S. Vrech

The aim of this paper is double. In the fi rst part I argue against the traditional interpretation of Ayer’s emotivism. According to this interpretation, in Language, Truth and Logic Ayer based emotivism on his “radical empiricist” view. I argue that this is not so. Then, in the second part I develop a new interpretation of emotivism according to which Ayer’s analysis of moral vocabulary does not depend on positivism. The purpose of the article is to contribute to the history of metaethics by presenting a correct account of Ayer’s analysis.

In this paper I carry out two tasks. First, I account for one of the distinctive uses of thought experiments in philosophy, namely, the fact that just a thought experiment is sufficient to confute a well-established theory. Secondly, I present three arguments to defend the claim that, at least in philosophy, we should remove thought experiments from our metaphilosophical toolkit. The central premise that motivates these arguments is the following: the very methodology of thought experiments permits to construct different scenarios in which philosophical theories are refuted ad infinitum.