Jane Austen’s Moral Universe Jane Austen is the most moral of writers, but what is her morality? What values does she espouse and promote? That is not an easy question, given the elusiveness of the authorial mind and the gap between life and art, but I propose to deal with an […]
Memory Illusions In Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, Fanny Price, a thoughtful and unassuming young woman, makes the following observations to a certain Miss Crawford: “If any one faculty of our nature may be called morewonderful than the rest, I do believe it is memory. There seems something more speakingly incomprehensible in the […]
Multi-Dimensional (Inclusive) Semantics I address you today in a spirit of inclusiveness and diversity. For too long semantics (theory of meaning) has been the confine of a single type of entity held to constitute all that meaning encompasses (or a couple of entities, closely related). We must broaden our horizons and recognize […]
External Conditions of Thought The idea of the singular proposition is that propositions can contain particulars as well as universals as their constituents. If I think that that bird is pretty, my thought’s content contains both a particular bird and the general property of being pretty. Thus a singular thought has […]
Existence and theCogito The Cogitostrikes most people as intuitively valid, but it has been trenchantly criticized. How exactly the inference is supposed to work still excites controversy. Here I will consider a line of objection that I have not seen pressed before. The natural way to interpret the inference is that it […]
Moral Distance We tend to think that our moral obligations fall off with distance: the closer someone is to us the greater is his moral claim on us, and the further away the less. Morality operates like gravity—it weakens with distance. True, morality is an expanding circle, but it […]
I have discovered that my 1992 novel The Space Trap now exists in audio form from Amazon. I had no idea this was being done and was not informed of it. I discovered it by chance when I bought an Alexa and it started reciting the novel to me for reasons I can’t fathom. The woman […]
Moral Minimalism I shall explore the prospects for a minimalist theory of normative ethics. By “minimalist” I mean a theory (analogous to minimalism in linguistics) that seeks to base normative ethics on the most exiguous of foundations, viz. a single moral principle, with other aspects of the ethical life consigned to […]
Strengths of Realism Realism and anti-realism are conventionally presented as dichotomous: you must be either one or the other with nothing in between. This is supposed true across the board, from material objects to moral values. But on reflection the dichotomy is too simple—there are finer distinctions to capture. We can approach […]
The Alleged Limits of Moral Philosophy Bernard Williams wrote a book entitled Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.[1]This title invites interrogation. What kind of limitation might be meant? We can all agree that philosophy is limited in someway: it cannot do what science does, for example, or history or geography or […]