books edited by David Macarthur
This collection offers a synoptic view of current philosophical debates concerning the relationsh... more This collection offers a synoptic view of current philosophical debates concerning the relationship between facts and values, bringing together a wide spectrum of contributors committed to testing the validity of this dichotomy, exploring alternatives, and assessing their implications. The assumption that facts and values inhabit distinct, unbridgeable conceptual and experiential domains has long dominated scientific and philosophical discourse, but this separation has been seriously called into question from a number of corners. The original essays here collected offer a diversity of responses to fact-value dichotomy, including contributions from Hilary Putnam and Ruth Anna Putnam who are rightly credited with revitalizing philosophical interest in this alleged opposition. Both they, and many of our contributors, are in agreement that the relationship between epistemic developments and evaluative attitudes cannot be framed as a conflict between descriptive and normative understanding. Each chapter demonstrates how and why contrapositions between science and ethics, between facts and values, and between objective and subjective are false dichotomies. Values cannot simply be separated from reason. Facts and Values will therefore prove essential reading for analytic and continental philosophers alike, for theorists of ethics and meta-ethics, and for philosophers of economics, sociology and law. Reviews "The concept of normativity spans a series of interrelated dichotomies that lie at the heart of philosophical inquiry: fact and value, is and ought, the objective and the subjective, causes and reasons, the natural world and human sensibilities. Much philosophical effort has been devoted to accentuating the gaps between the concepts juxtaposed by each of these pairs, and the fallacies involved in their conflation. This volume, however, seeks to bridge these gaps. The papers collected here—all written expressly for this volume—set out to show that normative discourse must be sensitive to the facts, and that reasoning about facts is inherently value
Papers – Liberal Naturalism by David Macarthur
De Caro, M. & Macarthur, D. (eds.), The Handbook of Liberal Naturalism. London: Routledge., 2022
In this paper I shall consider the relationship between naturalism and aesthetics. In order to ad... more In this paper I shall consider the relationship between naturalism and aesthetics. In order to address this question I want to critically discuss Murray Smith’s book "Film, Art and the Third Culture" (2017) because it has the virtue of putting this question at the centre of its account of the aesthetics of film. I shall argue for two main ideas: firstly, that earning the label “non-reductive” in the setting of a scientific naturalism is a lot more problematic than Smith supposes and once one sees the difficulties that arise then the possibility of a non-scientific or liberal naturalism becomes attractive; and, secondly, whereas Smith thinks the way to thicken explanations in (film) aesthetics is to go sub-personal by invoking sub-personal neural mechanisms in the explanation of aesthetic phenomena, I suggest that such a move is optional and, in any case, philosophically problematic.
The Cambridge History of Philosophy: 1945-2015, ed. K. Becker & K.D. Thomson, 2019
Naturalism as a philosophy of nature, what it consists in, and our ways of knowing nature (so con... more Naturalism as a philosophy of nature, what it consists in, and our ways of knowing nature (so conceived) has a long history in philosophy. In the twentieth century the question of naturalism has been, for the most part, centrally concerned with the question of philosophy's relation to science, especially the natural (or "hard") sciences. Its moral is that philosophy can no longer continue to think of itself as an autonomous discipline or stance distinct from science. I will proceed by examining in some detail the naturalisms of W. V. O. Quine and David Armstrong, which seem to align as a result of a commitment to what, at first, seem the same doctrines of Physicalism, Empiricism, and Metaphysical Realism. Against this perception of near-alignment I want to argue that they do not neatly line up on the naturalist side of the long-standing opposition between idealism and naturalism. In fact, in some key respects, Quine's naturalism contains traces of idealism. The real opposition is between normativism and naturalism. I conclude by briefly contrasting two normativist positions-idealism and liberal naturalism-and come down in favour of the latter.
For a New Naturalism, Arran Gare & Wayne Hudson (eds.), Candor, NY: Telos., 2017
A Companion to Naturalism, Juliano Do Carmo (ed.), Pelotas, Brazil: Nepfil.
Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted... more Philosophers constantly see the method of science before their eyes, and are irresistibly tempted to ask and answer questions in the way science does. This tendency is the real source of metaphysics, and leads the philosopher into complete darkness. I want to say here that it can never be our job to reduce anything to anything… -Wittgenstein 1
Australasian Philosophy Review, vol. 18 no. 2: 179–183., 2019
Philosophia, vol. 43 no. 3, 2015
In their intriguing paper "The Natural Origins of Content" Daniel Hutto and Glenda Satne review t... more In their intriguing paper "The Natural Origins of Content" Daniel Hutto and Glenda Satne review the current state of play in "the game of naturalizing content" almost a quarter of a century after John Haugeland's well--known review article of 1990 comparing three prominent theoretical options: neo--Cartesianism (e.g. Fodor, Millikan); neo--Behaviourism (e.g. Dennett); and neo--Pragmatism (e.g. Brandom). 2 The program of naturalizing content is the philosophical attempt to solve what some have called the placement problem 3 : the problem of how to 'place' intentional content -or mental states or attitudes with intentional content (e.g. the belief that p), and the linguistic utterances that express them (e.g. the assertion that p) -in a world exhaustively characterized in terms of the posits of physics or, less starkly, the collective posits of the natural sciences.
Naturalism and Normativity, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010
it is an unjustified leap to say that [good and right]… are not as real, objective, and nonrelati... more it is an unjustified leap to say that [good and right]… are not as real, objective, and nonrelative as any other part of the natural world. The temptation to make this leap comes partly from the great hold of natural science models on our entire enterprise of selfunderstanding in the sciences of human life." Taylor (1989, 56)
Analisis (Spain), vol. 1 no. 1, 2014
Philo, vol. 11 no. 1, 2008
This paper is a critical discussion of Quineʼs naturalist credos: 1) physicalism; 2) there is no ... more This paper is a critical discussion of Quineʼs naturalist credos: 1) physicalism; 2) there is no first philosophy; 3) philosophy is continuous with science; and 4) the only responsible theory of the world as a whole is scientific theory. The aim is to show that Quineʼs formulations admit of two readings: a strong reading (often Quineʼs own) which is compatible with reductive forms of naturalism but implausible; and a mild reading which is plausible but suggestive of more liberal forms of naturalism. The paper ends by claiming that naturalism is a normative doctrine that is inconsistent by its own lights.
Erkenntnis, vol. 61, 2004
Naturalism and Normativity, New York: Columbia University Press, 2010
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books edited by David Macarthur
Papers – Liberal Naturalism by David Macarthur
The papers brought together here are situated in the context of a discipline in transformation that seeks a fundamental approach to its own tools, logic and approaches. In this realm, the approaches of logic and epistemology help to define an alternate means of criticality not subjected to personalities or the specialist knowledge of individual philosophies. Rather the various articles attempt to demonstrate that such difference of background assumptions is a common human habit and that some of the techniques of analytic philosophy may help to leap these chasms. The hope is that this is a start of a larger conversation in architecture theory that has as of yet not begun.
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