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310Speciesism defended against common misrepresentations of what people actually believe about human moral status.
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7657Understanding the abortion argumentPhilosophy and Public Affairs 1 (1): 67-95. 1971.critical analyses of the arguments and attitudes favoring the various popular datings of the inception of a human being's life
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1337Understanding RetributionCriminal Justice Ethics 2 (2): 19-38. 1983.Critical analysis of wide variety of conceptions and justifications of retribution and punishment. Emphasis is on pivotal role of condemnation
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660Socratic ScepticismMetaphilosophy 24 (4): 344-362. 1993.The Socratic Paradox (that only Socrates is wise, and only because only he recognizes our lack of wisdom) is explained, elaborated and defended. His philosophical scepticism is distinguished from others (Pyrrhonian, Cartesian, Humean, Kripkean Wittgenstein, etc.): the doubt concerns our understanding of our beliefs, not our justification for them; the doubt is a posteriori and inductive, not a priori. Post-Socratic philosophy confirms this scepticism: contra-Descartes, our ideas are not transpar…Read more
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443Post-Fregean theorists use 'quotation' to denote indifferently both colloquially called quotations (repetitions of prior utterances) and what I call 'displays': 'Rot' means red. Colloquially, quotation is a strictly historical property, not semantic or syntactic. Displays are semantically and syntactically distinctive sentential elements. Most displays are not quotations. Pure echo quotations (Cosmological arguments involve "an unnecessary shuffle") aren't displays. Frege-inspired formal languag…Read more
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953Neither M. Walzer's collectivist conception of the "moral equality" of combatants, nor its antithetical individualist conceptions of responsibility are compatible with the ethos of military professionalism and its conception(s) of the responsibility of military professionals for service in an unjust war.
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3790Are the Police Necessary?In E. Viano & J. Reiman (eds.), The Police in Society, D.c. Heath. 1975.critical analysis of need for police
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331Errata: A reply to AbbottPolitical Theory 6 (3): 337-344. 1978.A lengthy inventory of misreadings and other errors in Phillip Abbott's critique of recent essays on abortion by analytic philosophers.
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686The Synonymy AntinomyIn A. Kanamori (ed.), The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Philosophy Document Center. pp. 67-88. 2000.Resolution of Frege's Puzzle by denying that synonym substitution in logical truths preserves sentence sense and explaining how logical form has semantic import. Intensional context substitutions needn't preserve truth, because intercepting doesn't preserve sentence meaning. Intercepting is nonuniformly substituting a pivotal term in syntactically secured truth. Logical sentences and their synonym interceptions share factual content. Semantic content is factual content in synthetic predications,…Read more
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649Review of Robert Brown, Analyzing Love (review)Philosophy and Phenomonological Research 51 (1): 244-45. 1991.
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459Identity SyntaxIn Tom Rockmore (ed.), The Proceedings of the Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Philosophy Document Center. pp. 171-186. 1999.Like '&', '=' is no term; it represents no extrasentential property. It marks an atomic, nonpredicative, declarative structure, sentences true solely by codesignation. Identity (its necessity and total reflexivity, its substitution rule, its metaphysical vacuity) is the objectual face of codesignation. The syntax demands pure reference, without predicative import for the asserted fact. 'Twain is Clemens' is about Twain, but nothing is predicated of him. Its informational value is in its 'metaile…Read more
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360Preferring Punishment of Criminals Over Provisions for VictimsIn D. Sank & D. Caplan (eds.), To Be a Victim, Plenum. 1991.Victims of crime have long been victimized by our criminal justice system. Why? And why has the movement to rectify this been so late coming?
Decatur, Georgia, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Language |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |