Senior Research Fellow at Wadham College. At the Blavatnik School he co-directs the Master of Public Policy, and directs the Military Leadership and Judgment Programme.
Simpson applied the “Page 99 Test” to his new book, Trust: A Philosophical Study, and reported the following:
I particularly like page 99. I did that rare thing, of checking a citation, and discovered that an author who is often quoted in support of a specific idea actually thought something subtly different. In this case the author is a titan of 20th Century philosophy, Elizabeth Anscombe, and she is often quoted as saying that it is possible for a hearer to wrong a speaker if she, the hearer, does not believe what he, the speaker, says. This is a very thought-provoking and fertile idea. But I think it is probably false, and it turns out that Anscombe wasn’t sure that it’s correct either. On page 99 I show that her view is carefully qualified, in support of the position I advocate. The discussion on page 99 is, then, a microcosm of the problems of trust—we certainly want others to trust us, and may feel offended if we are not trusted, but it is not clear that we have any right so to feel. What matters, rather, is that we are trustworthy.”Learn more about Trust: A Philosophical Study at the Oxford University Press website.
--Marshal Zeringue
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