Rorty’s Promise in Metaethics

Nietzsche and Contemporary Metaethics

1I use the following standard acronyms when citing Nietzsche’s texts: TheAntichrist (A); Beyond Good and Evil (BGE);TheBirth of Tragedy (BT);TheCase ofWagner (CW);Daybreak (D); Ecce Homo (EH); On the Genealogy of Morality (GM); The Gay Science (GS); Human, All-Too-Human (HH); Nietzsche contra Wagner (NCW); Twilight of the Idols (TI); Untimely Meditations (UM); Thus Spoke Zarathustra (Z). I cite...

Parfit's Mistaken Metaethics

In the first volume of On What Matters, Derek Parfit defends a distinctive metaethical view, a view that specifies the relationships he sees between reasons, facts, beliefs, desires, aims, actions, and values. Parfit's metaethical view is a version of what he calls 'Objectivism', and he explicitly argues not just for his preferred version of Objectivism, but against all versions of Subjectivism...

Does Metaethics Rest on a Mistake?

One consequence of the professionalization of philosophy is its ever increasing specialization. Within the normative domain, what has come to be known as metaethical inquiry is increasingly conducted independently of substantive ethical reflection. Even if this trend is intelligible given the economic and institutional pressures that spawned it, it is reasonable to wonder if insights are lost a...

Gyn/Ecology: the metaethics of radical feminism

idea of the imagination influencing the shape of the developing foetus was in existence before and after Van Helmont. In the eighteenth century the image-making faculty was transferred to the brain. The nineteenth-century conception that only what is in the outside world is real was replaced during the twentieth century by the thought that what goes on in people's minds can have just as much re...

Uncertainties on the spiral staircase: metaethics and the new biology.