Cambridge, United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
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    Professor geach's article criticized our earlier "analysis" paper on pages 48-50 of "on denoting." he took us to have offered an account of russell's earlier use of the expression "denoting phrase" which he regarded as inadequate. But we had not done so: we were interested solely in the denoting phrases which are perplexing russell on those pages, And we repeat our view that the problem which russell had found arises as much for frege's theory of reference as for russell's own earlier theory. Th…Read more
  •  8
    Has Kant Refuted Parfit?
    In Jonathan Dancy (ed.), Reading Parfit, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 180--201. 1997.
  •  19
    Review: Mind and Language (review)
    Philosophical Quarterly 26 (105). 1976.
  •  6
    Gibbard on normative logic
    Philosophical Issues 4 60-66. 1993.
  •  2
    Alasdair Maclntyre: After Virtue
    Philosophical Investigations 5 (2): 146-153. 1982.
  •  1
    TPM Essay
    The Philosophers' Magazine 52 34-42. 2011.
    I think it is a lapse of taste to spend a grown-up life on problems of which people in the office next door, let alone those outside the building, cannot see the point. I rather fear that the so-called semantic or logical problem of vagueness, Professor Williamson’s own showcase example of his compulsory methods, strikes me as like that.
  •  8
    Williams, Smith, and the Peculiarity of Piacularity
    Journal of the American Philosophical Association 1 (2): 217--232. 2015.
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    Replies
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (1): 164-176. 2002.
    Dreier’s sympathy with expressivism is welcome, and yet he comes upon an ‘uncomfortable surprise’, in a circularity or regress that he detects in my attempt to place ethical commitments in a natural world. The circularity is that the expressivist analysis of what is going on, when we invoke norms, identifies particular states of mind: valuings, or acceptance of norms, or complexes of attitude. But states of mind are themselves normatively tainted. Hence: ‘the kernel of expressivist analysis invo…Read more
  •  18
    Truth (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 1999.
    This volume is designed to set out some of the central issues in the theory of truth. It draws together, for the first time, the debates between philosophers who favor 'robust' or 'substantive' theories of truth, and those other, 'deflationist' or minimalists, who deny that such theories can be given. The editors provide a substantial introduction, in which they look at how the debates relate to further issues, such as the Liar paradox and formal truth theories.
  •  4
    2. Liriope’s Son
    In Mirror, Mirror: The Uses and Abuses of Self-Love, Princeton University Press. pp. 35-43. 2014.
  • Wittgenstein and Minimalism
    In B. Garrett & K. Mulligan (eds.), Themes from Wittgenstein, Anu Working Papers in Philosophy 4. pp. 1--14. 1993.
  •  2
    Professor whatever
    Disputatio 1 (8): 1-12. 2000.
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    (2000). Critical notice of Frank Jackson, from metaphysics to ethics: A defence of conceptual analysis. Australasian Journal of Philosophy: Vol. 78, No. 1, pp. 119-124. doi: 10.1080/00048400012349401
  •  88
    Success Semantics
    In Hallvard Lillehammer & David Hugh Mellor (eds.), Ramsey's Legacy, Oxford University Press. 2005.
  •  6
    Interview - Simon Blackburn
    The Philosophers' Magazine 40 (40): 38-39. 2008.
    Cambridge professor Simon Blackburn is best known to the general public as the author of several books of popular philosophy such as  ink, Being Good andTruth: a Guide for the Perplexed. Academic philosophers also know him as the author of one of the most important books of contemporary moral philosophy, Ruling Passions, and as a former editor of the leading journal Mind.
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    Précis of ruling passions (review)
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 65 (1). 2002.
    Ruling Passions is about human nature. It is an invitation to see human nature a certain way. It defends this way of looking at ourselves against competitors, including rational choice theory, modern Kantianism, various applications of evolutionary psychology, views that enchant our natures, and those that disenchant them in the direction of relativism or nihilism. It is a story centred upon a view of human ethical nature, which it places amongst other facets of human nature, as just one of the …Read more
  •  7
    Being Good: A Short Introduction to Ethics
    Oxford University Press. 2001.
    This is a very short introduction to ethics. It divides into three parts: first, introducing and discussing reasons for skepticism about ethics; second introducing themes of birth, death, happiness, desire and freedom to show how deeply our lives are interwoven with ethics; third, introducing attempts to found ethics, due to Aristotle, Kant, and the contractarian tradition.
  •  91
    The idea behind expressivism as a philosophy of ethics faces a number of different challenges, and has a number of different choices to make as it tries to meet them. Perhaps the first is to specify what is the primitive of the theory, which will be something that is expressed, and is usually identified as a state of mind. Later in this paper, I shall suggest caution about this, but for the moment we can go along with it. Emotion was one suggestion, prescriptions are another, desires of various …Read more
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    16 How to be an Ethical Antirealist
    In Paul K. Moser & J. D. Trout (eds.), Contemporary Materialism: A Reader, Routledge. pp. 357. 1995.
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    Normativity à la mode
    The Journal of Ethics 5 (2): 139-153. 2001.
    This paper sets out to raise questions about the metaphor of the spaceof reasons. It argues that a proper appreciation of Wittgensteinundermines the metaphysical or dualistic way of taking the metaphor thatis supposed to prevent the naturalization of reason.
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    Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning
    Oxford University Press UK. 1998.
    Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling original philosophy of human motivation and morality. He maintains that we cannot get clear about ethics until we get clear about human nature. So these are the sorts of questions he addresses: Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is our ethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers in an exploration of guilt, shame, disgust, and other moral emotions; he draws also on game theory and cognitive sc…Read more
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    Fiction and Conviction
    Philosophical Papers 32 (3): 243-260. 2003.
    Abstract In this piece I take issue with Bernard Williams's interpretation of Herodotus as lacking something of our conception of time. I claim that there is nothing so unusual in the interleaving of myth or fiction and history that Williams finds in Herodotus. I also reflect on the difficulty of separating acceptance of truth from acceptance of myth, metaphor, and model, not only in history but also in science