Panayot Butchvarov

This book is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the classics of analytic philosophy. O'Connor's discussion of Moore's philosophy is intelligent, useful, and generally accurate and informed. The title of the book is somewhat misleading. For O'Connor discusses all major parts of Moore's philosophy except his ethics. Hence much of the book is concerned with Moore's defense of common sense, his philosophy of perception, and his conception of analysis, topics that have received much attention and on which it is difficult to say something new. But relatively little has been written on Moore's properly metaphysical views, especially those on universals and existence. Fortunately, O'Connor does devote more than a third of the book to these views.

This is a welcome addition to the growing literature in an ethics that is unself-consciously and unabashedly normative. It is concerned with what good lives are and how they can be achieved. At least in civilized contexts, good lives depend on self-direction, which itself depends on possessing the virtues of self-control, self-knowledge, moral sensitivity, and wisdom. These are discussed in detail and with insight. The other-regarding virtues of justice and benevolence are also acknowledged but not discussed, except that Kekes makes clear that his view has nothing to do with egoism; the reason for the omission seems to be his understandable desire to limit the scope of the book.

One of the most important and perennially debated philosophical questions is whether we can have knowledge of the external world. Butchvarov here considers whether and how skepticism with regard to such knowledge can be refuted or at least answered. He argues that only a direct realist view of perception has any hope of providing a compelling response to the skeptic and introduces the radical innovation that the direct object of perceptual, and even dreaming and hallucinatory, experience is always a material object, but not necessarily one that actually exists. This leads him to a metaphysics in which reality is ultimately constructed by human decisions out of objects that are ontologically more basic but which cannot be said in themselves to be either real or unreal

Anti-Meinongian philosophers, such as Russell, do not explain what they mean by existence when they deny that there are nonexistent objects — they just sense robustly. I argue that any plausible explanation of what they mean tends to undermine their view and to support the Meinongian view. But why are they so strongly convinced that they are right? I argue that the reason is to be found in the special character of the concept of existence, which has been insufficiently examined by anti-Meinongian as well as by Meinongian philosophers.

Anti-Meinongian philosophers, such as Russell, do not explain what they mean by existence when they deny that there are nonexistent objects — they just sense robustly. I argue that any plausible explanation of what they mean tends to undermine their view and to support the Meinongian view. But why are they so strongly convinced that they are right? I argue that the reason is to be found in the special character of the concept of existence, which has been insufficiently examined by anti-Meinongian as well as by Meinongian philosophers.