Moral Knowledge and Moral Language Moral knowledge is one thing; moral language is quite another. The two topics need to be treated separately. I am mainly concerned here with the language question, but I will make some prefatory remarks about moral knowledge. Moral knowledge comprises knowledge-that, knowledge-how, and knowledge-what: we know (say) that genocide is […]
Hi Colin It was great having you on the show. Here is a link to your episode. Feel free to share it. https://youtu.be/4pQMOiomZ-k?si=Sir4BtdV29_z2T_P Kind Regards Mark Oppenheimer Advocate at the Johannesburg Bar President of the South African Institute of Race Relations https://markoppenheimer.co.za/ 083 983 5848
Art for Art’s Sake I am fed up to the back teeth with this slogan. It may have once seemed brave and insightful, but now it reveals a complete failure of moral judgment (and intelligence). It is the opposite of the truth. First, let’s parse it, because it conceals a slyly tendentious ambiguity. It clearly […]
Ana’s Friends I was struck by something Ana Navarro said in a recent interview. She was talking about her old friends in the Republican party: Marco Rubio, Lindsay Graham, Pam Bondi, and others. She emphasized that she had known these people for many years and counted them as good friends. Lindsay Graham went back to […]
Cognitive Closure Generalized Transcendental naturalism (TN) is the idea that nature naturally transcends our ability naturally to know about it. Ignorance is real and natural—a biological fact.[1] Cognitive closure (CC) is the fact of being cut off from nature cognitively; not all of it, to be sure, but some of it. TN is a metaphysical […]
Description, Analysis, Explanation, and Philosophy I invite you to indulge with me in some loose reflections on the nature of philosophy. There will be no test or harsh judgment. We are doing this as friends at a kind of philosopher’s party. We can take the brakes off for a while. There are three kinds of […]
Universal Prescriptivism It used to be held that there are two types of speech act: descriptive and prescriptive. Descriptive speech acts state facts; prescriptive speech acts recommend acts. The fact-act dichotomy underlies the description-prescription dichotomy. I think this is completely wrong: there is no such thing as a descriptive speech act in the intended sense, […]
