Circularity, Naturalism, and Desire-Based Reasons

Desire-Based Theories of Reasons, Pleasure, and Welfare

An Essay on the Desire-based Reasons Model

Desire-Based Theories of Reasons, Pleasure, and Welfare (Final for OSME)

One of the most important disputes in the foundations of ethics concerns the source of practical reasons. On the desire-based or internalist view, only one’s desires (broadly construed) provide one with reasons to act. On the value-based view, the strongest form of externalism about reasons, reasons are instead provided by the objective evaluative facts, and never by our desires. Lying in betwe...

heidegger.ontological attitude and naturalism

Constructive Truth and Circularity

We propose a constructive interpretation of truth which resolves the standard semantic paradoxes. 1. Heuristic concepts In intuitionism the law of excluded middle (LEM) is not accepted because the assignment of truth values to sentences is seen as a kind of open-ended process. Although the validity of any purported proof is supposed to be decidable, the truth value of a given sentence may not b...