Celia Green

Celia Elizabeth Green (born 26 November 1935) is a British writer on philosophical scepticism and psychology.

Green's parents were both primary school teachers, who together authored a series of geography textbooks which became known as The Green Geographies.

She was educated first at the Ursuline Convent in Ilford, and later at the Woodford High School for Girls, a state school. In a book, Letters from Exile, she compared these two schools and made conclusions that preferred parentally financed to state education. She won the Senior Open Scholarship to Somerville College, Oxford aged 17.

In 1960 she was awarded a B.Litt. degree from Oxford University's faculty of Literae Humaniores (Philosophy), for a thesis, supervised by H. H. Price, entitled An Enquiry into Some States of Consciousness and their Physiological Foundation. From 1957 to 1960, Green held the post of Research Officer at the Society for Psychical Research in London. In 1961, Green founded and became the Director of the Institute of Psychophysical Research. The Institute's areas of interest were initially listed as philosophy, psychology, theoretical physics, and ESP. However, its principal work during the sixties and seventies concerned hallucinations and other quasi-perceptual experiences in normal subjects. Its main benefactor, from 1963 to 1970, was Cecil Harmsworth King, then Chairman of the IPC group, which owned the Daily Mirror.

In 1996 Green was awarded a DPhil degree by the Oxford faculty of Literae Humaniores for a thesis on causation and the mind-body problem. Green is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, University of Liverpool.

Green's basic philosophical position may be described as one of radical scepticism, based on a perception of what she calls 'the total uncertainty'. This perception leads her to agnostic positions, not just on traditional philosophical issues such as the nature of physical causation, but also on current social arrangements, such as state education and the monopolistic power of the medical profession, of both of which she is a relentless critic. Green writes in Letters from Exile and elsewhere of the damage which she believes can be done to exceptional children by holding back, rather than pushing, a topic which she regards as subject to extreme misrepresentation among current educational theorists.

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