•  19
    A resolute reading of Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    It is often remarked that Iris Murdoch’s thought deeply influenced the landscape of twentieth-century moral philosophy. It is certainly true that she inspired a generation of Anglo-American philosophers who sought to critique the moral philosophy of their day. However, these philosophers drew almost exclusively from her early philosophical thought, most notably The Sovereignty of Good. When it came to Murdoch’s second book, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (MGM), moral philosophers and scholars …Read more
  •  22
    A resolute reading of Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
    British Journal for the History of Philosophy 1-25. forthcoming.
    It is often remarked that Iris Murdoch’s thought deeply influenced the landscape of twentieth-century moral philosophy. It is certainly true that she inspired a generation of Anglo-American philosophers who sought to critique the moral philosophy of their day. However, these philosophers drew almost exclusively from her early philosophical thought, most notably The Sovereignty of Good. When it came to Murdoch’s second book, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (MGM), moral philosophers and scholars …Read more
  •  16
    Introduction
    In Matthew Boyle & Evgenia Mylonaki (eds.), Reason in Nature: New Essays on Themes From John Mcdowell, Harvard University Press. pp. 1-16. 2022.
  •  116
    Reason in Nature: New Essays on Themes From John Mcdowell (edited book)
    Harvard University Press. 2022.
    Against the dominant view of reductive naturalism, John McDowell argues that human life should be seen as transformed by reason so that human minds, while not supernatural, are in an important sense sui generis. This collection assembles eleven critical essays exploring the strengths, weaknesses, and ramifications of McDowell's unorthodox position.
  •  32
    The Sophisticated and Naive View of Moral Experience
    Philosophies 8 (4): 72. 2023.
    In this paper, I draw a contrast between two ways of posing the question of moral experience: the episodic and the contemplative. On the first, the episodic outlook, the question of moral experience is the question of specifying the workings of a capacity (or set of capacities) whose exercise may ground claims of moral knowledge. On the contemplative outlook, on the other hand, the question of understanding moral experience is the question of articulating a standpoint: the moral standpoint. On t…Read more
  •  14
    8. Seeing the World: Moral Difficulty and Drama
    In Matthew Boyle & Evgenia Mylonaki (eds.), Reason in Nature: New Essays on Themes From John Mcdowell, Harvard University Press. pp. 217-240. 2022.
  •  39
    The question of practical knowledge
    Philosophical Explorations 23 (2): 167-179. 2020.
    Volume 23, Issue 2, June 2020, Page 167-179.
  •  38
    The aim of this paper is to develop a constitutivist account of instrumental normativity (an account of the requirement to take the means to one’s end as the normative standard that constitutes intentional action) that overcomes the restrictions of the neo-Anscombean variant of constitutivism without reverting to the reductivism of Kantian constitutivism. I call this account “Murdochian”, for it relies on Iris Murdoch’s conception of the practicable good.
  •  77
    In this paper I take up the question of whether and in what sense action might be the conclusion of practical reasoning and argue against the answer provided by Sebastian Rödl's account of practical reasoning. Rödl's account aspires to steer a middle ground between the attitudinal and the neo-Aristotelian accounts of practical reasoning, by proposing that its conclusion is at once a thought and a movement. This account is worth considering for it promises to explain both practical reasoning's pr…Read more
  •  92
    Practical Knowledge and Perception
    In Alznauer Mark & Torralba Jose (eds.), Theories of Action and Morality: Perspectives from Philosophy and Social Theory., Georg Olms Verlag. pp. 241-265. 2016.
    In this paper I examine the relation between intentional action and morality from the perspective of practical epistemology. In other words I study the relation between Elizabeth Anscombe's knowledge of one’s own intentional actions (knowledge in action) and Iris Murdoch's knowledge of what is good to do or what one ought to do in particular circumstances (knowledge in the circumstances). If practical knowledge in the former sense (knowledge in action) and practical knowledge in the latter sens…Read more
  •  51
    In this paper I show how John Hyman takes the traditional question whether we should give a physical, ethical, psychological or intellectual account of human action and stands it on its head. For Hyman argues that the real question is how to distinguish the physical, the ethical, the psychological and the intellectual dimensions of human action, and he thereby changes the landscape in the philosophy of action. Finally, I argue that Hyman's positive proposal fails by the lights of his own argume…Read more