Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling original philosophy of human motivation and morality. He maintains that we cannot get clear about ethics until we get clear about human nature. So these are the sorts of questions he addresses: Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is our ethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers in an exploration of guilt, shame, disgust, and other moral emotions; he draws (...) also on game theory and cognitive science in his account of the structures of human motivation. Many philosophers have wanted a naturalistic ethics a theory that integrates our understanding of human morality with the rest of our understanding of the world we live in. What is special about Blackburn's naturalistic ethics is that it does not debunk the ethical by reducing it to the non-ethical. At the same time he banishes the spectres of scepticism and relativism that have haunted recent moral philosophy. Ruling Passions sets ethics in the context of human nature: it offers a solution to the puzzle of how ethics can maintain its authority even though it is rooted in the very emotions and motivations that it exists to control. (shrink)

The notion that our society, its education system and its intellectual life, is characterised by a split between two cultures – the arts or humanities on one hand and the sciences on the other – has a long history. But it was C. P. Snow's Rede lecture of 1959 that brought it to prominence and began a public debate that is still raging in the media today. This fiftieth anniversary printing of The Two Cultures and its successor piece, A Second (...) Look features an introduction by Stefan Collini, charting the history and context of the debate, its implications and its afterlife. The importance of science and technology in policy run largely by non-scientists, the future for education and research, and the problem of fragmentation threatening hopes for a common culture are just some of the subjects discussed. (shrink)

This article reviews the transition between post-Fregean anti-naturalistic epistemology and contemporary naturalistic epistemologies. It traces the revival of naturalism to Quine’s critique of the "a priori", and Kuhn’s defense of historicism, and use the arguments of Quine and Kuhn to identify a position, "traditional naturalism", that combines naturalistic themes with the claim that epistemology is a normative enterprise. Pleas for more radical versions of naturalism are articulated, and briefly confronted.

The questions traditionally known as ontological have sometimes been summed up in the deceptively simple interrogative: “What is there?” But this formulation is notoriously misleading, because it suggests that we are already quite clear as to what “Being” is, i.e. as to what we mean when we say of something, that it exists. And this is not always so. Moreover, when we make statements like, “Time exists”, “redness exists”, it is almost never so. Statements of this kind, of course, are (...) very uncommon. We could imagine a situation in which they could have a use, but only a rhetorical use. We would be hard put to say how to go about answering them or debating them. (shrink)

This symposium contribution discusses some issues of moral realism and antirealism involved in the metaethics of Hilary Putnam's book Ethics without Ontology.

From Sources of the Self to A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has shown how we create ways of being, as individuals and as a society. Here, he demonstrates that language is at the center of this generative process. Language does not merely describe; it constitutes meaning, and the shared practice of speech shapes human experience.

This symposium contribution discusses some issues of ontology involved in the metaethics of Hilary Putnam's book Ethics without Ontology.

Presents a good mapping of Williams’s argument in the larger context, relative to other thinkers, especially McDowell. With a short conclusion that there is something transcendent about ethical value that ecumenical projects reconciling the naturalist and the realist tend to miss.

This article makes replies to the five commentators of a symposium about my book Ethics without Ontology.

This symposium contribution discusses the conception of ontology which is used in Hilary Putnam's book Ethics without Ontology.