Augusta Moore

I distinguish my question from various others with which it might be confused, and then argue for an affirmative answer to it. My argument, which I call ‘the Basic Argument’, is an embellishment of an argument due to Williams. Its key premise, which I call ‘the Basic Assumption’, and which I express as the assumption that ‘representations are representations of what is there anyway’, involves a cluster of interrelated ideas about the unity, substantiality, and autonomy of reality. I end the chapter by considering the role of science, and specifically of physics, within what I have just argued.

I identify and discuss three principles that underlie these ideas: first, that we are finite; secondly, that we are self‐conscious about our finitude; and thirdly, that we aspire to be infinite. I argue that the third of these explains the value of certain things to us, and that it leads to our being shown that these things are of unconditioned value. Finally, by addressing the question what value our aspiration to be infinite itself has, I make some suggestions about the relationship between our ineffable knowledge and God.

There is a temptation associated with the question, which must be exposed before the question can be properly addressed. This is the temptation to think that there are perspectival features of reality that figure in perspectival facts, and that what makes true perspectival representations true is the obtaining of such facts. I argue that this is incoherent, and that the absolute/perspectival distinction applies exclusively to representations, not to what is represented. I also consider why the temptation exists, and how it can be resisted.

I further argue that we can make sense of. This requires a critique of nonsense, since, for reasons that I give, what replaces ‘x’ in the schema must be nonsense. I endorse an austere view of nonsense whereby there is nothing more to nonsense than sheer lack of sense, as in ‘phlump jing ux’. The point is this: because our ineffable knowledge is a mark of our finitude, and because we have a shared aspiration to transcend our finitude, we also have a shared temptation to put our ineffable knowledge into words, which in turn gives us a shared sense of when a piece of nonsense is ‘apt’ to replace ‘x’ in the schema, where ‘aptness’ is a quasi‐aesthetic attribute. This is enough for instances of the schema to count as true or false—and, arguably, for ‘We are shown that transcendental idealism is true’ to count as true.

I begin by raising the question whether there can be ‘absolute representations’ and explain what I mean by this. I define a ‘representation’ as anything, which has content and which, because of its content, is either true or false. I define an ‘absolute’ representation as a representation whose content can be combined with that of any other possible representation ‘by simple addition’. This contrasts with the case of a ‘non‐absolute’ or ‘perspectival’ representation, whose content may not be combinable with that of another representation until the element of perspective has been eliminated. Thus if one person says, ‘I am English,’ and another says, ‘I am German,’ it is not possible for either of those people, nor indeed for anyone else, to combine the contents of their representations by saying, ‘I am English and I am German.’

There remains the problem of accounting for the appeal of transcendental idealism. Transcendental idealists themselves may say that there is nothing wrong with the doctrine, but only with the attempt to express it, the point being that it is inexpressibly true: but I argue that this does not extricate them from the trap of self‐stultification. An importantly different proposal, which I derive from the earlier work of Wittgenstein, is this: while we cannot coherently state that transcendental idealism is true we are shown that transcendental idealism is true, where ‘A is shown that x’ is defined as ‘ A has ineffable knowledge, and when an attempt is made to put that knowledge into words, the result is: x.’ I try to indicate how, provided we can make sense of and, this proposal has the threefold merit of: avoiding self‐stultification; being compatible with the incoherence of transcendental idealism; and providing an account of transcendental idealism's appeal.

Having argued for an affirmative answer to my question, I consider arguments for a negative answer to it. With the important exception of those arguments in which the Basic Assumption is rejected, I think I can resist each of these. But in the case of arguments in which the Basic Assumption is rejected, I seem to reach an impasse. There is, however, some prospect of reconciliation. This comes in a species of transcendental idealism whereby all our representations are from a ‘transcendent’ point of view and whereby the Basic Argument, though it has to be rejected at that ‘transcendent’ level, can be retained at a ‘non‐transcendent’ level.

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 Descartes. In an earlier essay I argued that it is not. In a subsequent essay I indicated that I had changed my mind and gave a more sympathetic account of Williams’ contention. In this essay I set out the issues and say some more about my change of mind.

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 pretext for paternalist and controlling attitudes to the groups in question – notably to women – Anderson urges us to reimagine our vulnerability as a condition not merely of exposure to violence but of openness to mutual affection, love, and friendship. Hegel’s celebrated image of the owl of Minerva, which takes wing only with the coming of dusk, suggests an association of (philosophical) wisdom with negativity – with the experience of death or loss. Anderson, by contrast, proposes an alternative and more hopeful image of the dawn of enlightenment, in the guise of new ethical dispositions shaped by an emancipatory (and so, no longer an oppressive or sexist) conception of our capacity for love. Her main interlocutors or influences in this piece are Judith Butler (who contributes the idea of a “relational ontology”), Michèle Le Doeuff, and Mary Midgley.

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 the course of doing so, I raise some issues about what we can aspire to as philosophers. These issues in turn bear on the relation between philosophy and the feminine, between philosophy and the masculine, and between philosophy and the human. Towards the end of my essay I urge that the third of these relations – the relation between philosophy and the human – is of far greater significance than either of the other two.

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 range, A. W. Moore's study refutes the tired old cliché that there is some unbridgeable gulf between analytic philosophy and philosophy of other kinds. It also advances its own distinctive and compelling conception of what metaphysics is and why it matters. Moore explores how metaphysics can help us to cope with continually changing demands on our humanity by making sense of things in ways that are radically new.

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 bodies, which essentially constitutes human personhood and rational agency. I say ‘suggest’ because, obviously, no proper argument for such a conclusion could ever be worked out in a short essay. I would nevertheless like to motivate my suggestion by way of a commentary on the second part of Adrian Moore's extremely rich and interesting recent book, Noble in Reason, Infinite in Faculty

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: philosophy in the case of Part II, ethics in the case of Part III, and mathematics in the case of Part IV. Much of the attention throughout is devoted to the work of other philosophers: Kant and Wittgenstein feature prominently, and five of the essays take the form of reviews or critical notices of recent work in philosophy. But the interest in never purely exegetical. One of the lessons that emerges from the essays, either in opposition to the views of these other philosophers or by invocation of their views, is that we humans achieve nothing of real significance in philosophy, ethics, or mathematics except from a human point of view, and hence that all three of these pursuits can be said to betoken what may reasonably be called 'the human a priori'.