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62Wittgenstein and transcendental idealismIn Guy Kahane, Edward Kanterian & Oskari Kuusela (eds.), Wittgenstein and His Interpreters: Essays in Memory of Gordon Baker, Wiley-blackwell. pp. 174--199. 2007.
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104More on 'The Philosophical Significance of Gödel's Theorem'Grazer Philosophische Studien 55 (1): 103-126. 1998.In Michael Dummett's celebrated essay on Gödel's theorem he considers the threat posed by the theorem to the idea that meaning is use and argues that this threat can be annulled. In my essay I try to show that the threat is even less serious than Dummett makes it out to be. Dummett argues, in effect, that Gödel's theorem does not prevent us from "capturing" the truths of arithmetic; I argue that the idea that meaning is use does not require that we be able to "capture" these truths anyway. Towar…Read more
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17The Concern with Truth, Sense, Et Al. – Androcentric or Anthropocentric?Angelaki 25 (1-2): 126-134. 2020.In her book Re-visioning Gender in Philosophy of Religion, Pamela Sue Anderson generously discusses some of my ideas. In particular, she considers my views about a certain kind of philosophical nonsense. She argues that I am not interested in engaging seriously with such nonsense; and that my not being interested in engaging seriously with it betrays my gender. This essay is a response to Anderson’s discussion. I argue that she is guilty of certain errors, both exegetical and philosophical. In t…Read more
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76Towards a New Philosophical ImaginaryAngelaki 25 (1-2): 8-22. 2020.The paper builds on the postulate of “myths we live by,” which shape our imaginative life (and hence our social expectations), but which are also open to reflective study and reinvention. It applies this principle, in particular, to the concepts of love and vulnerability. We are accustomed to think of the condition of vulnerability in an objectifying and distancing way, as something that affects the bearers of specific (disadvantaged) social identities. Against this picture, which can serve as a…Read more
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164Reason, freedom and Kant: An exchangeKantian Review 12 (1): 113-133. 2007.According to Kant, being purely rational or purely reasonable and being autonomously free are one and the same thing. But how can this be so? How can my innate capacity for pure reason ever motivate me to do anything, whether the right thing or the wrong thing? What I will suggest is that the fundamental connection between reason and freedom, both for Kant and in reality, is precisely our human biological life and spontaneity of the will, a conjunctive intrinsic structural property of our animal…Read more
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2A Lockean Theory of Intellectual PropertyDissertation, The Ohio State University. 1997.In the broadest terms my goal in this work is to justify rights to intellectual property. Rule-utilitarians who offer incentives based arguments think that this goal is easily attained. Rights, they claim, should be granted to authors and inventors of intellectual property because granting such control provides incentives necessary for social progress. Society ought to maximize social utility, therefore, temporary rights to intellectual works should be granted. This argument is typically given a…Read more
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32The measure of things: Humanism, humility, and mystery (review)Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 71 (2): 497-499. 2005.
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133Not to be taken at face valueAnalysis 69 (1): 116-125. 2009.It is a long time since I have admired a book as much as I admire this one. It is a long time since I have disagreed with a book as profoundly as I disagree with this one. I hope this combination of reactions on my part has more than whatever limited biographical interest it has. I hope it helps to signal the combination of excellence and provocation that mark Timothy Williamson's book, which is at once beautifully clear, forcefully argued, continually insightful, and, in my view, deeply wrong.O…Read more
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56The Human A Priori: Essays on How We Make Sense in Philosophy, Ethics, and MathematicsOxford University Press. 2023.The Human A Priori is a collection of essays by A. W. Moore, one of them previously unpublished and the rest all revised. These essays are all concerned, more or less directly, with something ineliminably anthropocentric in our systematic pursuit of a priori sense-making. Part I deals with the nature, scope, and limits of a priori sense-making in general. Parts II, III, and IV deal with what are often thought to be the three great exemplars of the systematic pursuit of such sense-making: philoso…Read more
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Transcendental idealism in Wittgenstein, and theories of meaningIn Daniel Whiting (ed.), The later Wittgenstein on language, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.
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12IntroductionIn Bernard Williams (ed.), Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline, Princeton University Press. 2006.
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16More on Williams on Ethical Knowledge and ReflectionTopoi 43 (2): 381-386. 2024.This essay is concerned with Bernard Williams’ contention in Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy that, in ethics, reflection can destroy knowledge. I attempt to defend this contention from the charge of incoherence. I do this by taking seriously the idea that ethical knowledge is knowledge from an ethical point of view. There nevertheless remains an issue about whether the contention is consistent with ideas elsewhere in Williams’ own work, in particular with what he says about knowledge in Desc…Read more
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102The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of ThingsCambridge University Press. 2011.This book is concerned with the history of metaphysics since Descartes. Taking as its definition of metaphysics 'the most general attempt to make sense of things', it charts the evolution of this enterprise through various competing conceptions of its possibility, scope, and limits. The book is divided into three parts, dealing respectively with the early modern period, the late modern period in the analytic tradition, and the late modern period in non-analytic traditions. In its unusually wide …Read more
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6Bernard WilliamsIn John Shand (ed.), Central Works of Philosophy V5: Twentieth Century: Quine and After, Routledge. pp. 207-226. 2006.
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11Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy of MathematicsIn Hans-Johann Glock & John Hyman (eds.), A Companion to Wittgenstein, Wiley-blackwell. 2017.The philosophy of mathematics was of colossal importance to Wittgenstein. Its problems had a peculiarly strong hold on him; and he seems to have thought that it was in addressing these problems that he produced his greatest work. However robust the distinction between the calculus and the surrounding prose, the prose may infect the calculus; or the prose may infect how we couch the calculus. Yet Wittgenstein's writings in the philosophy of mathematics stand in a curious relation to this self‐ass…Read more
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33Wittgenstein and Transcendental IdealismIn Guy Kahane, Edward Kanterian & Oskari Kuusela (eds.), Wittgenstein and His Interpreters: Essays in Memory of Gordon Baker, Wiley-blackwell. 2007.This chapter contains section titled: Introduction1 Was the Early Wittgenstein a Transcendental Idealist? Was the Later Wittgenstein a Transcendental Idealist?
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21The Infinite: Third EditionRoutledge. 2018.This third edition of The Infinite includes a new part 'Infinity Superseded' which contains two new chapters refining Moore's ideas through a re-examination of the ideas of Spinoza, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Much of this is heavily influenced by the work of Deleuze. There is also a new technical appendix on still unresolved issues about different infinite sizes.
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32More on 'The Philosophical Significance of Gödel's Theorem'Grazer Philosophische Studien 55 (1): 103-126. 1998.In Michael Dummett's celebrated essay on Gödel's theorem he considers the threat posed by the theorem to the idea that meaning is use and argues that this threat can be annulled. In my essay I try to show that the threat is even less serious than Dummett makes it out to be. Dummett argues, in effect, that Gödel's theorem does not prevent us from "capturing" the truths of arithmetic; I argue that the idea that meaning is use does not require that we be able to "capture" these truths anyway. Towar…Read more
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38Language, World, and Limits: Essays in the Philosophy of Language and MetaphysicsOxford University Press. 2019.A.W. Moore presents eighteen of his philosophical essays, written since 1986, on representing how things are. He sketches out the nature, scope, and limits of representation through language, and pays particular attention to linguistic representation, states of knowledge, the character of what is represented, and objective facts or truths.
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440What are these Familiar Words Doing Here?Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 51 147-171. 2002.This essay is concerned with six linguistic moves that we commonly make, each of which is considered in turn. These are: stating rules of representation; representing things categorically; mentioning expressions; saying truly or falsely how things are; saying vaguely how things are; and stating rules of rules of representation. A common-sense view is defended of what is involved in our doing each of these six things against a much more sceptical view emanating from the idea that linguistic behav…Read more
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33Ineffability and NonsenseSupplement to the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 77 (1): 169-193. 2003.Criteria of ineffability are presented which, it is claimed, preclude the possibility of truths that are ineffable, but not the possibility of other things that are ineffable—not even the possibility of other things that are non-trivially ineffable. Specifically, they do not preclude the possibility of states of understanding that are ineffable. This, it is argued, allows for a reappraisal of the dispute between those who adopt a traditional reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus and those who adop…Read more
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351Review: One or Two Dogmas of Objectivism (review)Mind 108 (430). 1999.This essay is a critical notice of Thomas Nagel’s The Last Word. Though the essay evidences broad sympathy with the spirit of Nagel’s book, its main burden is to query the letter of the book. Nagel’s defence of the view that there are certain beliefs and ways of thinking that are not from any point of view, or that are ‘objective’ in his own terms, is criticized on the grounds that it is too facile. It is also criticized for not being pitted against a critique of beliefs and ways of thinking tha…Read more
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290Apperception and the Unreality of TenseIn Christoph Hoerl & Teresa McCormack (eds.), Time and memory: issues in philosophy and psychology, Oxford University Press. pp. 375-391. 2001.The aim of this essay is to characterize the issue whether tense is real. Roughly, this is the issue whether, given any tensed representation, its tense corresponds in some suitably direct way to some feature of reality. The task is to make this less rough. Eight characterizations of the issue are considered and rejected, before one is endorsed. On this characterization, the unreality of tense is equivalent to the unity of temporal reality. The issue whether tense is real, so characterized, is t…Read more
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68Was the author of the Tractatus a transcendental idealist?In Peter Sullivan & Michael Potter (eds.), Wittgenstein's Tractatus: history and interpretation, Oxford University Press. pp. 239. 2013.
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1Wittgenstein and infinityIn Oskari Kuusela & Marie McGinn (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Wittgenstein, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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555The underdetermination/indeterminacy distinction and the analytic/synthetic distinctionErkenntnis 46 (1): 5-32. 1997.Two of Quine's most familiar doctrines are: that there is a distinction between underdetermination and indeterminacy; and that there is no distinction between analytic and synthetic truths. An argument is given that these two doctrines are incompatible. In terms wholly acceptable to Quine and based on the underdetermination/indeterminacy distinction, an exhaustive and exclusive distinction is drawn between two kinds of true sentences, which, it is argued, corresponds to the traditional analytic/…Read more
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