his priestly ordination, in Rome's view, remained valid; he had never been released from his obligation of clerical celibacy; his 1965 marriage to Nancy Gayley entailed excommunication. He retained, he said, his moral preoccupations and his historical interests — what he shed was the theological certainty that had once housed them.

"He migrated from the life of a Catholic parish priest to that of an Oxford philosophy don, shedding his religious beliefs in the process while retaining the moral preoccupations that had originally drawn him into the priestly life."

Aquinas and Wittgenstein — The Unusual Double Competence

Kenny's most distinctive philosophical contribution was his ability to read Aquinas and Wittgenstein together — to see the medieval philosopher of mind and the twentieth-century analyst as addressing the same fundamental problems about intentionality, mental states, and the relationship between thought and world.

His "Aquinas on Mind" (1993) — relating Aquinas's account of intellect and will to the tradition of philosophy of mind inaugurated by Wittgenstein and Ryle — demonstrated that Descartes was not the beginning of the philosophy of mind story but a detour that had led philosophy away from more defensible positions Aquinas had already articulated. Once the Cartesian framework was rejected — once the sharp soul-body dualism was abandoned — Aquinas's hylomorphic account of mind became philosophically available again as a live option.

His "Wittgenstein" (1973) — for many years the standard introduction — and his subsequent work on Wittgenstein's legacy and philosophy demonstrated that he was not merely expounding Aquinas from a Wittgensteinian angle but genuinely mastered both traditions. His judgments on the history of philosophy were formed by someone who had worked in detail on each major period — which gave his history a quality that purely narrative histories lacked.

"Anthony Kenny is unusually qualified to bring together the medieval and modern philosophical insights, since he was trained in scholastic philosophy at the Gregorian University in Rome and has taught analytic philosophy in Oxford for many years."

Action, Emotion, and Will — The Philosophy of Agency

Kenny's "Action, Emotion and Will" (1963) — published the same year he left the priesthood — was his first major philosophical work and remained one of his most philosophically original. It addressed the philosophical analysis of action: what distinguished an action from a mere bodily movement, what role desire, belief, and intention played in explaining behavior, how emotions should be understood in relation to reason and will.

His approach brought Aristotelian concepts — particularly the practical syllogism and the analysis of voluntary action — into dialogue with mid-century analytic philosophy of action. The resulting account was neither purely Aristotelian nor purely analytic but genuinely synthetic: identifying where the traditions converged and where each illuminated what the other left dark. His subsequent work on free will and power — "Will, Freedom and Power" (1975) — extended this analysis into the theological territory he knew from both inside and outside: the compatibility of divine foreknowledge and human freedom, the coherence of the concept of omnipotence.

"If God is omnipotent and omniscient, then determinism is absolute and human free will is impossible — this is one of the incoherences in the traditional concept of God that pushed Kenny toward agnosticism."

The Agnosticism — A Principled Third Position

Kenny's philosophical position on God — developed across several books — was not the atheism of someone who had simply lost faith but the agnosticism of someone who had examined the arguments carefully and found neither theism nor atheism established. His formulation in "What I Believe" (2006) was precise: atheism makes a stronger claim than theism — that no definition of 'God' makes 'God exists' true — while theism claims only that some definition does. Neither stronger nor weaker claim had been convincingly established. The default position was therefore neither theism nor atheism but agnosticism: "a claim to knowledge needs to be substantiated; ignorance need only be confessed."

He was equally critical of confident atheism — calling Richard Dawkins's move from "The Extended Phenotype" to "The God Delusion" like moving from the Financial Times to The Sun — and of the easy piety that passed for religious reasoning in much popular theology. The traditional attributes of God — omniscience, omnipotence, benevolence — were, in his view, jointly incoherent: omniscience plus omnipotence implied divine determinism incompatible with genuine human freedom; omnipotence raised familiar paradoxes about what an omnipotent being could do; the Five Ways of Aquinas depended on Aristotelian cosmology that modern physics had rendered obsolete. None of this made the question of God unimportant — it made it genuinely open.

"The atheist says that no matter what definition you choose, 'God exists' is always false. The theist only claims that there is some definition which will make 'God exists' true. In my view, neither the stronger nor the weaker claim has been convincingly established. The true default position is neither theism nor atheism, but agnosticism — a claim to knowledge needs to be substantiated; ignorance need only be confessed."

The New History of Western Philosophy — The Life's Summation

Kenny's four-volume "New History of Western Philosophy" (2004–2007), collected in a single volume in 2010, was the culmination of a career spent reading and writing about the entire philosophical tradition. He had written scholarly books on Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, and Wittgenstein — the anchors of each of his four periods — and the history had the unusual quality of being written by someone who had worked in detail on each era.

His judgments were characteristically direct. Plato and Aristotle in the ancient world, Augustine and Aquinas in the medieval, Descartes and Kant in the early modern — these were the greats. Wittgenstein he had no doubt about for the modern period. Whether Marx or Frege was the other greatest philosopher of the modern period — that he hesitated over. On Derrida, he was blunt: "corrupted by being famous — he gave up philosophy for rhetoric, and rhetoric of a particularly childish kind."

"Philosophy is not a matter of knowledge, it is a matter of understanding — that is to say, of organizing what is known. But because philosophy is all-embracing, so universal in its field, the organization of knowledge it demands is something so difficult that only genius can do it."

Legacy — The Philosopher Who Crossed Every Bridge

Kenny's legacy is partly institutional — Master of Balliol, President of the British Academy, Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Oxford — and partly scholarly: a body of work that crossed the usual academic fences between analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy, between medieval and modern, between philosophy of mind and philosophy of religion, with an unusual combination of genuine scholarly depth and accessible prose that made him one of the few philosophers whose books general readers could actually read.

On CivSim he belongs alongside Maritain, Pieper, and Alasdair MacIntyre — philosophers trained in the Catholic tradition who brought its conceptual resources into serious dialogue with the secular philosophical mainstream, neither defensively retreating into Catholic orthodoxy nor abandoning what the tradition had genuinely achieved. His particular contribution: demonstrating that Aquinas's philosophy of mind was not merely a historical curiosity but a philosophically serious alternative to Cartesian dualism — a demonstration that mattered for any philosophy of action, will, and personhood, including Universal Humanism's account of what human beings are.

"Moving from The Extended Phenotype to The God Delusion is like moving from the Financial Times to The Sun."

— Kenny on Richard Dawkins, from Brief Encounters (2018)