• Not Crickets? Ethics, Rhetoric and Sporting Boycotts
    In William John Morgan (ed.), Ethics in Sport, Human Kinetics. 2007.
  •  15
    What are the limits of the imagination in morality? What role does fiction play in moral thought? My starting point in addressing these questions is Tamar Szabo Gendler's ‘puzzle of imaginative resistance’, the problem of explaining the special difficulties we seem to encounter in imagining to be right what we take to be morally wrong in fiction, and Gendler's claim that those difficulties are due to our unwillingness to imagine these things, rather than our inability to imagine what is logicall…Read more
  •  7
    Harald Johannessen – Interpreting Wittgenstein: Four Essays
    Norsk Filosofisk Tidsskrift 44 (3-4): 316-320. 2010.
  •  16
    An Attitude Towards a Soul: Wittgenstein, Other Minds and the Mind
    In Joel Backström, Hannes Nykänen, Niklas Toivakainen & Thomas Wallgren (eds.), Moral Foundations of Philosophy of Mind, Springer Verlag. pp. 159-177. 2019.
    We tend to take for granted that we know what is involved in belief in other minds, and that the real problem lies in justifying that belief. By contrast, this chapter argues that we misunderstand what belief in other minds involves, and that the problem of other minds has its source in that misunderstanding. My aim is to rethink what belief in other minds involves in terms of what Wittgenstein calls ‘an attitude towards a soul’. Doing so not only undermines the problem of other minds as traditi…Read more
  •  17
    Zalabardo on Wittgenstein and the Unity of the Proposition
    Australasian Philosophical Review 2 (3): 333-337. 2018.
    ABSTRACTWhat explains the difference between a proposition and a mere list of the words it contains, presented in the same order? What unites the parts of a proposition to form a whole? José Zalaba...
  •  29
    Wittgenstein, mindreading and perception
    European Journal of Philosophy 27 (3): 675-692. 2019.
    Can we perceive others' mental states? Wittgenstein is often claimed to hold, like some phenomenologists, that we can. The view thus attributed to Wittgenstein is a view about the correct explanation of mindreading: He is taken to be answering a question about the kind of process mindreading involves. But although Wittgenstein claims we see others' emotions, he denies that he is thereby making any claim about that underlying process and, moreover, denies that any underlying process could have th…Read more
  • Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought
    In Reshef Agam-Segal & Edmund Dain (eds.), Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought, Routledge. pp. 9-35. 2018.
  •  56
    Remarks on Perception and Other Minds
    Nordic Wittgenstein Review 6 (2): 31-45. 2017.
    It is a simple truth about the English language that we can see or hear or feel what others are thinking or feeling. But it is tempting to think that there is a deeper sense in which we cannot really see or hear or feel these things at all. Rather, what is involved must be a matter of inference or interpretation, for instance. In these remarks, I argue against a variety of ways in which that thought, the thought that we cannot really see or hear or feel what others are thinking or feeling, might…Read more
  •  109
    Wittgenstein, Contextualism, and Nonsense: A Reply to Hans-Johann Glock
    Journal of Philosophical Research 33 101-125. 2008.
    What nonsense might be, and what Wittgenstein thought that nonsense might be, are two of the central questions in the current debate between those—such as Cora Diamond, James Conant and Michael Kremer—who favour a “resolute” approach to Wittgenstein’s work, and those—such as P. M. S. Hacker and Hans-Johann Glock—who instead favour a more “traditional” approach. What answer we give to these questions will determine the nature and force of his criticisms of traditional philosophy, and so the very …Read more
  •  20
    Review of Mark Kalderon, Moral Fictionalism (review)
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 15 (1): 146-9. 2007.
  •  58
    Not cricket? Ethics, rhetoric and sporting boycotts
    Journal of Applied Philosophy 24 (1). 2007.
    abstract Using as a background the ongoing crisis afflicting the international cricket scene over whether or not to boycott Zimbabwe, this paper seeks to explore the moral complexities surrounding the case of the sporting boycott in general as a response to morally odious regimes. Rather than attempting to provide some easy formula by which to determine justifiable from unjustifiable boycotts, we take as our starting point many of the arguments raised in the national press and explore and develo…Read more
  •  1
    On Interpreting Wittgenstein (review)
    Norsk Filosofisk Tiddskrift 3 316-321. 2009.
  • Book Reviews (review)
    with James N. McGuirk, Ruth Egan, Felix O. Murchadha, and Richard Hamilton
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 15 (1): 141-167. 2007.
  •  43
    Wittgenstein’s Moral Thought (edited book)
    Routledge. 2018.
    This book offers a radical reappraisal of the nature and significance of Wittgenstein’s thought about ethics from a variety of different perspectives. The book includes essays on Wittgenstein’s early remarks on ethics in the _Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus,_ on his 1929 "Lecture on Ethics", and on various aspects of Wittgenstein’s later views on ethics in the _Philosophical Investigations_ and elsewhere. Together, the essays in this volume provide a comprehensive assessment of Wittgenstein’s mor…Read more
  • Austerity and Ineffability
    Philosophical Writings 30 (3): 49-58. 2005.
    Two views are central to ‘New’ or ‘Resolute’ readings of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus: that Wittgenstein did not hold that some insights are ineffable; and that Wittgenstein did hold an austere view of nonsense . Adrian Moore, in his paper ‘Ineffability and Nonsense’, offers an argument that seems to show that austerity in fact involves a commitment to the existence of ineffable understanding, and so that Resolute readers cannot hold both and . Hence, Resolute readers would have to give up one or ot…Read more
  •  76
    Projection and Pretence in Ethics
    Philosophical Papers 41 (2). 2012.
    Abstract Suppose one is persuaded of the merits of noncognitivism in ethics but not those of expressivism: in such a case, a form of moral fictionalism, combining a descriptivist account of moral sentences with a noncognitivist account of the attitudes involved in their acceptance or rejection, might seem an attractive alternative. This paper argues against the use of moral fictionalism as a strategy for defending noncognitivism in ethics. It argues, first, that the view is implausible as it sta…Read more
  •  202
    Contextualism and Nonsense in Wittgenstein's Tractatus
    South African Journal of Philosophy 25 (2): 91-101. 2006.
    Central to a new, or 'resolute', reading of Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico- Philosophicus is the idea that Wittgenstein held there an 'austere' view of nonsense: the view, that is, that nonsense is only ever a matter of our failure to give words a meaning, and so that there are no logically distinct kinds of nonsense. Resolute readers tend not only to ascribe such a view to Wittgenstein, but also to subscribe to it themselves; and it is also a feature of some readings which in other respects ar…Read more
  •  36
    Ethical Eliminativism and the Sense of Wittgenstein's Tractatus
    Contributions of the Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society 35 49-50. 2012.
    This paper argues that Wittgenstein holds that ethical propositions are nonsense, in that they lack any meaning whatsoever, that they are redundant, in that the work they are intended to do is already being done by other features of our language, and that they are harmful, insofar as they prevent us from appreciating what is of genuine ethical significance in our lives. Its aim is to outline a sense in which Wittgenstein can be seen to be trying, through the elimination of “ethical propositions”…Read more
  •  70
    If, as the title of this book suggests, the state of Tractatus commentary has at times recently resembled something close to a state of war, then it has most of all resembled a war of attrition. Against this background, Roger White's "Throwing the Baby Out with the Ladder" makes for refreshing reading. To be sure, White repeats some of the familiar misconceptions of what resolute readers do or must claim that have marred the debate over the adequacies or inadequacies of such an approach to the T…Read more
  • Review of Marie McGinn, Elucidating the Tractatus (review)
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 17 (1): 134-8. 2009.
  •  66
    Nonsense and the New Wittgenstein
    Dissertation, Cardiff University. 2006.
    This thesis focuses on 'New' or 'Resolute' readings of Wittgenstein's work, early and later, as presented in the work of, for instance, Cora Diamond and James Conant. One of the principal claims of such readings is that, throughout his life, Wittgenstein held an 'austere' view of nonsense. That view has both a trivial and a non-trivial aspect. The trivial aspect is that any string of signs could, by appropriate assignment, be given a meaning, and hence that, if such a string is nonsense, that wi…Read more
  •  52
    Eliminating Ethics: Wittgenstein, Ethics and the Limits of Sense
    Philosophical Topics 42 (1): 1-11. 2014.
    This paper is about what might be called the philosophical tradition of ethics, and Wittgenstein’s opposition or hostility to that tradition. My aim will be to argue that ethics, or a large part of what we think of as ethics, is nonsense, and in doing so I shall be developing the line of argument that I take to lie behind Wittgenstein’s claim in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus that there can be no ethical propositions. That argument has its basis in the simple thought that value is not arbitr…Read more