Edgar Dawn Ross "Ted" Honderich (30 January 1933 – 12 October 2024) was a Canadian-born British philosopher, who was Grote Professor Emeritus of the Philosophy of Mind and Logic, University College London.

(Hons) in Philosophy and English Literature, he came to University College London to study under the logical positivist and Grote Professor A. J. Ayer, graduating with a PhD in 1968.

He was involved in controversy for his moral defence of Palestinian political violence, despite his justification of the founding and maintaining of Israel in its original 1948 borders.

He appeared on radio and television, was the editor of The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, wrote a philosophical autobiography, was chairman of the Royal Institute of Philosophy where he inaugurated the annual lectures subsequently published as Philosophers of Our Times, and he was an honorary associate of the National Secular Society.

Actualism argues, further, that it satisfies further criteria better than other existing theories of consciousness including one of subjectivity, individuality or personal identity, and that it is relevant to desires for human standing that are the motivation of beliefs in free will as against determinism.

The real problem of the consequences of determinism is not choosing between the two traditional doctrines, but a more practical one: trying to give up what must be given up, since we do not have the power of origination.

This sort of physicalism, a predecessor to the notion of supervenience, has since been succeeded in Honderich's writings by the near-physicalism of Radical Externalism.

He also argues that this is consistent with contemporary neuroscience, rescues us from the argument from illusion or brain in a vat, and also from the dubious conclusions of sense-data theory and phenomenalism.

Honderich argues that the Principle of Humanity is that what is right always consists in what, according to the best available knowledge and judgement, are actually rational steps, effective and not self-defeating ones rather than pretences, to the end of getting and keeping people out of bad lives.

With respect to bad lives, Honderich argues that our omissions have resulted in 20 million years of possible living-time lost by a certain sample of Africans.

Such outlooks as political realism and such ideologies as liberalism and libertarianism are also considered, as is what Honderich calls 'hierarchic democracy'.

The Principle of Humanity is used to judge our moral responsibility for the many bad lives, which Honderich tells us is great.

He also argues that we should supplement our democracies with the transformations of the civil disobedience of Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King Jr., Bertrand Russell, and those in Eastern Europe who brought down the wall.

His later book, Humanity, Terrorism, Terrorist War: Palestine, 9/11, Iraq, 7/7... begins by asking if analytic philosophy in considering large questions of right and wrong should proceed by embracing international law, human rights, just war theory or the like.

The book justifies and defends Zionism, defined as the creation of Israel in its original borders, but also reaffirms that Palestinians have had a moral right to their liberation—to terrorism within historic Palestine against what Honderich calls the ethnic cleansing of Neo-Zionism, the expansion of Israel beyond its original borders.

In condemning the 7/7 terrorist attack on London, Honderich considers the importance of horror to morality.

Terrorism, as in this case, can as exactly be self-defence, a freedom struggle, martyrdom, the conclusion of an argument based on true humanity.

Mixed theories of punishment, drawing on backward-looking considerations as well as the notion of prevention, sometimes in terms of the reform of offenders, are also found to be untenable.

has to do with eternal values and therefore with reform rather than change, a view underpinning Edmund Burke's condemnation of the French Revolution and all conservatives since.

Other distinctions have to do with the right kind of political thinking and with human nature, with particular doctrines of incentive and reward, and with certain freedoms, including those of private property.

The Canadian newspaper The Globe and Mail suggested that Oxfam was taking money from a terrorist sympathiser, and it then declined the contributions, for which it was judged adversely in the British media.

Micha Brumlik, director of a Holocaust centre and Professor of Pedagogy at Frankfurt University, demanded publicly that the book be withdrawn from sale by the publisher, Suhrkamp Verlag.

Despite the declaration by the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, who had recommended the translation, that the book was not anti-semitic, it was withdrawn from sale.

[7] Lesser controversies have included an imputation of anti-semitism by a student newspaper in London, against which Honderich took successful legal action.

[8] Honderich wrote a number of papers in criticism of Donald Davidson's Anomalous Monism, and in particular made the objection that on certain assumptions the view is epiphenomenalist.