Blackburn argues that moral supervenience in conjunction with the lack of entailments from naturalistic to moral judgments poses a challenge to moral realism. Klagge and McFetridge try to avert the challenge by appealing to synthetically necessary connections between natural and moral properties. Blackburn rejoins that, even if there are such connections, the challenge still remains. We remain agnostic on the question whether there are such connections, but argue against Blackburn that, if there are indeed such connections, then the challenge to (...) moral realism, properly phrased, does not hold up. (shrink)

My aim is to challenge recent attempts at reconciling moral realism and naturalism by pushing ethical naturalists into a dilemma. According to one horn of the dilemma, ethical naturalists must either build unique facts and properties about divergent social structures into their subvenient sets of natural facts and properties, and so jeopardize the objectivity of moral truths, or insist, in the face of all possible worlds in which people have different moral beliefs than ours, that they are all mistaken—this despite (...) the fact that the belief-forming mechanism responsible for their moral beliefs was never concerned with the truth of those beliefs in the first place. This will bring me to suggest that moral properties might only weakly supervene upon natural phenomena. But, according to the other horn of the dilemma, weak supervenience is a defeater for moral knowledge. (shrink)

A defender of any view of moral language must explain how people with different moral views can be be talking to each other, rather than past each other. For expressivists this problem drastically constrains the search for the specific attitude expressed by, say, ‘immoral’. But cognitivists face a similar difficulty; they need to find a specific meaning for ‘immoral’ that underwrites genuine disagreement while accommodating the fact that different speakers have very different criteria for the use of that term. This (...) paper explains how neo-pragmatism deals with this issue while avoiding problems that arise with existing expressivist and cognitivist solutions. (shrink)

It is reported that in reply to John Wisdom’s request in 1944 to provide a dictionary entry describing his philosophy, Wittgenstein wrote only one sentence: “He has concerned himself principally with questions about the foundations of mathematics”. However, an understanding of his philosophy of mathematics has long been a desideratum. This was the case, in particular, for the period stretching from the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus to the so-called transitional phase. Marion’s book represents a giant leap forward in this direction. In the (...) preface, Marion provides a diagnosis for why it has taken such a long time to obtain an accurate picture of Wittgenstein’s ideas in the foundations of mathematics. When the Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics came out in 1956 the reception by specialists, such as Kreisel, was negative. This led many Wittgenstein scholars to set aside the issues in the foundations of mathematics and go on with the business of the day, focusing on Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language and psychology. However, these early negative appraisals were severely limited by two facts. First of all, the nature of the Remarks was a hindrance to an understanding of what Wittgenstein was up to. The book was edited by Wittgenstein’s literary executors by collating together passages from several manuscripts dating from 1937 to 1944, cutting, however, many passages in between remarks. Second, many of the original manuscripts and typescripts of the transitional phase were not available and thus it was virtually impossible to obtain a balanced picture of Wittgenstein’s development. Finally, a stark contraposition between the early and late Wittgenstein did not encourage people to work seriously on the development of Wittgenstein’s position from the Tractatus through the transitional period to the later writings. (shrink)