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News

News: Winter 1991

Singer Silenced

The annual meeting of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society, which was due to be held in August in Salzburg, was cancelled due to threats of violence from political activists. The philosopher Peter Singer, who favours euthanasia, was due to speak at the symposium, and groups representing the handicapped threatened to disrupt the meeting unless his invitation was withdrawn. The Society responded instead by cancelling the whole meeting.

The Aristotelian Society AGM in Durham shortly afterwards passed a motion deploring this curtailment of free speech. A rather sniffy article in the Times called the affair a ‘squabble among philosophers’ and said that British philosophers had emerged from it with no credit.

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