Value, Reality, and Desire

Datos Bibliográficos

ID23398362
AutoresGraham Oddie (0000-0002-9934-246X, Department of Philosophy, University of Colorado at Boulder, autor de correspondencia)
Año2005
Páginas252
Fecha de publicación2005-03-10
Open AccessNo
TipoBOOK
RevistaValue, reality, and desire (SOURCE_BOOK)
EditorialOxford University PressOxford (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1093/0199273413.001.0001
OpenAlexW1555838252
Open LibraryOL3434826M
ISBN9780199273416
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas96
Referencias citadas36

This book presents an extended argument for a robust realism about value. The robust realist affirms the following distinctive theses. There are genuine claims about value which are true or false — there are facts about value. These value-facts are mind-independent — they are not reducible to desires or other mental states, or indeed to any non-mental facts of a non-evaluative kind. And these genuine, mind-independent, irreducible value-facts are causally efficacious. Values, quite literally, affect us. These are not particularly fashionable theses, and taken as a whole they go somewhat against the grain of quite a lot of recent work in the metaphysics of value. Further, against the received view, this book argues that we can have knowledge of values by experiential acquaintance, that there are experiences of value which can be both veridical and appropriately responsive to the values themselves. Finally, these value-experiences are not the products of some exotic and implausible faculty of ‘intuition’. Rather, they are perfectly mundane and familiar mental states — namely, desires. This view explains how values can be ‘intrinsically motivating’, without falling foul of the widely accepted ‘queerness’ objection. There are, of course, other objections to each of the realist's claims. In showing how and why these objections fail, the book introduces a wealth of interesting and original insights about issues of wider interest — including the nature of properties, reduction, supervenience, and causation.

Argument (complex analysis) · Causation · Epistemology · Intuition · Metaphysics · Realism · Supervenience · Value (mathematics) · Epistemology, Ethics, and Metaphysics · Mathematics · Philosophical Ethics and Theory · Philosophy · Philosophy and Theoretical Science · Psychology · Desire · Philosophy of mind · Reality · Values