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130Wittgenstein and Irigaray: Gender and Philosophy in a Language (Game) of DifferenceHypatia 14 (2). 1999.Drawing Wittgenstein's and Irigaray's philosophies into conversation might help resolve certain misunderstandings that have so far hampered both the reception of Irigaray's work and the development of feminist praxis in general. A Wittgensteinian reading of Irigaray can furnish an anti-essentialist conception of "woman" that retains the theoretical and political specificity feminism requires while dispelling charges that Irigaray's attempt to delineate a "feminine" language is either groundlessl…Read more
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47Against the enclosure of the ethical commons: Radical environmentalism as an “ethics of place”Environmental Ethics 19 (4): 339-353. 1997.Inspired by recent anti-roads protests in Britain, I attempt to articulate a radical environmental ethos and, at the same time, to produce a cogent moral analysis of the dialectic between environmental destruction and protection. In this analysis, voiced in terms of a spatial metaphoric, an “ethics of place,” I seek to subvert the hegemony of modernity’s formal systematization and codification of values whilestill conserving something of modernity’s critical heritage: to reconstitute ethics in o…Read more
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17Cheney and the myth of postmodernismEnvironmental Ethics 15 (1): 3-17. 1993.I draw critical parallels between Jim Cheney’s work and various aspects of modernism, which he ignores or misrepresents. I argue, first, that Cheney’s history of ideas is appallingly crude. He amalgamates all past Western philosophical traditions, irrespective of their disparate backgrounds and complex interrelationships, under the single heading, modern. Then he posits a radical epistemological break between a deluded modernism—characterized as foundationalist, essentialist, colonizing, and tot…Read more
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138Repetition and difference: Lefebvre, le corbusier and modernity's (im)moral landscapeEthics, Place and Environment 4 (1). 2001.If, as Lefebvre argues, every society produces its own social space, then modernity might be characterized by that (anti-)social and instrumental space epitomized and idealized in Le Corbusier's writings. This repetitively patterned space consumes and regulates the differences between places and people; it encapsulates a normalizing morality that seeks to reduce all differences to an economic order of the Same. Lefebvre's dialectical conceptualization of 'difference' can both help explain the op…Read more
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26Ethical difference(s): A response to maycroft on le corbusier and LefebvreEthics, Place and Environment 5 (3). 2002.This Article does not have an abstract
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28Desires... and Beliefs... of One's OwnIn Manuel Vargas (ed.), Rational and Social Agency: The Philosophy of Michael Bratman, Oxford University Press. pp. 129-151. 2014.On one influential view, a person acts autonomously, doing what she genuinely values, if she acts on a desire that is her own, which is (on this account) a matter of it being appropriately ratified at a higher level. This view faces two problems. It doesn’t generalize, as it should, to an account of when a belief is an agent’s own, and does not let one distinguish between desires (and beliefs) happening to be one's own and their being the ones a person would need to have in order to be autonomou…Read more
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252The argument for internalism: Reply to MillerAnalysis 56 (3). 1996.Alexander Miller objects to the argument for moral judgement internalism that I provide in _The Moral Problem. Miller's objection suggests a misunderstanding of the argument. In this reply I take the opportunity to restate the argument in slightly different terms, and to explain why Miller's objection betrays a misunderstanding
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39Philosophy and commonsense: The case of weakness of willIn John O'Leary-Hawthorne & Michaelis Michael (eds.), Philosophy in Mind, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 141--157. 1994.
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104Internalism’s WheelRatio 8 (3): 277-302. 1995.If an agent judges that she morally ought to PHI in certain circumstances C then, according to internalists, absent practical irrationality, she must be motivated, to some extent, to PHI in C. Internalists thus accept what I have elsewhere called the ‘practicality requirement on moral judgement’. There are many different theories about the nature and content of moral judgement that aspire to explain and capture the truth embodied in internalism, and these theories share little in common beyond t…Read more
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229The Possibility of Philosophy of ActionIn Jan Bransen & Stefaan Cuypers (eds.), Human Action, Deliberation and Causation, Kluwer Academic Publishers. pp. 17--41. 1998.This article was conceived as a sequel to “The Humean Theory of Motivation.” The paper addresses various challenges to the standard account of the explanation of intentional action in terms of desire and means-end belief, challenges that didn’t occur to me when I wrote “The Humean Theory of Motivation.” I begin by suggesting that the attraction of the standard account lies in the way in which it allows us to unify a vast array of otherwise diverse types of action explanation. I go on to consider…Read more
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123A theory of freedom and responsibilityIn Garrett Cullity & Berys Nigel Gaut (eds.), Ethics and practical reason, Oxford University Press. pp. 293-317. 1997.
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Color, transparency, mind-independenceIn John J. Haldane & C. Wright (eds.), Reality, Representation, and Projection, Oxford University Press. 1993.
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14‘It Makes My Skin Crawl...’: The Embodiment of Disgust in Phobias of ‘Nature’Body and Society 12 (1): 43-67. 2006.Specific phobias of natural objects, such as moths, spiders and snakes, are both common and socially significant, but they have received relatively little sociological attention. Studies of specific phobias have noted that embodied experiences of disgust are intimately associated with phobic reactions, but generally explain this in terms of objective qualities of the object concerned and/or evolutionary models. We draw on the work of Kolnai, Douglas and Kristeva to provide an alternative phenome…Read more
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3ConstitutivismIn Tristram Colin McPherson & David Plunkett (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, Routledge. pp. 371-384. 2017.
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46The explanatory role of being rationalIn David Sobel & Steven Wall (eds.), Reasons for Action, Cambridge University Press. pp. 58--80. 2009.Humeans hold that actions are movements of an agent's body that are suitably caused by a desire that things be a certain way and a belief on the agent's behalf that something she can just do, namely perform a movement of her body of the kind to be explained, has some suitable chance of making things that way (Davidson 1963). Movements of the body that are caused in some other way aren't actions, but are rather things that merely happen to agents.
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129Objectivity and moral realism: On the significance of the phenomenology of moral experienceIn John Haldane & Crispin Wright (eds.), Reality, Representation, and Projection, Oxford University Press. pp. 235-256. 1993.
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165Evaluation, uncertainty and motivationEthical Theory and Moral Practice 5 (3): 305-320. 2002.Evaluative judgements have both belief-like and desire-like features. While cognitivists think that they can easily explain the belief-like features, and have trouble explaining the desire-like features, non-cognitivists think the reverse. I argue that the belief-like features of evaluative judgement are quite complex, and that these complexities crucially affect the way in which an agent's values explain her actions, and hence the desire-like features. While one form of cognitivism can, it turn…Read more
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59In defence of ethics and the a priori: A reply to Enoch, Hieronymi, and TannenbaumPhilosophical Books 48 (2): 136-149. 2007.
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16Reason and Value: Themes From the Moral Philosophy of Joseph Raz (edited book)Clarendon Press. 2004.Reason and Value collects fifteen brand-new papers by leading contemporary philosophers on themes from the moral philosophy of Joseph Raz. The subtlety and power of Raz's reflections on ethical topics - including especially his explorations of the connections between practical reason and the theory of value - make his writings a fertile source for anyone working in this area. The volume honours Raz's accomplishments in the area of ethical theorizing, and will contribute to an enhanced appreciati…Read more
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58Review: Which Passions Rule? (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (1). 2002.Simon Blackburn attempts to answer these questions in the early part of his wonderful new book Ruling Passions (Blackburn 1998). Unsurprisingly, despite my admiration for his book, I think he fails to identify a special feature of desires and aversions that makes them especially suitable for expression in normative claims. For all that he says the desires and aversions he picks out are much like the addict’s desire to take drugs. There are revisions Blackburn could make which would make his acco…Read more
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648Internal reasonsPhilosophy and Phenomenological Research 55 (1): 109-131. 1995.The idea that there is such an analytic connection will hardly come as news. It amounts to no more and no less than an endorsement of the claim that all reasons are 'internal', as opposed to 'external', to use Bernard Williams's terms (Williams 1980). Or, to put things in the way Christine Korsgaard favours, it amounts to an endorsement of the 'internalism requirement' on reasons (Korsgaard 1986). But how exactly is the internalism requirement to be understood? What does it tell us about the nat…Read more
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22Passions and Projections: Themes From the Philosophy of Simon Blackburn (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2015.This volume presents fourteen original essays which explore the philosophy of Simon Blackburn, and his lifetime pursuit of a distinctive projectivist and anti-realist research program. The essays document the range and influence of Blackburn's work and reveal, among other things, the resourcefulness of his brand of philosophical pragmatism.
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149The incoherence argument: Reply to Schafer-LandauAnalysis 61 (3). 2001.Russ Schafer-Landau’s ‘Moral judgement and normative reasons’ is admirably clear and to the point (Schafer-Landau 1999). He presents his own version of the argument for the practicality requirement on moral judgement – that is, for the claim that those who have moral beliefs are either motivated or practically irrational – that I gave in The Moral Problem (Smith 1994), and he then proceeds to identify several crucial problems. In what follows I begin by making some comments about his presentatio…Read more