“We do not stop playing because we grow old, we grow old because we stop playing”*…

… and so we shouldn’t. Ryan Weber (a professor of technical writing who, happily for us, moonlights) is here to help…

More at “‘Descartes Against Humanity’ and Other Games Designed by Famous Philosophers,” from @mcsweeneys.net.

Unrelated, but important: “Help save Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine by signing this petition.”

* George Bernard Shaw (though often mis-attributed to Benjamin Franklin)

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As we play, we might spare a thought for a philosopher whose game would likely be “The Game of Life,” Bernard Williams; he died on this date in 2003. As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Williams became known for his efforts to reorient the study of moral philosophy to psychology, history, and in particular to the Greeks. 

His publications include Problems of the Self (1973), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), Shame and Necessity (1993), and Truth and Truthfulness (2002).  Gilbert Ryle, one of Williams’s mentors at Oxford University, said that Williams “understands what you’re going to say better than you understand it yourself, and sees all the possible objections to it, and all the possible answers to all the possible objections, before you’ve got to the end of your own sentence.”

Described by Colin McGinn as an “analytical philosopher with the soul of a general humanist,” he was sceptical about attempts to create a foundation for moral philosophy. Martha Nussbaum wrote that he demanded of philosophy that it “come to terms with, and contain, the difficulty and complexity of human life.”

source

https://bsky.app/profile/serenissimaj.bsky.social/post/3mnhzh27aqs2e

#Philosophy #AnalyticPhilosophy

What if the Frege–Geach problem isn’t a problem at all?

Analytic philosophy built a logical puzzle by assuming moral language works like empirical language. My Language Insufficiency Hypothesis says that’s a category error. Moral predicates live in different conceptual terrain entirely.

https://philosophics.blog/2025/11/17/what-if-the-frege-geach-problem-isnt/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social&utm_vampaign=lih

#Philosophy #AnalyticPhilosophy #PhilosophyOfLanguage #MetaEthics #Emotivism #Wittgenstein #Metaphysics #Logic #Language #PostEnlightenment #CriticalTheory #Epistemology #Psychology

Something about the way the consequentializing literature (and as a result the normative ethics literature more generally) defines what makes a moral theory consequentialist always bothered me. It always felt like the definition was trying to give precision beyond what makes sense for a family of views. But of course "that's too precise of a definition" is not an objection that gets taken very seriously by analytic philosophers.

I always tried to vaguely gesture at my worry in conversation by saying things like "consequentialism isn't a theory or set of theories, its a tradition."
I don't think that's wrong, but I can understand why is always left my interlocutors unsatisfied.

I think finally reading some Elisabeth Camp has helped it click for me - I think consequentialism is a Campian *perspective* (something like a cluster of dispositions and patterns of salience in deliberation), and the consequentialist tradition is the set of people who have roughly overlapping Campian perspectives about how to approach moral theory.

I think this is also equally true of deontology and virtue theory.

On this proposal, we shouldn't think about dividing moral theories in terms of logical structure or even of how they answer some set of paradigmatic moral dilemmas (though there will be non-coincidental connections), but in terms of which things are taken to be salient and how to approach moral theory. While certain approaches will tend to lead to certain answers to these questions about structure and solutions to moral dilemmas, they don't entail them.

#philosophy #ethics #analyticphilosophy

From Nikhil Krishnan’s A Terribly Serious Adventure: Philosophy at Oxford 1900-1960:

The big claims were about the imminence of a final dissolution: ancient knots would be cut, the old metaphysical doctrines hunted to extinction. Once the old detritus was cleared, then the revelation, ‘of a whole world of infinite subtlety and diversity with its own fine and complex structure, a world which had always lain about us to be observed as soon as we ceased straining our eyes towards imaginary grandeurs and simplicities’*. That world would reveal itself once we ceased straining our eyes and tried instead to listen, not least to ourselves.

Remind you of anyone? Now it’s been a long while since I was immersed in Rorty but I don’t recall this ever being part of his intellectual narrative, whereas the ethos of his ironism I now suspect resembles post-war Oxford philosophy much more than, as often alleged, postmodernism. To what extent was this an intellectual juncture reached through multiple pathways or a common ethos which coalesced?

*From Peter Strawon’s post-linguistic thaw

https://markcarrigan.net/2024/07/07/the-unacknowledged-debt-of-richard-rorty-to-the-ethos-of-post-war-oxford-philosophy/

#analyticPhilosophy #irony #language #linguisticTurn #richardRorty