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95Asymmetries in Thinking about ThoughtAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 90 (2): 299-315. 2016.My essay is concerned with two kinds of case of asymmetries in thinking about thought. If one says that there is nothing else to think but that so and so, one may mean either that there are no considerations which could make it reasonable to think the opposite, or that to think anything else is to be in a muddle, not really to be thinking anything. A case of the latter sort is important in Elizabeth Anscombe’s criticism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, while a case of the former sort is important fo…Read more
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21Intention and Intentionality: Essays in Honor of G. E. M. AnscombePhilosophical Review 90 (4): 624. 1981.
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729Eating Meat and Eating PeoplePhilosophy 53 (206). 1978.This paper is a response to a certain sort of argument defending the rights of animals. Part I is a brief explanation of the background and of the sort of argument I want to reject; Part II is an attempt to characterize those arguments: they contain fundamental confusions about moral relations between people and people and between people and animals. And Part III is an indication of what I think can still be said on—as it were–the animals' side
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25Hommage ou Dommage?Philosophy 58 (223): 73-. 1983.Collingwood was hardly in danger. In 1939, when he wrote that, Festschrift volumes for British scholars were rare; for philosophers they were virtually non-existent. Whitehead had been given two, but then he had put himself at risk by going to America. Recently things have changed, and it is no longer safe to stay at home: half a dozen such volumes—at least—were published in honour of British philosophers between 1977 and 1980. But are they really a Bad Thing?
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1What can you do with the general propositional form?In José L. Zalabardo (ed.), Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2012.
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51The Hardness of the Soft: Wittgenstein’s Early Thought About SkepticismIn James Conant & Andrea Kern (eds.), Varieties of Skepticism: Essays After Kant, Wittgenstein, and Cavell, De Gruyter. pp. 145-182. 2014.
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5Introduction to 'Having a Rough Story About What Moral Philosophy Is'In John Gibson & Wolfgang Huemer (eds.), The Literary Wittgenstein, Routledge. pp. 127--132. 2004.
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898What time is it on the sun?In S. Phineas Upham & Joshua Harlan (eds.), Philosophers in conversation: interviews from the Harvard review of philosophy, Routledge. 2002.
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146Intention and intentionality: essays in honour of G. E. M. Anscombe (edited book)Cornell University Press. 1957/2000.
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8Does Bismarck Have a Beetle in His Box?In Alice Crary & Rupert J. Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein, Routledge. 2000.
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84Asymmetries in Thinking about ThoughtAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 90 (2): 299-315. 2016.My essay is concerned with two kinds of case of asymmetries in thinking about thought. If one says that there is nothing else to think but that so and so, one may mean either that there are no considerations which could make it reasonable to think the opposite, or that to think anything else is to be in a muddle, not really to be thinking anything. A case of the latter sort is important in Elizabeth Anscombe’s criticism of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, while a case of the former sort is important fo…Read more
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3Moral Differences and Distances: Some QuestionsIn Lilli Alanen, Sara Heinämaa & Thomas Wallgren (eds.), Commonality and particularity in ethics, St. Martin's Press. pp. 197--223. 1997.
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192Logical Syntax in Wittgenstein's TractatusPhilosophical Quarterly 55 (218). 2005.P.M.S. Hacker has argued that there are numerous misconceptions in James Conant's account of Wittgenstein's views and of those of Carnap. I discuss only Hacker's treatment of Conant on logical syntax in the _Tractatus. I try to show that passages in the _Tractatus which Hacker takes to count strongly against Conant's view do no such thing, and that he himself has not explained how he can account for a significant passage which certainly appears to support Conant's reading
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IntegrityIn Lawrence C. Becker & Charlotte B. Becker (eds.), The Encyclopedia of Ethics, Garland Publishing. pp. 2--863. 1992.
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589The Importance of Being HumanRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 29 35-62. 1991.I want to argue for the importance of the notion human being in ethics. Part I of the paper presents two different sorts of argument against treating that notion as important in ethics. A. Here is an example of the first sort of argument. What makes us human beings is that we have certain properties, but these properties, making us members of a certain biological species, have no moral relevance. If, on the other hand, we define being human in terms which are not tied to biological classificatio…Read more
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35General Propositional Form?In José L. Zalabardo (ed.), Wittgenstein's Early Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 151. 2012.
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129Criticising from “Outside”Philosophical Investigations 36 (1): 114-132. 2013.I look at a disagreement between Elizabeth Anscombe, on the one hand, and Peter Winch and Ilham Dilman, on the other, about whether it is legitimate to call something an error that counts as knowledge within some alien system of belief; and I look also at the question what Wittgenstein's view was. I try to show that our understanding of what is real cannot be adequately elucidated if we consider only its role within language-games, and I argue that an important element in our thinking about what…Read more
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