John Nicholas Gray (born 1948). English political philosopher and author with interests in analytic philosophy and the history of ideas. Retired in 2008 as Professor of European Thought, London School of Economics and Political Science. Gray contributes The Guardian, The Times Literary Supplement and the New Statesman, where he is the lead book reviewer. He is a modest atheist. He ultimately understands there will be Ending--the human project will terminate. Gray points to a future in which humans suffer in a dying nest they almost religiously and willfully befouled [171], and either terminate or are superseded.

Gray has written several influential books, including False Dawn: The Delusions of Global Capitalism (1998), which argues that free market globalization is an unstable Enlightenment project currently in the process of disintegration; Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (2002), which attacks philosophical humanism, a worldview which Gray sees as originating in religions; and Black Mass: Apocalyptic Religion and the Death of Utopia (2007), a critique of utopian thinking in the modern world.

"The Gaian perspective [hypothesis] is the most potent antidote within late modern culture to the hubris of humanism". [170]

Gray sees volition, and morality, as illusions. Portrays humanity as a ravenous species engaged in wiping out other forms of life. "In the late modern phenomenon of the omnicompetent market, modernity may have become self-consuming." [184] The global "free market" is a destructive gale of toxic waste generation. We cannot control technology, and sites of incalculable risk already abound. He doubts if there is any late modern society with the cultural resources to initiate and sustain prudent risk-aversion.

Gray concludes on a fatalistic note, and it is already hollowed out by his atheism and an apparently constitutional inability to find hope in discoveries. For those who invoke the hoary hope of "examined life" as expressed in the Socratic project, he notes that "the idea of thinking human beings" remains an obstacle to thought. "The present inquiry has been intended as no more than a prelude to thinking. The preparatory thinking that is most needed in our time is that which is ready to put our certainty in question." [186] ( )