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40Sexual Ontology and Group MarriagePhilosophy 58 (224): 215-227. 1983.Philosophers of earlier ages have usually spent time in considering thenature of marital, and in general familial, duty. Paley devotes an entire book to those ‘relative duties which result from the constitution of the sexes’,1 a book notable on the one hand for its humanity and on the other for Paley‘s strange refusal to acknowledge that the evils for which he condemns any breach of pure monogamy are in large part the result of the fact that such breaches are generally condemned. In a society wh…Read more
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39Emotion and Peace of Mind: from Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (review)Philosophy 77 (1): 125-141. 2002.
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39The Absence of a Gap between Facts and ValuesAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 54 (1). 1980.
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39Global ReligionRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 36 113-128. 1994.The social and environmental problems that we face at this tail end of twentieth-century progress require us to identify some cause, some spirit that transcends the petty limits of our time and place. It is easy to believe that there is no crisis. We have been told too often that the oceans will soon die, the air be poisonous, our energy reserves run dry; that the world will grow warmer, coastlands be flooded and the climate change; that plague, famine and war will be the necessary checks on pop…Read more
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38Orwell and the Anti-RealistsPhilosophy 67 (260): 141-154. 1992.The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.
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38Atheism Considered as a Christian SectPhilosophy 90 (2): 277-303. 2015.Atheists in general need share no particular political or metaphysical views, but atheists of the most modern, Western, militant sort, escaping from a merely nihilistic mind-set, are usually humanists of an especially triumphalist kind. In this paper I offer a critical analysis and partial history of their claims, suggesting that they are members of a distinctively Christian heretical sect, formed in reaction to equally heretical forms of monotheistic idolatry.
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37Aesthetic themes in pagan and Christian Neoplatonism from Plotinus to Gregory of NyssaBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (4): 784-786. 2016.
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37Plotinus on Number - Slaveva-Griffin Plotinus on Number. Pp. xii + 176. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Cased £39.99, US$74, ISBN: 978-0-19-537719-4 (review)The Classical Review 60 (1): 91-93. 2010.
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36Taylor's waking dream: No one's replyInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 34 (2). 1991.Taylor recognizes the problems posed by the ideals of disengaged reason and the affirmation of ?ordinary life? for unproblematic commitment to other ideals of universal justice and the like. His picture of ?the modern identity? neglects too much of present importance and he is too disdainful of Platonic realism to offer a convincing solution. The romantic expressivism that he seeks to re?establish as an important moral resource can only avoid destructive effects if it is taken in its original an…Read more
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36G.K. Chesterton: Thinking Backward, Looking ForwardTempleton Foundation Press. 2006.Offering a detailed study of early 20th-century essayist, poet, novelist, political campaigner, and theologian G.K. Chesterton, author Stephen R.L. Clark ...
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36Utility, Rights and the Domestic Virtues: Or What's Wrong With RaymondBetween the Species 4 (4): 3. 1988.
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36Plotinian dualisms and the "greek" ideas of selfJournal of Chinese Philosophy 36 (4): 554-567. 2009.No Abstract
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36Does the Burgess shale have moral implications?Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 36 (4). 1993.Stephen Jay Gould's Wonderful Life is a study of the fossils of the Burgess Shale of British Columbia. My concern is with the morals that Gould draws, with the ?new picture of life? that, he says, the reinterpreted Burgess animals compel. I conclude that his case is not established. (1) There may have been reasons to do with ?fitness? why most of the Burgess animals left no descendants, even if we cannot guess exactly what they were. (2) We do not know that our past is dotted with the kind of ma…Read more
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36Plotinus on intellect – eyjólfur kjalar EmilssonPhilosophical Quarterly 59 (235): 357-359. 2009.No Abstract
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35Have biologists wrapped up philosophy?Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 43 (2). 2000.An examination of the currently fashionable thesis that scientists, and especially biologists in the wake of the Darwinian Revolution, can now solve the problems that traditional philosophers have only talked about. Past philosophers, for example during the Enlightenment, have themselves made use of contemporary, scientific techniques and theories. The present claim may only be another such move, to be welcomed by philosophers who would distinguish themselves from rhetoricians. Others may prefer…Read more
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35From Jim Harter, Animals: 1419 Copyright-Free 1UustraJWns, 1979; Carol Belanger Grafton, OldBetween the Species 9 (3). 1993.
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35Book Review: Stephen J. Pope, Human Evolution and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). xiii + 359 pp. £50/us$95 (hb), ISBN 978-0-521-86340-7 (review)Studies in Christian Ethics 22 (4): 506-509. 2009.
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35Animals and Their Moral StandingRoutledge. 1997.Twenty years ago, people thought only cranks or sentimentalists could be seriously concerned about the treatment of non-human animals. However, since then philosophers, scientists and welfarists have raised public awareness of the issue; and they have begun to lay the foundations for an enormous change in human practice. This book is a record of the development of 'animal rights' through the eyes of one highly-respected and well-known thinker. This book brings together for the first time Stephen…Read more
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35Who is GodEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8 (4): 3--22. 2016.The Hindu Brahmanas record that God’s reply to the question ”Who are you?’ was simply ”Who’: ”Who is the God whom we should honour with the oblation’: an indicative, as well as interrogative! Might this also be what Aeschylus intended by his reference to ”Zeus hostis pot’estin’ : not an expression of doubt, but of acknowledged mystery? The name by which He is to be called, perhaps, is not ”Zeus’ but, exactly, ”Whoever’. And most famously the God that Moses encountered, asked who He is, answered …Read more
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34The possible truth of metaphorInternational Journal of Philosophical Studies 2 (1). 1994.No abstract
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34The cosmic priority of valueTijdschrift Voor Filosofie 62 (4). 2000.Adam Sedgwick's complaint that Darwin's rejection of final causes indicated a "demoralized understanding" cannot easily be dismissed: if nothing happens because it should, our opinions about what is morally beautiful are no more than projections. Darwin was carrying out an Enlightenment project — to exclude final causes or God's purposes from science because we could not expect to know what they were. That abandonment of final causes was an episode in religious history, a reaction against compla…Read more
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34The Limits of Explanation: Limited ExplanationsRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 27 195-210. 1990.When I was first approached to read a paper at the conference from which this volume takes its beginning I expected that Flint Schier, with whom I had taught a course on the Philosophy of Biology in my years at Glasgow, would be with us to comment and to criticize. I cannot let this occasion pass without expressing once again my own sense of loss. I am sure that we would all have gained by his presence, and hope that he would find things both to approve, and disapprove, in the following venture.
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33Icons, Sacred Relics, Obsolescent PlantJournal of Applied Philosophy 3 (2): 201-210. 1986.Whether churches should be demolished, rebuilt, restored or preserved is a contentious issue. Some hold that the needs of a present worshipping community should take precedence over antiquarian or aesthetic interest, others that we owe a debt to the ages. Arguments mirror those between developers and environmentalists. It is argued here that it is not abstract rights that matter, but a sense of history, and of the sacred. Church buildings and landscapes are to be maintained not as museum pieces …Read more
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33Abstract Morality, Concrete CasesRoyal Institute of Philosophy Lecture Series 22 35-53. 1987.Practitioners of disciplines whose problems are debated by moral philosophers regularly complain that the philosophers are engaged in abstract speculation, divorced from ‘real-life’ consequences and responsibilities, that it is the practitioners (doctor, research scientist, politician) who must take the decisions, and that they cannot (and should not) act in accordance with strict abstract logic.
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33Non-Personal MindsRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 53 185-209. 2003.Persons are creatures with a range of personal capacities. Most known to us are also people, though nothing in observation or biological theory demands that all and only people are persons, nor even that persons, any more than people, constitute a natural kind. My aim is to consider what non-personal minds are like. Darwin's Earthworms are sensitive, passionate and, in their degree, intelligent. They may even construct maps, embedded in the world they perceive around them, so as to be able to co…Read more
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33Citizens of the World and their ReligionPhilosophical Papers 48 (1): 103-122. 2019.The notion of a ‘cosmopolites’ has diverged quite far from its philosophical origins, but may eventually serve a similar function. The hope of a global peace or any sort of global managemen...
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32First Person Plural: Multiple Personality and the Philosophy of mindPhilosophical Books 34 (2): 109-112. 1993.
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University of BristolHonorary Research Fellow
Liverpool, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
Philosophical Traditions |