Needs, values, truth : essays in the philosophy of value
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Needs, values, truth : essays in the philosophy of value
Clarendon Press, 1998
3rd ed
Available at 35 libraries
Note
"First published 1987, by Basil Blackwell"--T.p. verso
Includes indexes
Description and Table of Contents
Description
Needs, Values, Truth brings together of some of the most important and influential writings by a leading contemporary philosopher, David Wiggins; they are drawn from twenty-five years of his work in the broad area of the philosophy of value. The author passes to and fro between problems of ethics, meta-ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of logic and language. The following themes are prominent:
the elucidation of the ideas of truth, objectivity, subjectivity and intersubjectivity
the scope and limits of the attribution of the status of plain truth among the judgements of morals, politics and aesthetics
the compatibility of moral cognitivism both with criticism and with a 'no-foundations' view of morals, politics and aesthetics
the part played in the fixation of the sense of evaluative language by the antecedent possibility of agreement not only in judgements but also (the Humean addendum) in sentiments
the philosophical ineliminability of explanations that explain a subject's thought by vindicating it, and the indispensability of evaluative and subjective categories to such vindications
the irreplaceability and irreducibility for practical or valuational thinking of such ideas as those of need, self and metaphysical freedom.
For this third edition the author has added a new essay on incommensurability, in addition to making minor revisions to the existing text. The volume will stand as a definitive summation of his work in this area.
Table of Contents
- I: Claims of Need
- II: Universalizability, Impartiality, Truth
- III: Truth, Invention and the Meaning of Life
- IV: Truth as Predicated of Moral Judgments
- V: A Sensible Subjectivism
- VI: Deliberation and Practical Reason
- VII: Weakness of Will, Commensurability and the Objects of Deliberation and Desire
- VIII: Towards a Reasonable Libertarianism
- IX: The Concern to Survive
- Postscript to Essays I-IX
- X: Incommensurability: Four Proposals
- Index
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