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19Yuval Harari on Human Rights and BiologyThink 23 (67): 59-63. 2024.Yuval Harari believes that humans make myths, and that these can be powerful engines for social change. One of these myths, claims Harari, is the existence of ‘liberal rights’. This article challenges that claim and defends the idea of grounding rights in human nature.
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Non-cognitivism and motivationIn Constantine Sandis (ed.), New essays on the explanation of action, Palgrave-macmillan. 2009.
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28Disinterestedness: Analysis and Partial DefenseIn Larissa Berger (ed.), Disinterested Pleasure and Beauty: Perspectives from Kantian and Contemporary Aesthetics, De Gruyter. pp. 59-86. 2023.
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9Fashion, Illusion, and AlienationIn Fritz Allhoff, Jessica Wolfendale & Jeanette Kennett (eds.), Fashion - Philosophy for Everyone: Thinking with Style, Wiley. 2011.This chapter contains sections titled: What Is It To Be Fashionable? Appearing Fashionable Two Concepts of Fashion Fashion and Alienation The Metaphysics of Fashion.
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Beauty and the agreeable : a critique of experimental aestheticsIn Florian Cova & Sébastien Réhault (eds.), Advances in Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics, Bloomsbury Academic. 2018.
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14Kant on Pleasure in the GoodDisputatio 13 (62): 181-188. 2021.I analyze and defend Kant’s claim in the Critique of the Power of Judgement that pleasure in the good is interested.
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274Neoplatonist Theology and God's RelevanceEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 14 (3): 129-138. 2022.I raise the issue of the role of God with respect to morality and why we should be concerned with Him. Then the difficulty that God existence is still irrelevant even if He created the world and even if the Divine Commandment Theory is right that He is responsible for Morality. A Jewish Neo-Aristotelian solution is considered but rejected, and the Jewish Neoplatonist solution endorsed and sympathetically but cautiously endorsed. Free Will is considered from the Neoplatonist point of view. Someth…Read more
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163Against Logical InferentialismLogique Et Analyse 255 (255): 275-287. 2021.I argue against inferentialism about logic. First, I argue against an analogy between logic and chess, before considering a more basic objection to stipulating inference rules as a way of establishing the meaning of logical constants. The objectionthe Mushroom Omelette Objectionis that stipulative acts are partly constituted by logical notions, and therefore cannot be used to explain logical thought. I then argue that the same problem also attaches to following existing conventional rules, sin…Read more
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185The philosophical interpretation of language game theoryJournal of Language Evolution 6 (2). 2021.I give an informal presentation of the evolutionary game theoretic approach to the conventions that constitute linguistic meaning. The aim is to give a philosophical interpretation of the project, which accounts for the role of game theoretic mathematics in explaining linguistic phenomena. I articulate the main virtue of this sort of account, which is its psychological economy, and I point to the casual mechanisms that are the ground of the application of evolutionary game theory to linguistic p…Read more
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270Our Moral Duty to Eat MeatJournal of the American Philosophical Association 7 (3): 295-311. 2021.I argue that eating meat is morally good and our duty when it is part of a practice that has benefited animals. The existence of domesticated animals depends on the practice of eating them, and the meat-eating practice benefits animals of that kind if they have good lives. The argument is not consequentialist but historical, and it does not apply to nondomesticated animals. I refine the argument and consider objections.
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Moral DependenceIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume Iii, Oxford University Press. 2008.
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38Epistemic PluralismMetaphilosophy 51 (4): 485-498. 2020.In this paper epistemic pluralism concerning knowledge is taken to be the claim that very different facts may constitute knowledge. The paper argues for pluralism by arguing that very different facts can constitute the knowledge‐making links between beliefs and facts. If pluralism is right, we need not anxiously seek a unified account of the links between beliefs and facts that partly constitute knowledge in different cases of knowledge. The paper argues that no good reasons have been put forwar…Read more
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10Music and Aesthetic Reality: Formalism and the Limits of DescriptionRoutledge. 2015.In this volume, Zangwill develops a view of the nature of music and our experience of music that foregrounds the aesthetic properties of music. He focuses on metaphysical issues about aesthetic properties of music, psychological issues about the nature of musical experience, and philosophy of language issues about the metaphorical nature of aesthetic descriptions of music. Among the innovations of this book, Zangwill addresses the limits of literal description, generally, and in the aesthetic ca…Read more
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13Of Essence and Context: Between Music and Philosophy (edited book)Springer Verlag. 2019.This book provides a new approach to the intersections between music and philosophy. It features articles that rethink the concepts of musical work and performance from ontological and epistemological perspectives and discuss issues of performing practices that involve the performer’s and listener’s perceptions. In philosophy, the notion of essence has enjoyed a renaissance. However, in the humanities in general, it is still viewed with suspicion. This collection examines the ideas of essence an…Read more
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52The Metaphysics of BeautyCornell University Press. 2001.In chapters ranging from "The Beautiful, the Dainty, and the Dumpy" to "Skin-deep or In the Eye of the Beholder?" Nick Zangwill investigates the nature of beauty as we conceive it, and as it is in itself. The notion of beauty is currently attracting increased interest, particularly in philosophical aesthetics and in discussions of our experiences and judgments about art. In The Metaphysics of Beauty, Zangwill argues that it is essential to beauty that it depends on the ordinary features of thing…Read more
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3Rules and privacy: remarks on philosophical investigations §202Ethic@: An International Journal for Moral Philosophy 15 (2). 2016.I first distinguish issues about rules and issues about language in Wittgenstein. I then I distinguish private and private rules and argue that there can be private rules because norms of reasoning are private rules. I suggest that Wittgenstein may have equated rules with public rules. I end with reflections on private language.
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621Music, emotion and metaphorJournal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 65 (4): 391-400. 2007.We describe music in terms of emotion. How should we understand this? Some say that emotion descriptions should be understood literally. Let us call those views “literalist.” By contrast “nonliteralists” deny this and say that such descriptions are typically metaphorical.1 This issue about the linguistic description of music is connected with a central issue about the na- ture of music. That issue is whether there is any essential connection between music and emotion. According to what we can ca…Read more
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35The Yummy and the Yucky: Expressive Language and the AgreeableThe Monist 101 (3): 294-308. 2018.I probe the judgments of the agreeable that we make about food and drink. I first separate different concerns that we might have with food and drink. After that, I address expressive language by first sketching an evolutionary language-game-theoretic approach for referential language. I then try to extend it to expressive language, showing how expressive signaling might be likely to evolve. Given an account of expressive prediction, and its point, I turn to the Frege-Geach problem for the agreeabl…Read more
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23Re-Centring Musicology and the Philosophy of MusicJournal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology 1 (2): 231-240. 2014.ABSTRACTI defend a non-reductionist view of music, according to which music should be understood in terms of musical beauty. I suggest that general theories of music are legitimate, and I discuss sublimity and argue that it is a species of beauty. Musical experience is the experience of aesthetic properties of that are realized in sounds. Sometimes, when we are fortunate, this experience generates pleasure in musical beauty. As Hanslick rightly insisted, there is no way to begin to understand wh…Read more
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4Rules and privacy: Remarks on philosophical investigations §202Ethic@ - An International Journal for Moral Philosophy 15 (2): 317-327. 2016.I first distinguish issues about rules and issues about language in Wittgenstein. I then I distinguish private and private rules and argue that there can be private rules because norms of reasoning are private rules. I suggest that Wittgenstein may have equated rules with public rules. I end with reflections on private language.
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14Replies To Farrell And ComptonAmerican Society for Aesthetics Graduate E-Journal 1 (1): 14-20. 2008.
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2Rules and Privacy: Remarks on Philosophical Investigations §202In Katharina Neges, Josef Mitterer, Sebastian Kletzl & Christian Kanzian (eds.), Realism - Relativism - Constructivism: Proceedings of the 38th International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg, De Gruyter. pp. 449-458. 2017.
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55Hotel Paintings and the Nature of Art: Everyday Artistic Phenomena and MethodologyThe Monist 101 (1): 53-58. 2018.I argue that there is a problem for a wide class of theories of art that arises from counterexamples drawn from everyday artistic activity, rather than high artworld artistic activity. I explore how the counterexample functions. Part of the point is to reflect on methodological issues concerning the use of examples when considering theories of art. We will also see why thinking about everyday cases is theoretically significant.
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81II—Moral Dependence and Natural PropertiesAristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 91 (1): 221-243. 2017.I explore the Because Constraint—the idea that moral facts depend on natural facts and that moral judgements ought to respect the dependence of moral facts on natural facts. I consider several issues concerning its clarification and importance.
Areas of Specialization
Meta-Ethics |
Aesthetics |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Philosophy of Mind |
Areas of Interest
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Meta-Ethics |
Aesthetics |
Logic and Philosophy of Logic |
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Normative Ethics |