Why is someone enduringly prized as a philosopher? To answer this question, this historical case study examines the intersecting careers of John Rawls and R. M. Hare. It looks at their writings, a complex chain of disagreements, the argumentative dimension. The essay moreover explores the clash of differing temperaments. Finally, themes in addition to ratiocination and personality are factored in: the leanings of the institutions that control access to intellectual endeavor; the public square—politics widely conceived—into which the two men were (...) thrown; and the cultural rivalry between England and America after World War Two. (shrink)

Philippa Foot, like others of her philosophical generation, was much concerned with the status and authority of morality. How universal are its demands, and how dependent on the idiosyncrasies of individuals? In the early years of her career, she was persuaded that Kant and his twentieth-century followers had been wrong to insist on the centrality to morality of absolute and unconditionally binding moral imperatives. To that extent, she wrote, there was indeed ‘an element of deception in the official line about (...) morality’. In this paper, I shall explore her early alternative: a system of merely ‘hypothetical’ imperatives, imperatives that depend on the motivations of particular individuals. Could so contingent a system deserve to be termed a morality? How revisionary a proposal was this, and how serious its costs? And how might we reconcile ourselves to a morality stripped of what she called the ‘fictions’ that surrounded it? Foot's early answer, tentative and exploratory, remains of interest, long after she herself abandoned it. (shrink)

Bernard Williams thought that philosophy should address real human concerns felt beyond academic philosophy. But what wider concerns are addressed by Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, a book he introduces as being ‘principally about how things are in moral philosophy’? In this article, we argue that Williams responded to the concerns of his day indirectly, refraining from explicitly claiming wider cultural relevance, but hinting at it in the pair of epigraphs that opens the main text. This was Williams’s solution (...) to what he perceived as the stylistic problem of how to pursue philosophy as cultural critique. Taking the epigraphs as interpretative keys to the wider resonances of the book, we show how they reveal Williams’s philosophical concerns – with the primacy of character over method, the obligation to follow orders, and the possibility of combining truth, truthfulness, and a meaningful life in a disillusioned world – to be recognisably rooted in the cultural concerns of post-war Britain. In the light of its epigraphs, the book emerges as the critique of a philosophical tradition’s inadequacies to the special difficulties of its cultural moment. (shrink)

R. M. Hare has an ambitious project of arguing from a limited set of premises about the nature of moral thought and language all the way to substantive utilitarian conclusions. I reconstruct Hare's argument, identify an important problem for Hare, and then develop and endorse a restricted Hare-like argument. This argument is less ambitious than Hare's, and does not substantiate utilitarian conclusions on its own, but I demonstrate that it nonetheless imposes important constraints on moral judgements and I indicate how (...) it can play a role in a larger argument for utilitarian conclusions. (shrink)

This paper addresses the project of philosophical autobiography, using two different perspectives. On the one hand, the societal, economic, and family contexts of William James are addressed, and connected a modern academic context of business ethics research, marketing and purchasing decision making, and the continuing financial crisis. The concepts of “stream of consciousness” and “acting as-if” are connected to recent literature on William James. On the other hand, the significance of family context, and the possible connection between the William James (...) family and the author, is addressed through shared family narratives interspersed throughout the paper. (shrink)