• Economics and Three Faces of Prudence
    In Péter Róna, László Zsolnai & Agnieszka Wincewicz-Price (eds.), Homo Curator: Towards the Ethics of Consumption, Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 131-142. 2024.
    Modern economics does not have much use for the classical scheme of virtues and vices. Yet, it appears to recognise prudence, or something lying in the same general region as prudence. In classical philosophy, prudence is the virtue of practical rationality, or rationality in action. Economics too has a theory of rationality in action. This paper asks if this is a good theory – if the actions prescribed by economics are indeed the actions that an ideally prudent counsellor would prescribe. As I …Read more
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    CHRONOCIDE: Prologue to the Resurrection of Time
    Common Knowledge 9 (2): 186-198. 2003.
  • Moral Enhancement and the Human Condition
    In Michael Hauskeller & Lewis Coyne (eds.), Moral Enhancement: Critical Perspectives, Cambridge University Press. 2018.
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    What moral philosophers can learn from the history of moral concepts
    History of European Ideas 45 (3): 311-321. 2019.
    It is often claimed that the core moral concepts are universal, though the words used to articulate them have changed significantly. I reject this claim. Concepts cannot be disentangled from words; as these latter change, they change too. Thus the philosophical analysis of moral concepts cannot overlook the history of the words by which these concepts have been expressed. In the second part of the essay, I illustrate this claim with the example of happiness, showing how its original ‘verdictive’…Read more
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    Moral Enhancement and the Human Condition
    Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 83 109-120. 2018.
    I argue that the project of moral enhancement is incipiently contradictory. All our judgements of human excellence and deficiency rest on what I call the human “form of life”, meaning that a radical transformation of this form of life, such as is envisioned by advocates of moral enhancement, would undermine the basis of those judgements. It follows that the project of moral enhancement is self-defeating: its fulfilment would spell the abolition of the very conditions that allow us to describe it…Read more
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    Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture
    Princeton University Press. 2008.
    This is the first English-language intellectual biography of the German-Jewish philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945), a leading figure on the Weimar intellectual scene and one of the last and finest representatives of the liberal-idealist ...
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    From epistemology to cultural criticism: Georg Simmel and Ernst Cassirer
    History of European Ideas 29 (3): 365-381. 2003.
    The sociologist Georg Simmel and the philosopher Ernst Cassirer developed strikingly similar theories of modernity. Both viewed the transition from a substantialist to a functionalist view of the world as the modern age's distinguishing characteristic. But they interpreted this transition from very different philosophical perspectives. Simmel subscribed to a phenomenalism derived from Mach, whereas Cassirer advocated an objectivism inspired by a particular interpretation of Kant. This epistemolo…Read more
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    Bibliography
    In Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture, Princeton University Press. pp. 269-280. 2009.
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    Thick Concepts
    Philosophical Quarterly 65 (258): 131-134. 2015.
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    Index
    In Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture, Princeton University Press. pp. 281-288. 2009.
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    Ernst Cassirer
    The Philosophers' Magazine 46 90-93. 2009.
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    The Touch of Midas: Money, Markets, and Morality
    Ethics and International Affairs 27 (4): 449-457. 2013.
    The Invention of Market Freedom, Eric MacGilvray , 216 pp., $94 cloth, $26.99 paper.What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, Michael Sandel , 256 pp., $27 cloth, $15 paper.Money: The Unauthorised Biography, Felix Martin , 336 pp., £20 cloth, £9.99 paper.Money has always inspired obsession, both in those who amass it and in those who think about it. “Man will never be able to know what money is any more than he will be able to know what God is,” wrote the French financier Marcel Labordè…Read more
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    In 1973, the philosopher George Dickie proposed an ingenious new answer to the old question: what is art? Arthood, he suggested, is not an intrinsic property of objects, but a status conferred upon them by the institutions of the art world. He accordingly attached an exemplary significance to works like Duchamp's urinal, whose very lack of intrinsic distinction focuses our attention upon their institutional context. But his theory was about art in general, and not just readymades. ‘I am not clai…Read more
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    The strange death of british idealism
    Philosophy and Literature 31 (1): 41-51. 2007.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Strange Death of British IdealismEdward SkidelskyIIn 1958, the Oxford philosopher G. J. Warnock opened his survey of twentieth-century English philosophy with some disparaging comments on British Idealism. It was, he writes, "an exotic in the English scene, the product of a quite recent revolution in ways of thought due primarily to German influences." Analytic philosophy, by contrast, represents a return to the venerable lineage…Read more
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    Notes
    In Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture, Princeton University Press. pp. 239-268. 2009.
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    Eight. Heidegger
    In Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture, Princeton University Press. pp. 195-219. 2009.
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    What Can We Learn From Happiness Surveys?
    Journal of Practical Ethics 2 (2): 20-32. 2014.
    Defenders of happiness surveys often claim that individuals are infallible judges of their own happiness. I argue that this claim is untrue. Happiness, like other emotions, has three features that make it vulnerable to introspective error: it is dispositional, it is intentional, and it is publically manifest. Other defenders of the survey method claim, more modestly, that individuals are in general reliable judges of their own happiness. I argue that this is probably true, but that it limits wha…Read more
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    Seven. The Philosophy of Life
    In Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture, Princeton University Press. pp. 160-194. 2009.
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    Happiness, Pleasure, and Belief
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 95 (3): 435-446. 2017.
    This paper argues that happiness and pleasure are distinct states of mind because they stand in a distinct logical relation to belief. Roughly, being happy about a state of affairs s implies that one believes that s satisfies the description ‘s’ and that it is in some way good, whereas taking pleasure in s does not. In particular, Fred Feldman's analysis of happiness in terms of attitudinal pleasure overlooks this distinction.
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    Nine. Politics
    In Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture, Princeton University Press. pp. 220-238. 2009.
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    Four. Between Irony and Tragedy
    In Ernst Cassirer: The Last Philosopher of Culture, Princeton University Press. pp. 71-99. 2009.
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