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80Critical Notice: Iain McGilchrist, The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World (Perspectiva, 2021). 2 volumes, 1500 pages, no price (review)Philosophical Investigations 45 (4): 528-539. 2022.Philosophical Investigations, Volume 45, Issue 4, Page 528-539, October 2022.
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67The Heart of What Matters: The Role for Literature in Moral PhilosophyMind 112 (447): 506-509. 2003.
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65On future peopleThink 10 (29): 43-47. 2011.It is no longer socially-acceptable to exhibit prejudice against ethnic minority people on grounds of their ethnicity, women on grounds of their gender, or working-class people on grounds of their class. The last bastions of discrimination are being overcome: such as prejudice against gay and lesbian people, and against disabled people. …Or, is there one more, crucial bastion of discrimination still strongly in place?
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63Wittgenstein and Zen Buddhism: one practice, no dogmaIn Mario D'Amato, Jay L. Garfield & Tom J. F. Tillemans (eds.), Pointing at the Moon: Buddhism, Logic, Analytic Philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 13--23. 2009.
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63The New Hume Debate (edited book)Routledge. 2000.First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
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61What does ‘signify’ signify?: A response to GillettPhilosophical Psychology 14 (4): 499-514. 2001.Gillett argues that there are unexpected confluences between the tradition of Frege and Wittgenstein and that of Freud and Lacan. I counter that that the substance of the exegeses of Frege and Wittgenstein in Gillett's paper are flawed, and that these mistakes in turn tellingly point to unclarities in the Lacanian picture of language, unclarities left unresolved by Gillett. Lacan on language is simply a kind of enlarged/distorted mirror image of the Anglo-American psychosemanticists: where they …Read more
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59A strengthened ethical version of Moore's Paradox? Lived paradoxes of self-loathing in psychosis and neurosisPhilosophical Psychology 25 (1). 2012.Wittgenstein once remarked: ?nobody can truthfully say of himself that he is filth. Because if I do say it, though it can be true in a sense, this is not a truth by which I myself can be penetrated: otherwise I should either have to go mad or change myself.? This has an immediate corollary, previously unnoted: that it may be true that someone is simply filth?a rotten person through and through?and also true that they don?t believe that they are filth (or, in a certain sense, that they do), but t…Read more
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54Does Thomas Kuhn have a 'model of science'?Social Epistemology 17 (2-3): 293-296. 2003.No abstract
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54The `Hard' Problem of Consciousness Is Continually Reproduced and Made Harder by All Attempts to Solve ItTheory, Culture and Society 25 (2): 51-86. 2008.
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53The difference principle is not action-guidingCritical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 14 (4): 487-503. 2011.Utilitarianism would allow any degree of inequality whatsoever productive of the greatest happiness of the greatest number. But it does not guide political action, because determining what level of inequality would produce the greatest happiness of the greatest number is opaque due to well-known psychological coordination problems. Does Rawlsian liberalism, as is generally assumed, have some superiority to Utilitarianism in this regard? This paper argues not; for Rawls’s ‘difference principle’ w…Read more
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53“Nothing is Shown”: A ‘Resolute’ Response to Mounce, Emiliani, Koethe and VilhauerPhilosophical Investigations 26 (3): 239-268. 2003.
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52Wittgenstein's Metaphilosophy. By Paul Horwich. Oxford University Press, 2012, xv+225pp, £16.99. ISBN-10: 019966112X; ISBN-13: 978-0199661121 (review)Philosophy 89 (2): 1-6. 2014.
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50Time to stop trying to provide an account of timePhilosophy 78 (3): 397-408. 2003.Dummett argues that there are difficulties with existing accounts of time, and urges us to consider the merits of his alternative ‘constructionist’ account. He derides my opting out of the debate between him and his Realist opponents as “quietist”. But the epithet “quietist” only works if there actually is some genuine topic on which I am staying quiet (or silencing others). Whereas I simply urge that, while Dummett has correctly identified difficulties with Realist accounts of time, he does not…Read more
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48Throwing away 'the bedrock'Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 105 (1). 2005.If one is impressed with Wittgenstein's philosophizing, then it is a deep mistake to think that the terms that he made famous-philosophical terms like 'form of life', 'language-game', 'everyday', 'bedrock'-are the key to his philosophy. On the contrary, they are in the end an obstacle to be overcome. The last temptation of the Wittgensteinian philosopher is to treat these terms as providing a kind of ersatz foundation. They are rather a ladder that takes one... to where one already is, only now …Read more
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47Literature as Philosophy of Psychopathology: William Faulkner as WittgensteinPhilosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 10 (2): 115-124. 2003.I argue that the language of some schizophrenic persons is akin to the language of Benjy in Williams Faulkner's novel The Sound and the Fury, in one crucial respect: Faulkner displays to us language that, ironically, cannot be translated or interpreted into sense... without irreducible 'loss' or 'garbling.' The same is true of famous schizophrenic writers, such as Renee and Schreber. Such 'garbling' is of an odd kind, admittedly: it is a garbling that inadvisably turns nonsense into sense.... Fa…Read more
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47Review: John W. Cook: The Undiscovered Wittgenstein: The Twentieth Century's Most Misunderstood Philosopher (review)Mind 117 (467): 681-685. 2008.
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47The carbon credit crunchThe Philosophers' Magazine 51 (51): 46-49. 2010.Those of us contemplating jetting off to a philosophy conference abroad really do need to ask ourselves how much good we would really be doing by going and whether we can justify the harm that we are certainly responsible for if we go.
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45Wittgenstein and the Illusion of ‘Progress’: On Real Politics and Real Philosophy in a World of TechnocracyRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 78 265-284. 2016.‘You can’t stop progress’, we are endlessly told. But what is meant by “progress”? What is “progress” toward? We are rarely told. Human flourishing? And a culture? That would be a good start – but rarely seems a criterion for ‘progress’. Rather, ‘progress’ is simply a process, that we are not allowed, apparently, to stop. Or rather: it would be futile to seek to stop it. So that we are seemingly-deliberately demoralised into giving up even trying.Questioning the myth of ‘progress’, and seeking t…Read more
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44Wittgenstein in Exile by James C. Klagge (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 51 (3): 499-500. 2013.James Klagge aims to shed light on Wittgenstein’s philosophy by situating it in its biographical–cultural context. While Klagge is not alone in pursuing this aim, his claim to originality lies in his thematic focus on Wittgenstein’s relationship to his time and culture as one of “alienation” (3), expressed by the metaphor of being “in exile” (61). A central concern of Klagge’s is how we, as modern readers living in a “civilized” culture not dissimilar to the one from which Wittgenstein felt hims…Read more
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44Review: Persons and Passions: Essays in Honor of Annette Baier (review)Mind 116 (461): 173-176. 2007.
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44What 'there can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word' could possibly meanIn Alice Crary & Rupert Read (eds.), The New Wittgenstein, Routledge. 2000.
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42De‐mystifying tacit knowing and clues: a comment on Henry et alJournal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 17 (5): 944-947. 2011.
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42On wanting to say: “All we need is a paradigm”The Harvard Review of Philosophy 9 (1): 88-105. 2001.
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42The real philosophical discovery': A reply to Jolley 's 'Philosophical Investigations 133: Wittgenstein and the End of Philosophy?Philosophical Investigations 18 (4): 362-369. 1995.
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40Wittgenstein and Marx on ordinary and philosophical languageEssays in Philosophy 1 (2): 1-41. 2000.
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40Beyond Just Justice – Creating Space for a Future‐Care EthicPhilosophical Investigations 39 (4). 2016.Distributive justice relies on metaphors about spatial distribution. Modelling cross-temporal relations on cross-spatial relations in this way obscures how earlier groups become the later ones. Procedural justice metaphors rely on metaphors of contract and thereby on impartial reasoning. Their dominance is already problematic in the case of contemporary relations, but is even more so in the case of relations across time, where the conditions for later parties are controlled and created by earlie…Read more
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38The Tale Parfit Tells: Analytic Metaphysics of Personal Identity vs. Wittgensteinian Film and LiteraturePhilosophy and Literature 39 (1): 128-153. 2015.[B]ecause I have shown my hands to be empty you must now expect not only that an illusion will follow but that you will acquiesce in it.Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.What has to be overcome is not difficulty of the intellect but of the will.“Are you watching closely?”The last line of Parfit’s description of the “branch-line case” of tele-transportation, the very epicenter of his hugely influential thought experiment that famously proposes a radically new view on “personal iden…Read more
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |