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1116Analytic Philosophy (Alternative title 'Analytic Atheism?')In Stephen Bullivant & Michael Ruse (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Atheism, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 307-319. 2013.Most analytic philosophers are atheists, but is there a deep connection between analytic philosophy and atheism? The paper argues a) that the founding fathers of analytic philosophy were mostly teenage atheists before they became philosophers; b) that analytic philosophy was invented partly because it was realized that the God-substitute provided by the previously fashionable philosophy - Absolute Idealism – could not cut the spiritual mustard; c) that analytic philosophy developed an unhea…Read more
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321Hume on Is and Ought (edited book)Palgrave-Macmillan. 2010.It ‘seems altogether inconceivable', says Hume, that this ‘new relation' ought ‘can be a deduction' from others ‘which are entirely different from it' The idea that you can't derive an Ought from an Is, moral conclusions from non-moral premises, has proved enormously influential. But what did Hume mean by this famous dictum? Was he correct? How does it fit in with the rest of his philosophy? And what does this suggest about the nature of moral judgements? This collection, the first on this topic…Read more
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290Book Note: Gert, Joshua, Normative Bedrock: Response-Dependence Rationality and Reasons, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013, x + 218 pp, hardback (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy (1): 1-1. 2013.No abstract
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1278Negative truths from positive factsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 84 (2). 2006.According to the truthmaker theory that we favour, all contingent truths are made true by existing facts or states of affairs. But if that is so, then it appears that we must accept the existence of the negative facts that are required to make negative truths (such as 'There is no hippopotamus in the room.') true. We deny the existence of negative facts, show how negative truths are made true by positive facts, point out where the (reluctant) advocates of negative facts (Russell, Armstrong, et a…Read more
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53Scott Soames: The analytic tradition in philosophy, volume 1: Founding giants: Princeton University PressPhilosophical Studies 172 (6): 1671-1680. 2015.The Analytic Tradition in Philosophy is an excellent successor to an excellent book : It is a fine an example of the necromantic style in the history of philosophy where the object of the exercise is to resurrect the mighty dead in order to get into an argument with them, either because we think them importantly right or instructively wrong. However what was a pardonable a simplification and a reasonable omission in the earlier book has now metamorphosed into a sin of omission and an oversimplif…Read more
Dunedin, Otago, New Zealand
Areas of Specialization
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Philosophy of Action |
Meta-Ethics |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Philosophy of Social Science |
20th Century Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |