January 9, 2008

Realism and Semantics
By Guy Kahane

J. L. Mackie did a great service to metaethics by distinguishing, as previous philosophers hadn’t, between semantics and metaphysics.* He pointed out that it’s one thing to show that our normative concepts refer to objective properties, quite another to show that anything out there actually corresponds to these concepts. Defending normative realism therefore turns out to be harder than previously thought: winning the argument about the semantics only takes you halfway.

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Posted on January 9, 2008 at 6:42 pm in Metaethics, Philosophy of Language, Guy Kahane's Posts | 9 Comments

July 11, 2007

Hempel’s Dilemma and Human Nature
By Rebecca Roache

The concept of human nature is an interesting one. This is partly because, although it’s a familiar concept, and one of which most people have at least a prima facie grasp; there are problems with arriving at a satisfactory, robust definition of it that will support normative philosophical claims. (For an account of some problems associated with defining human nature, see David Hull (1986) ‘On Human Nature‘, PSA 2: 3-13). In trying to understand it and work out how to tackle such problems, it’s interesting to look at similar concepts. One that I keep coming back to is the concept ‘physical’.

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Posted on July 11, 2007 at 8:58 am in Applied Ethics, Bioethics, Philosophy of Language, Rebecca Roache's Posts | 20 Comments