Being Realistic about Reasons

Bibliographic Data

ID10690209
AuthorsRuth Wedgwood (0000-0003-1391-2407, University of Southern California, corresponding author), Ralph Wedgwood
Year2015
Pagespqv029
Publication date2015-04-26
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeREVIEW
Review ofBeing Realistic about Reasons, T M Scanlon, 2014
VenueThe Philosophical Quarterly (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0031-8094 • E-ISSN: 1467-9213
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/pq/pqv029
OpenAlexW1983214556
LanguageEN
References cited1

T. M. Scanlon is a towering figure in moral and political philosophy. His three earlier books and his numerous seminal articles, stretching back over 40 years, are well known to everyone who has a serious interest in these subjects. In this new book, based on the Locke Lectures that he gave in Oxford in 2009, he turns his attention to metaethics—that is, to questions about the semantics, philosophical psychology, metaphysics, and epistemology of normative thought and discourse. Throughout, this new book reveals the impressive creative intelligence that always characterizes Scanlon's work. It is an important work, which all metaethicists will have to come to grips with, since it defends a distinctive position about these central metaethical questions. Nonetheless, this book is also, in my judgment, a decidedly unsatisfying work. The majority of metaethicists today view metaethics as the point where ethics intersects with several other branches of philosophy—above all, with philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and epistemology. On this view, metaethics calls for an ‘intersubdisciplinary’ approach, deploying ideas from across all these different branches of philosophy, in order to construct a coherent theory of normative thought and language that gives unified and illuminating answers to a series of demands for explanation. (For example, these demands include the following: What is the nature of the mental states expressed by normative statements? If they are beliefs, what explains why they have the distinctive features that they have? If these beliefs can be correct or incorrect, what is the nature of the facts or states of affairs that would make them correct? What justifies these beliefs, and under what conditions—if any —do they count as knowledge?)

Analytic philosophy · Construct (python library) · Contemporary philosophy · Epistemology · Metaphysics · Normative · Normative ethics · Philosophy of language · Classical Philosophy and Thought · Computer Science · Ethics in medical practice · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy

Tools

Open DOISci-Hub