scholarly journals Passions and Projections: Themes from the Philosophy of Simon Blackburn, edited by R.N. Johnson and M. Smith

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 607-610
Author(s):  
Camil Golub
Keyword(s):  
Simon Blackburn

How Private Must an Objectionably Private Language Be?

1998 ◽  
pp. 62-66 ◽  
Author(s):  
Norman Lillegard
Keyword(s):  
Community Correction ◽  
Private Language ◽  
Rule Following ◽  
Proper Understanding ◽  
Philosophical Investigations ◽  
Private Practices ◽  
Simon Blackburn ◽  
Mental Events

Some philosophers, taking their cue from Philosophical Investigations (PI) 243-315, suppose that a private language is objectionable only when its terms refer to Cartesian mental events. Others (notably Kripke) have focused on PI 201 and the surrounding remarks about rule following, and have explicated the notion of an objectionable private language as (roughly) that of a language used by just one isolated individual unsupported at any time by any source of external or community correction and approval. I attempt to defend Kripke's account against some objections proffered by Simon Blackburn. Blackburn supposes that individuals are no worse off than communities with respect to the difficulties raised by Kripke, and argues that the "paradox" of PI 201 can be avoided by a proper understanding of extended dispositions, and by grasping the possibility of private practices. But Blackburn misconstrues what it is to go on in the "same" way in following a rule, and ignores the place of constitutive rules in practices.

Book Review. Think. A Compelling Introduction to Philosophy Simon Blackburn

Mind ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 110 (438) ◽  
pp. 430-432
Author(s):  
M. Sainsbury
Keyword(s):  
Simon Blackburn

The Practical Turn

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
William James ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Michael Dummett ◽  
Simon Blackburn ◽  
Recent Developments ◽  
Popular View ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
Charles Peirce

The pragmatist approach to philosophical problems focuses on the role of disputed notions—for example, truth, value, causation, probability, necessity—in our practices. The insight at the heart of pragmatism is that our analysis of such philosophical concepts must start with, and remain linked to, human experience and inquiry. As a self-conscious philosophical stance, pragmatism arose in America in the late nineteenth century, in the work of writers such as Charles Peirce, William James and John Dewey. While popular wisdom would have it that British philosophy thoroughly rejected that of its American cousins, that popular view is coming into dispute. Many distinguished British philosophers have also taken this practical turn, even if few have explicitly identified themselves as pragmatists. This book traces and assesses the influence of American pragmatism on British philosophy, with particular emphasis on Cambridge in the inter-war period (for instance, the work of Frank Ramsey and Ludwig Wittgenstein), on post-war Oxford (for instance, the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, P. F. Strawson and Michael Dummett), and on recent developments (for instance, the work of Simon Blackburn and Huw Price). There is a comprehensive introduction to the topic and the history of pragmatism, and Price and Blackburn, in their contributions, add their most recent thoughts to the debates.

scholarly journals Considering Dispositional Moral Realism

Perspectives ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-22
Author(s):  
Prabhpal Singh
Keyword(s):  
Moral Realism ◽  
Secondary Qualities ◽  
Dispositional Account ◽  
Affective Attitudes ◽  
Simon Blackburn ◽  
Moral Properties ◽  
The Difference ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
David Enoch

AbstractMy aim in this paper is to consider a series of arguments against Dispositional Moral Realism and argue that these objections are unsuccessful. I will consider arguments that try to either establish a dis-analogy between moral properties and secondary qualities or try to show that a dispositional account of moral properties fails to account for what a defensible species of moral realism must account for. I also consider criticisms from Simon Blackburn (1993), who argues that there could not be a corresponding perceptual faculty for moral properties, and David Enoch (2011), who argues that Dispositional Moral Realism does not most plausibly explain the difference between moral disagreements and disagreements of mere preference. Finally, I examine a novel criticism concerning the relationship between the diverse variety of moral properties and the range of our normative affective attitudes, arguing that the view has no problem accounting for this diversity.

scholarly journals I Might be Fundamentally Mistaken

2017 ◽  
Vol 9 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ridge
Keyword(s):  
Moral Belief ◽  
Moral Judgments ◽  
First Person ◽  
Ordinary People ◽  
Realist Theory ◽  
Making Sense ◽  
Moral Content ◽  
Simon Blackburn ◽  
Moral Error ◽  
Influential Paper

Quasi-realism aspires to preserve the intelligibility of the realist-sounding moral judgments of ordinary people. These judgments include ones of the form, “I believe that p, but I might be mistaken,” where “p” is some moral content. The orthodox quasi-realist strategy (famously developed by Simon Blackburn) is to understand these in terms of the agent’s worrying that some improving change would lead one to aban-don the relevant moral belief. However, it is unclear whether this strate-gy generalizes to cases in which the agent takes their error to be funda-mental in a sense articulated by Andy Egan. In an influential paper, Egan argues that it does not. Egan suggests that Blackburn’s approach is the only game in town for the quasi-realist when it comes to making sense of judgment of fallibility, and therefore concludes that Blackburn’s ina-bility to handle worries about fundamental moral error refutes quasi-realism tout court. Egan’s challenge has generated considerable discus-sion. However, in my view, we have not yet gotten to the heart of the matter. I argue that what is still needed is a fully general, quasi-realist-friendly theory of the nature of first-person judgments of fallibility, such that these judgments are demonstrably consistent with judging that the belief is stable in Egan’s sense. In this article, I develop and defend a fully general quasi-realist theory of such judgments, which meets this demand. With this theory in hand, I argue that Egan’s challenge can be met. Moreover, my discussion of how the challenge is best met provides an elegant diagnosis of where Egan’s argument against goes wrong. On my account, Egan’s argument equivocates at a key point between a “could” and a “would.”

scholarly journals Smile When You’re Winning: How to Become a Cambridge Pragmatist

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hallvard Lillehammer
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Master Narrative ◽  
Simon Blackburn ◽  
Huw Price

This chapter traces the development of a particular current of thought known by the label ‘pragmatism’ during the last part of the twentieth century and at the beginning of the twenty-first, and latterly associated with the work of Simon Blackburn and Huw Price. Three questions are addressed. First, how did this current of thought actually develop? Second, does this current of thought constitute a single, coherent, theoretical outlook? Third, does this current of thought constitute an attractive philosophical outlook? In answering these questions, attention is drawn to a tension between the two main proponents of this current of thought, namely the different attitudes they take to the naturalist ‘master narrative’ on which it depends.

The Competition

2019 ◽  
pp. 78-99
Author(s):  
Bryan R. Weaver ◽  
Kevin Scharp
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Simon Blackburn ◽  
Semantic Relativism

Chapter 4 shows why QUD Reasons Contextualism is preferable to its competitors. In particular, it considers Stephen Finlay’s conceptual analysis of reasons locutions, an expressivist view of reasons locutions based on the work of Simon Blackburn, Tim Henning’s information contextualism, and Niko Kolodny’s semantic relativism.

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