Addison Moore

In this bold and innovative new work, A.W. Moore poses the question of whether it is possible for ethical thinking to be grounded in pure reason. In order to understand and answer this question, he takes a refreshing and challenging look at Kant’s moral and religious philosophy. Identifying three Kantian Themes – morality, freedom and religion – and presenting variations on each of these themes in turn, Moore concedes that there are difficulties with the Kantian view that morality can be governed by ‘pure’ reason. He does however defend a closely related view involving a notion of reason as socially and culturally conditioned. In the course of doing this, Moore considers in detail, ideas at the heart of Kant’s thought, such as the categorical imperative, free will, evil, hope, eternal life and God. He also makes creative use of the ideas in contemporary philosophy, both within the analytic tradition and outside it, such as ‘thick’ ethical concepts, forms of life and ‘becoming those that we are’. Throughout the book, a guiding precept is that to be rational is to make sense, and that nothing is of greater value to use than making sense.

The philosophy of mathematics was of colossal importance to Wittgenstein. Its problems had a peculiarly strong hold on him; and he seems to have thought that it was in addressing these problems that he produced his greatest work. However robust the distinction between the calculus and the surrounding prose, the prose may infect the calculus; or the prose may infect how we couch the calculus. Yet Wittgenstein's writings in the philosophy of mathematics stand in a curious relation to this self‐assessment. By 1938, he had written an early version of his master‐work Philosophical Investigations, the second half of which was on the philosophy of mathematics. This material did not survive into the version of Philosophical Investigations that was eventually published after his death. Instead it appeared, modified in various ways, along with notes that he wrote during World War II, as Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics, another posthumous publication, assembled by his literary executors.

This essay is concerned with six linguistic moves that we commonly make, each of which is considered in turn. These are: stating rules of representation; representing things categorically; mentioning expressions; saying truly or falsely how things are; saying vaguely how things are; and stating rules of rules of representation. A common-sense view is defended of what is involved in our doing each of these six things against a much more sceptical view emanating from the idea that linguistic behavior is fundamentally messy. Both the fifth move and the sixth move involve vague concepts, and much of the essay is concerned with developing an approach to various problems and puzzles that attach to such concepts, most notably the sorites paradoxes.

1. If it is true that ‘an ethic is the propositional reflection of the dispositions and attitudes, policies and stances, of people,’ as Simon Blackburn says in summary of the quasi-realism that he champions in this excellent and wonderfully provocative book, then it seems to follow that different dispositions, attitudes, policies and stances—different conative states, for short—will issue in different ethics, each with an equal claim to truth; and this in turn seems to be one thing that could be reasonably meant by that slippery polyseme ‘relativism’. If such relativism does follow, a good deal remains to be said about how much force it has. At the limit it might do no more than signal the abstract possibility of an ethic rivalling that of humans. More potently, it might somehow legitimize the different ethics of different groups of humans in actual conflict with one another. But without the possibility of some such variability of ethic to match a possible variability of conative state, the quasi-realist’s claim that an ethic ‘reflects’ a particular combination of conative states appears hollow.

It is a long time since I have admired a book as much as I admire this one. It is a long time since I have disagreed with a book as profoundly as I disagree with this one. I hope this combination of reactions on my part has more than whatever limited biographical interest it has. I hope it helps to signal the combination of excellence and provocation that mark Timothy Williamson's book, which is at once beautifully clear, forcefully argued, continually insightful, and, in my view, deeply wrong.One thing that I admire about the book is Williamson's preparedness to reflect philosophically on the nature of philosophy, something that is surprisingly rare in a discipline that is marked by such a high degree of self-consciousness and in which there are so few scruples about reflecting on the nature of other disciplines. One thing that gives me pause is Williamson's lack of serious engagement with the history of philosophy. 1 I am convinced that the philosophy of philosophy will always be seriously handicapped if it is as dissociated from the history of philosophy as this. But I shall not dwell on that concern here, because Williamson is clear enough about where his interests lie and I would be in danger, if I did, of succumbing to that familiar absurdity of berating an author for not having written a numerically different book.What I will say is that Williamson's failure to engage seriously with the history of philosophy seems to me indicative of a scientism about philosophy which, despite how much he does to motivate his conception of the discipline, is manifest in how much ….

I begin with Kant's notion of a maxim and consider the role which this notion plays in Kant's formulations of the fundamental categorical imperative. This raises the question of what a maxim is, and why there is not the same requirement for resolutions of other kinds to be universalizable. Drawing on Bernard Williams' notion of a thick ethical concept, I proffer an answer to this question which is intended neither in a spirit of simple exegesis nor as a straightforward exercise in moral philosophy but as something that is poised somewhere between the two. My aim is to provide a kind of rational reconstruction of Kant. In the final section of the essay, I argue that this reconstruction, while it manages to salvage something distinctively Kantian, also does justice to the relativism involved in what J. L. Mackie calls 'people's adherence to and participation in different ways of life'

In this essay I focus on the idea of the univocity of being, championed by Duns Scotus and given prominence more recently by Deleuze. Although I am interested in how this idea can be established, my primary concern is with something more basic: how the idea can even be properly thought. In the course of exploring this issue, which I do partly by borrowing some ideas about logical syntax from Wittgenstein's Tractatus, I try to show how there can be dialogue between analytic philosophers and those of other traditions

It is argued that, although there are no ineffable truths, the concept of ineffability nevertheless does have application—to certain states of knowledge. Towards the end of the essay this idea is related to religion: it is argued that the language that results from attempting (unsuccessfully) to put ineffable knowledge into words is very often of a religious kind. An example of this is given at the very end of the essay. This example concerns the Euthyphro question: whether what is right is right because God wills it, or whether God wills it because it is right.

Creative Intelligence: Essays in the Pragmatic Attitude represents an attempt at intellectual cooperation. No effort has been made, however, to attain unanimity of belief nor to proffer a platform of "planks" on which there is agreement. The consensus represented lies primarily in outlook, in conviction of what is most likely to be fruitful in method of approach. As the title page suggests, the volume presents a unity in attitude rather than a uniformity in results. Consequently each writer is definitively responsible only for his own essay. The reader will note that the Essays endeavor to embody the common attitude in application to specific fields of inquiry which have been historically associated with philosophy rather than as a thing by itself. Beginning with philosophy itself, subsequent contributions discuss its application to logic, to mathematics, to physical science, to psychology, to ethics, to economics, and then again to philosophy itself in conjunction with esthetics and religion. The reader will probably find that the significant points of agreement have to do with the ideas of the genuineness of the future, of intelligence as the organ for determining the quality of that future so far as it can come within human control, and of a courageously inventive individual as the bearer of a creatively employed mind.

Criteria of ineffability are presented which, it is claimed, preclude the possibility of truths that are ineffable, but not the possibility of other things that are ineffable—not even the possibility of other things that are non-trivially ineffable. Specifically, they do not preclude the possibility of states of understanding that are ineffable. This, it is argued, allows for a reappraisal of the dispute between those who adopt a traditional reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and those who adopt the new reading recently championed by Cora Diamond, James Conant, and others. By maintaining that what the nonsense in the Tractatus is supposed to convey is ineffable understanding, rather than ineffable truth, we can do considerable justice to each of these readings. We can also do considerable justice to the Tractatus.