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412Review: Coffa, The Semantic Tradition from Carnap to Kant: To the Vienna Station (review)Philosophy of the Social Sciences 24 (4): 522-525. 1994.
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206Russell's moral philosophyStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2007.A 27000 word survey of Russell’s ethics for the SEP. I argue that Russell was a meta-ethicist of some significance. In the course of his long philosophical career, he canvassed most of the meta-ethical options that have dominated debate in the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries — naturalism, non-naturalism, emotivism and the error-theory (anticipating Stevenson and Ayer on the one hand and Mackie on the other), and even, to some extent, subjectivism and relativism. And though none of his theor…Read more
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1476Logic and the autonomy of ethicsAustralasian Journal of Philosophy 67 (2). 1989.My first paper on the Is/Ought issue. The young Arthur Prior endorsed the Autonomy of Ethics, in the form of Hume’s No-Ought-From-Is (NOFI) but the later Prior developed a seemingly devastating counter-argument. I defend Prior's earlier logical thesis (albeit in a modified form) against his later self. However it is important to distinguish between three versions of the Autonomy of Ethics: Ontological, Semantic and Ontological. Ontological Autonomy is the thesis that moral judgments, to be true…Read more
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519Introduction to Hume on Motivation and VirtueIn Hume on Is and Ought, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 1-29. 2010.This includes a methodological meditation (in blank verse) on the history of philosophy as a contribution to philosophy (rather than as a contribution to history) plus a conspectus of the issues surrounding Hume, the Motivation Argument and the Slavery of Reason Thesis. However I am posting it here mainly because it contains a novel restatement of the Argument from Queerness. Big Thesis: the Slavery of Reason Thesis (via the Motivation Argument) provides no support for non-cognitivism or emoti…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 |