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  1. Margaret Macdonald, Philosopher of Language.Oliver Thomas Spinney - forthcoming - Mind:fzae025.
    I chart the philosophical development of neglected figure Margaret Macdonald and situate that development in the context of mid-century analytic philosophy more broadly. I examine Macdonald’s changing attitude towards verificationism, and show that these changing views led her, in 1950 and beyond, to a very thorough appreciation of language use as capable of being employed in the execution of distinctive kinds of performative act. I compare Macdonald’s views with the far better known work of J. L. Austin, and I emphasise (...)
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  • Philosophy Is Not a Science: Margaret Macdonald on the Nature of Philosophical Theories.Peter West - 2024 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 14 (2):527-553.
    Margaret Macdonald was at the institutional heart of analytic philosophy in Britain in the mid-twentieth century. However, her views on the nature of philosophical theories diverge quite considerably from those of many of her contemporaries. In this article, I focus on Macdonald’s provocative 1953 paper, “Linguistic Philosophy and Perception,” in which she argues that the value of philosophical theories is more akin to that of poetry or art than science or mathematics. I do so for two reasons. First, it reveals (...)
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  • Helen Knight and Margaret Macdonald on the meaning of ‘good’.Oliver Thomas Spinney - forthcoming - British Journal for the History of Philosophy:1-19.
    I argue that Helen Knight and Margaret Macdonald expressed views on the nature of ‘good’ in aesthetic contexts which anticipate to a striking extent the dispute between Peter Geach and R. M. Hare over ethical uses of ‘good’ several years later. I show that Knight introduced a distinction between uses of adjectives later drawn also by Geach, and that she employed that distinction, as Geach did, in order to defend a descriptivist approach to ‘good’ according to which ‘good’ is not (...)
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