Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 2003

2005

Isonomia, 2015

This paper presents and defends a position - primitivist objectivism - in the philosophy of color. This view holds that colors are irreducible, mind-independent, sui generis properties of objects.

2007

Non-reductive objectivist accounts of color have been the focus of a certain amount of discussion recently. The present paper examines what explanations would be needed in order for an extended version of the viewpoint encompassing most of the sensory qualities to achieve conceptual consistency with the scientific account of reality. Once the explanations required have been identified, a form of non-reductive objectivism that meets them and embodies a dual-aspect model of causality is put forward. It is shown that this sheds new light on the hard problem of consciousness and supports a physicalist interpretation of man while also according reality in the external world to the phenomenal content of sensory experience.

There is a kind of objectivism in epistemology that involves the acceptance of objective epistemic norms. It is generally regarded as harmless. There is another kind of objectivism in epistemology that involves the acceptance of an objectivist account of justification, one that takes the justification of a belief to turn on its accuracy. It is generally regarded as hopeless. It is a strange and unfortunate sociological fact that these attitudes are so prevalent. Objectivism about norms and justification stand or fall together. Justification is simply a matter of conforming to norms. In this essay, I shall make the case for objectivism about justification.

Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2017

Metaethics tends to take for granted a bare Democritean world of atoms and the void, and then worry about how the human world that we all know can possibly be related to it or justified in its terms. I draw on Wittgenstein to show how completely upside-down this picture is, and make some moves towards turning it the right way up again. There may be a use for something like the bare-Democritean model in some of the sciences, but the picture has no standing as the basic objective truth about the world; if anything has that standing, it is ordinary life. I conclude with some thoughts about how the notion of bare, "thin" perception of non-evaluative reality feeds a number of philosophical pathologies, such as behaviourism, and show how a "thicker", more value-laden, understanding of our perceptions of the world can be therapeutic against them. Keywords Metaethics. Moral philosophy. Moral realism. Moral subjectivism. Wittgenstein. Thick concepts. Behaviourism. Problem of other minds What has to be accepted, the given, is-so one could say-forms of life. (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, II, p. 226) I noticed once again how all thought among us had become "something other than human life".

Mind, 1999

Thomas Nagel needs no plaudits from me. His crisp, forceful, rigorous treatment of matters that are both deep and important has long been a familiar feature of analytic philosophy. This book is sure to add to his well-deserved reputation. It is an engaging onslaught on that highly pernicious abnegation of critical thinking which, under the cover of various unlovely "isms", is, as Nagel puts it, "epidemic in the weaker regions of our culture" (p. 4). Nagel himself tends to designate his target by some of its less barbarous titles, if not perhaps the ones by which it is most likely to style itself: "relativism", "scepticism", "subjectivism", "irrationalism". We all know the kind of thing he has in mind. No doubt we must share Nagel's pessimism about whether such a book will make what he is opposing any the less fashionable. But, like work directed at other forms of philosophical scepticism, it can at least add to our own self-conscious grasp of the basic principles on which we rely in our thinking about the world. Nagel's fundamental idea is that it is impossible to question the objectivity of certain ways of thinking without, sooner or later, betraying a commitment to that very objectivity. Thus his opponents, who claim that these ways of thinking are not objective, because of anthropocentrism or because of some hidden cultural bias, say, find that they have no suitable vantage point from which to press their claim. I find myself very much in sympathy with the spirit of Nagel's book, very much out of sympathy with the letter of it. Much of this review will take the form of criticism. But I trust that I have already said enough to forestall any misunderstanding. I see this book as a thoroughly welcome recoil from an all too seductive and all too pervasive misology. last word may even sometimes be a matter, quite literally, of life and death. Nagel's own quasi-religious defence of his position, in the last chapter, adds obvious piquancy to this threat. The fact is, his position is a kind of dogmatism. Like other kinds of dogmatism, and in full spite of the book's title, it leaves us anxious to hear more. 6

Cambridge Companion to Utilitarianism edited by Dale E. Miller and Ben Eggleston