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7A Tension at the Center of Santayana’s PhilosophyIn Martin A. Coleman & Glenn Tiller (eds.), The Palgrave Companion to George Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith, Springer Nature Switzerland. pp. 257-271. 2024.Hodges explores Santayana’s doctrine of matter. Interpreting the realm of matter as the irrational, ineffable counterpart to the realm of essence, he elucidates the function and profound moral significance of materialism in Santayana’s system of philosophy.
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4AfterwordTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 59 (3): 366-368. 2024.Abstract:A brief response to papers presented by Herman Saatkamp, Krzysztof Skowroński, Eric Weber, and John Stuhr on the occasion of John Lachs' retirement from Vanderbilt University.
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18Armstrong's Causal Analysis and Direct KnowledgeSouthern Journal of Philosophy 17 (3): 335-343. 1979.
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29Thinking in the ruins: Wittgenstein and Santayana on contingencyVanderbilt University Press. 2000.Thinking in the Ruins will enhance our understanding of the intellectual accomplishments of monumental thinkers Ludwig Wittgenstein and George Santayana, showing how each influenced subsequent American philosophers. The book also serves as a call to philosophers to look beyond traditional classifications to the substance of philosophical thought.
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29A Free Man’s Worship: Santayana and Russell on TranscendenceOverheard in Seville 22 (22): 1-9. 2004.
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32Wittgenstein and Moral Philosophy (review)Review of Metaphysics 45 (1): 128-130. 1991."The aim... is to show what implications Wittgenstein's approach has in moral philosophy and in so doing to cast light on that subject-matter itself". While this carefully crafted and well-reasoned book develops ideas in an area that the later Wittgenstein did not discuss in a sustained way, Johnston also sheds light on several of Wittgenstein's remarks including the "Lecture on Ethics," passages from Culture and Value, and "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough." The author is interested in Wittgens…Read more
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21Interpreting Wittgenstein. A Cloud of Philosophy, a Drop of Grammar (review)Review of Metaphysics 44 (3): 656-657. 1991.This book presents an interestingly different approach to the interpretation of Wittgenstein's later philosophy. Instead of an account focused on the text of the later writings, Suter has chosen to organize his book by reference to certain central philosophical problems and Wittgenstein's actual or constructed treatment of them. Thus, after an opening section dealing with Wittgenstein's conception of philosophy, we are treated to an extended examination of the mind/ body problem which not only d…Read more
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25The Status of Ethical Judgments in the Philosophical InvestigationsPhilosophical Investigations 18 (2): 99-112. 1995.
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17A Free Man’s Worship: Santayana and Russell on TranscendenceOverheard in Seville 22 (22): 1-9. 2004.
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21Nominalism and the private language argumentSouthern Journal of Philosophy 14 (3): 283-291. 1976.
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165Wittgenstein, Dewey, and the possibility of religionJournal of Speculative Philosophy 20 (1): 1-19. 2006.John Dewey points out in A Common Faith (1934) that what stands in the way of religious belief for many is the apparent commitment of Western religious traditions to supernatural phenomena and questionable historical claims. We are to accept claims that in any other context we would find laughable. Are we to believe that water can be turned into wine without the benefit of the fermentation process? Are we to swallow the claim that there is such a phenomenon as the spontaneous conception of a chi…Read more
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64St. Anselm's Ontological Argument as Expressive: A Wittgensteinian ReconstructionPhilosophical Investigations 37 (2): 130-151. 2013.We offer a reading of Anselm's Ontological Argument inspired by Wittgenstein which focuses on the fact that the “argument” occurs in a prayer addressed to God, making it a strange argument since as a prayer it seems to presuppose its conclusion. We reconstruct the argument as expressive. Within the religious perspective, the issues are to be focused on the right object not to present an argument for the existence of God. While this sort of reading lets us understand much about the argument, it a…Read more
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34Transcendence and Wittgenstein's TractatusTemple University Press. 1990.1 INTRODUCTION The Historical and Cultural Background Ludwig Wittgenstein has been and continues to be one of the most enigmatic figures in ...
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37Expressivism, Moral Judgment, and Disagreement: A Jamesian ProgramJournal of Speculative Philosophy 32 (4): 628-656. 2018.Expressivism, the view that ethical claims are expressions of psychological states, has advantages such as closing the gap between normative claims and motivation and avoiding difficulties posed by the ontological status of values. However, it seems to make substantive moral disagreement impossible. Here, we develop a suggestion from William James as a pragmatist extension of expressivism. If we look at a set of moral claims from the perspective of the maximally comprehensive set of co-possible …Read more
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Thinking in the Ruins: Wittgenstein and Santayana on ContingencyTransactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 37 (1): 137-142. 2001.
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18Means/Ends and the Nature of EngineeringPSA: Proceedings of the Biennial Meeting of the Philosophy of Science Association 1980. 1980.Aristotle's distinction between the practical life and the contemplative life has been of central importance in fixing the sort of justification that is required for engineering activity. As practical it must be justified by its products, while intellect's activity claims intrinsic worth. Most philosophers of technology accept this model of justification. However, engineering is not essentially practical in the relevant sense. To claim that it is overlooks a distinction between "structuring ends…Read more
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30Meaning and the impotence hypothesisReview of Metaphysics 32 (3): 515-29. 1979.Epiphenomenalism consists of three claims: mental events are irreducibly distinct from physical events; each mental event is dependent both for its existence and for its properties on physical events; no mental event exerts any causal influence either on other mental events or on physical events. The first claim identifies epiphenomenalism as a dualistic theory, which is a source of both strength and weakness. The second and third claims taken together assert the complete dependence of the menta…Read more
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57Armstrong’s Causal Analysis and Direct KnowledgeSouthern Journal of Philosophy 17 (3): 335-343. 1979.
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51Hume on BeliefReview of Metaphysics 30 (1). 1976.In the light of this attention, it is surprising that we are unable to find a single writer who has noted an obvious contradiction between the Treatise of Human Nature and the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding on the subject of belief. In the Treatise Hume explicitly proposes a definition of belief. He says
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Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Religion |
Applied Ethics |