Zed Adams

There have been many genealogies of ethics. Philip Kitcher’s The Ethical Project stands apart in its ability to incorporate the insights of earlier genealogies while avoiding their oversights and mistakes. In this essay, I compare and contrast Kitcher’s genealogy of ethics with two contemporary alternatives, those offered by Frans do Waal and Richard Joyce. Comparing Kitcher’s genealogy with these alternatives makes it easy to highlight his most useful contribution to our understanding of the origin of ethics: the idea of ethics as a social technology. I conclude by identifying an oversight of Kitcher’s own genealogy, a significant way in which the function of ethics-as-a- technology has been transformed from its origin to today.

In On the Genealogy of Color , Zed Adams challenges widely held philosophical views about the nature of color, exploring the relevance of the history of color science for contemporary debates in color realism/anti-realism and philosophy of mind. Adams argues that the two sides of the contemporary debate on the problem of color realism, Cartesian anti-realism and Oxford realism, are both predicated on an assumption that the concept of color perception is ahistorical and unrevisable. Adams takes issue with this premise and traces the development of theories of color in order to undermine this assumption and open up the conversation about our perception of color. This book makes a significant contribution to recent debates on philosophical methodology by demonstrating the efficacy of using the genealogical method to explore philosophical concepts, and will appeal to philosophers of perception, philosophers of mind, and metaphysicians