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12Morality in a Realistic Spirit: Essays for Cora DiamondRoutledge. 2019.This unique collection of essays has two main purposes. The first is to honour the pioneering work of Cora Diamond, one of the most important living moral philosophers and certainly the most important working in the tradition inspired by Ludwig Wittgenstein. The second is to develop and deepen a picture of moral philosophy by carrying out new work in what Diamond has called the realistic spirit. The contributors in this book advance a first-order moral attitude that pays close attention to actua…Read more
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85Cora Diamond and the Moral ImaginationNordic Wittgenstein Review 5 (1): 55-77. 2016.Over several decades, Cora Diamond has articulated a distinctive way of thinking about ethics. Prompted by a recent critique of Diamond, we elucidate some of the main themes of her work, and reveal their power to reconfigure and deepen moral philosophy. In concluding, we suggest that Diamond’s moral philosophical practice can be seen as one plausible way of fleshing out what Wittgenstein might have meant by his dictum that “ethics is transcendental”.
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8Iris Murdoch’s Ontological ArgumentIn Nora Hämäläinen & Gillian Dooley (eds.), Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Springer Verlag. pp. 195-208. 2019.Iris Murdoch develops a version of the Ontological Argument as a moral argument for the existence of a transcendent and perfect Platonic Good. I argue that her version of the argument over-emphasises moral goodness as a distant and intangible ideal to which we are inevitably attracted, and towards which we may progress, but which, apart from occasional revelations in saintly lives and great art, is normally only available in glimpses and intimations, and which remains mysterious. The argument is…Read more
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36Horrendous Evil and the Loving God: a Reply to Joshua ThurowSophia 61 (2): 419-428. 2022.Marilyn McCord Adams has defended theodicy by appeal to the idea of post-mortem compensation for the victims of horrendous evil. I have argued that this overlooks the dissociation of theodicy from moral reality that she concedes in her response to criticism of theodicy by D Z Phillips. Joshua Thurow has recently defended Adams against my argument. Here I defend and strengthen that argument against Thurow.
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69Deducing the mindInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 42 (3-4): 385-410. 1999.Frank Jackson has argued that, in principle, all mental truths are deducible from all physical science truths: 'deducibility'. Jackson's defence of deducibility relies upon the method for producing naturalistic definitions of mental states championed in the analytical functionalism of himself, David Lewis, and others. Two arguments are presented. The first contends that the particular naturalistic definitions of analytical functionalism fail because they do not take account of the extraordinary …Read more
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113The Power of GodSophia 49 (4): 603-616. 2010.Much contemporary analytic philosophy understands the power of God as belonging to the same logical space as the power of human beings: a power of efficient causation taken to the maximum limit. This anthropomorphic picture is often explicated in terms of God’s capacity to bring about any logically possible state of affairs, so-called omnipotence. D.Z. Phillips criticized this position in his last book, The Problem of Evil and the Problem of God. I defend Phillips’s argument against recent criti…Read more
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41More on the Power of God: A Rejoinder to William HaskerSophia 49 (4): 617-629. 2010.In ‘The Power of God’ (Gleeson 2010) I elaborate and defend an argument by the late D.Z. Phillips against definitions of omnipotence in terms of logical possibility. In ‘Which God? What Power? A Response to Andrew Gleeson’ (Hasker 2010), William Hasker criticizes my defense of Phillips’ argument. Here I contend his criticisms do not succeed. I distinguish three definitions of omnipotence in terms of logical possibility. Hasker agrees that the first fails. The second fails because negative proper…Read more
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171Eating Meat and Reading DiamondPhilosophical Papers 37 (1): 157-175. 2008.Here is a very common philosophical opinion: being human plays no important role in moral thinking. Call this the anti-humanist thesis. I argue that a thirty-year old paper by Cora Diamond, ‘Eating Meat and Eating People' (‘EMEP') can help us to see that the anti-humanist thesis is false
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41'Philosophy, Ethics, and a Common Humanity: Essays in Honour of Raimond Gaita', edited by Christopher Cordner (review)Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (1): 193-196. 2013.
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10IntroductionPhilosophical Papers 31 (3): 217-225. 2002.http://www.ru.ac.za/academic/departments/philosophy/PhilosophicalPapers/abstracts.htm.
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75The Problem of Evil and the Problem of the Slightest ToothacheHeythrop Journal 56 (1): 32-43. 2015.
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298Moral particularism reconfiguredPhilosophical Investigations 30 (4). 2007.The definitive version is available at www.blackwell-synergy.com
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48God and Evil: A View from SwanseaPhilosophical Investigations 35 (3-4): 331-349. 2012.Herbert McCabe and Brian Davies defend an Aquinas-inspired, anti-anthropomorphic natural theology that emphasises the mysterious distance between the Creator and his creation. This theology gives rise to a powerful response to the problem of evil, powerful enough to scuttle the academic problem of evil that is based on a confused anthropomorphic understanding of God. But that does not dispose of the problem of evil per se. The McCabe–Davies natural theology can succeed only by appropriating a pe…Read more
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148Pettit on consequentialism and universalizabilityTheoretical Medicine and Bioethics 26 (3): 261-275. 2005.Philip Pettit has argued that universalizability entails consequentialism. I criticise the argument for relying on a question-begging reading of the impartiality of universalization. A revised form of the argument can be constructed by relying on preference-satisfaction rationality, rather than on impartiality. But this revised argument succumbs to an ambiguity in the notion of a preference (or desire). I compare the revised argument to an earlier argument of Pettit’s for consequentialism that a…Read more
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21Julia Hermann, On Moral Certainty, Justification and Practice: A Wittgensteinian Perspective . pp xiii + 215, £60.00 hb (review)Philosophical Investigations 39 (4). 2016.
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16Michael Rosen, Dignity: Its History and Meaning . xix + 176, price $21.95 hb (review)Philosophical Investigations 37 (4): 363-382. 2014.
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77Animal animationPhilosophia 28 (1-4): 137-169. 2001.The original publication can be found at www.springerlink.com
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1Three Dogmas of FunctionalismDissertation, The Australian National University (Australia). 1998.This thesis is a critique of functionalism in the philosophy of mind. I distinguish three tenets, or 'dogmas' of functionalism, viz: Mental states are causes of behaviour; Mental states can, in principle, be defined in non-mental terms; We understand everything, or at least everything of importance, about the mental states of people, by subsuming token mental states under one or other mental state type. ;The first dogma is rejected in the form which identifies mental state types with physical ty…Read more
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15Julia Hermann, On Moral Certainty, Justification and Practice: A Wittgensteinian Perspective . pp xiii + 215, £60.00 hb (review)Philosophical Investigations 40 (1): 82-88. 2016.
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24Amidst Mass Atrocity and the Rubble of Theology: Searching for a Viable Theodicy. By Peter Admirand. Pp. xxvi, 366, Eugene, Cascade Books, 2012, £29.70 (review)Heythrop Journal 56 (1): 171-172. 2015.
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85On Letting Go of Theodicy: Marilyn McCord Adams on God and EvilSophia 54 (1): 1-12. 2015.Marilyn McCord Adams agrees with D. Z. Phillips that instrumental theodicy is a moral failure, and that sceptical theists and others are guilty of ignoring what we know now about the moral reality of horrendous evils to speculate about unknown ways these evils might be made sense of. In place of theodicy, Adams advocates ‘the logic of compensation’ for the victims of evil, a postmortem healing of divine intimacy with God. This goes so deep, she believes, that eventually victims will see the horr…Read more
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17A frightening love: recasting the problem of evilPalgrave-Macmillan. 2012.The greater good -- The intellectual and the existential -- The problem of evil and the problem of the slightest toothache -- The God of love -- Is God an agent? -- The real God
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