Moore against the Skeptic

A couple of weeks ago, Jonathan Birch published the short, accessible piece “G. E. Moore’s hands vs. Radical Scepticism” on the blog of The London School of Economics and Political Science. You can find it here.

Annual Lecture at MCAS

On October 27th, Gianni Paganini (Università del Piemonte Orientale) will give, via zoom, the annual lecture at the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies (Universität Hamburg). He will talk about “Facts, Fictions, and Hypotheses: Hume’s Scepticism and Newton’s Method in the Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion”. For more information, go here.

Ethics and Mathematics

Those interested in anti-realist forms of skepticism in ethics and mathematics might want to take a look at Justin Clarke-Doane's recent book, Morality and Mathematics (OUP, 2020). Here's the abstract:

To what extent are the subjects of our thoughts and talk real? This is the question of realism. In this book, Justin Clarke-Doane explores arguments for and against moral realism and mathematical realism, how they interact, and what they can tell us about areas of philosophical interest more generally. He argues that, contrary to widespread belief, our mathematical beliefs have no better claim to being self-evident or provable than our moral beliefs. Nor do our mathematical beliefs have better claim to being empirically justified than our moral beliefs. It is also incorrect that reflection on the "genealogy" of our moral beliefs establishes a lack of parity between the cases. In general, if one is a moral antirealist on the basis of epistemological considerations, then one ought to be a mathematical antirealist as well. And, yet, Clarke-Doane shows that moral realism and mathematical realism do not stand or fall together -- and for a surprising reason. Moral questions, insofar as they are practical, are objective in a sense that mathematical questions are not, and the sense in which they are objective can only be explained by assuming practical anti-realism. One upshot of the discussion is that the concepts of realism and objectivity, which are widely identified, are actually in tension. Another is that the objective questions in the neighborhood of factual areas like logic, modality, grounding, and nature are practical questions too. Practical philosophy should, therefore, take center stage.

Evolution in Morality and Theological Ethics

The latest issue of the European Journal for Philosophy of Religion includes a section devoted to “Evolutionary Research on Morality and Theological Ethics.” The issue also contains a couple of papers on religious agnosticism.