According to noncognitivists, when we say that stealing is wrong, what we are doing is more like venting our feelings about stealing or encouraging one another not to steal, than like stating facts about morality. These ideas challenge the core not only of much thinking about morality and metaethics, but also of much philosophical thought about language and meaning. _Noncognitivism in Ethics_ is an outstanding introduction to these theories, ranging from their early history through the latest contemporary developments. Beginning with (...) a general introduction to metaethics, Mark Schroeder introduces and assesses three principal kinds of noncognitivist theory: the speech-act theories of Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare, the expressivist theories of Blackburn and Gibbard, and hybrid theories. He pays particular attention both to the philosophical problems about what moral facts could be about or how they could matter which noncognitivism seeks to solve, and to the deep problems that it faces, including the task of explaining both the nature of moral thought and the complexity of moral attitudes, and the ‘Frege-Geach’ problem. Schroeder makes even the most difficult material accessible by offering crucial background along the way. Also included are exercises at the end of each chapter, chapter summaries, and a glossary of technical terms - making _Noncognitivism in Ethics_ essential reading for all students of ethics and metaethics. (shrink)

This intriguing and ground-breaking book is the first in-depth study of the development of philosophy of science in the United States during the Cold War. It documents the political vitality of logical empiricism and Otto Neurath's Unity of Science Movement when these projects emigrated to the US in the 1930s and follows their de-politicization by a convergence of intellectual, cultural and political forces in the 1950s. Students of logical empiricism and the Vienna Circle treat these as strictly intellectual non-political projects. (...) In fact, the refugee philosophers of science were highly active politically and debated questions about values inside and outside science, as a result of which their philosophy of science was scrutinized politically both from within and without the profession, by such institutions as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. It will prove absorbing reading to philosophers and historians of science, intellectual historians, and scholars of Cold War studies. (shrink)

This issue of The Monist on Carnap’s metaphilosophy is another clear demonstration that Carnap’s career, nearly half a century after his death, is far from over. The scope of Carnap studies continues to broaden into new fields, incorporating more aspects of his thought and bringing it to bear on more aspects of philosophy. And more of his previously unpublished and unknown writings continue to appear; this is the third special issue of a journal in the past year or so that (...) includes hitherto unpublished texts by Carnap himself.1 I am also pleased that this issue of The Monist extends from the very early Carnap to the very late Carnap.2The call for papers was partly inspired by the recent burst of interest in metametaphysics, which in its present form3 derives from the debate between Carnap and Quine about ontology during the 1950s. While the Carnap-Quine debate itself is well represented here in the papers by Geoffrey Hellman and Sean Morris, the metametaphysical discussion about that debate is itself largely absent, to my surprise. That was not the intent, though Carnap himself would presumably have been pleased. He would also have been grateful for Thomas Uebel’s paper explaining that his apparent “elimination” of epistemology during the 1930s did not mean that epistemological questions had been ruled out, only that they had been largely turned into practical questions rather than cognitive ones—but practical questions whose answers needed to be informed by a lot of empirical knowledge. Along similar lines, my own paper tries to make clear, using Huw Price’s “global expressivism” as an example and starting point, what a Carnapian “descriptive pragmatics” would actually involve. In his reply, Price acknowledges Carnap as a fellow traveler and leaves room for descriptive pragmatics but also sketches some limits to this endorsement. (shrink)