This is the first comprehensive study of the ethics of G. E. Moore, the most important English-speaking ethicist of the 20th century. Moore's ethical project, set out in his seminal text the Principia Ethica is to preserve common moral insight from skepticism and, in effect, persuade his readers to accept the objective character of goodness. Brian Hutchinson explores Moore's arguments in detail, showing Moore's ethical work to be much richer and more sophisticated than his critics have acknowledged.

This paper compares and contrasts three groups that conducted biological research at Yale University during overlapping periods between 1910 and 1970. Yale University proved important as a site for this research. The leaders of these groups were Ross Granville Harrison, Grace E. Pickford, and G. Evelyn Hutchinson, and their members included both graduate students and more experienced scientists. All produced innovative research, including the opening of new subfields in embryology, endocrinology and ecology respectively, over a long period of time. (...) Harrison's is shown to have been a classic research school; Pickford's and Hutchinson's were not. Pickford's group was successful in spite of her lack of departmental or institutional position or power. Hutchinson and his graduate and post-graduate students were extremely productive but in diverse areas of ecology. His group did not have one focused area of research or use one set of research tools. The paper concludes that new models for research groups are needed, especially for those, like Hutchinson's, that included much field research. (shrink)

This 2001 book is a comprehensive study of the ethics of G. E. Moore, the most important English-speaking ethicist of the twentieth century. Moore's ethical project, set out in his seminal text Principia Ethica, is to preserve common moral insight from scepticism and, in effect, persuade his readers to accept the objective character of goodness. Brian Hutchinson explores Moore's arguments in detail and in the process relates the ethical thought to Moore's anti-sceptical epistemology. Moore was, without perhaps fully realizing (...) it, sceptical about the very enterprise of philosophy itself, and in this regard, as Brian Hutchinson reveals, was much closer in his thinking to Wittgenstein than has been previously realized. This book shows Moore's ethical work to be much richer and more sophisticated than his critics have acknowledged. (shrink)

The history of philosophy can be seen either as a contribution to history or a contribution to philosophy or perhaps as a bit of both. Hutchinson fail on both counts. The book is bad: bad in itself (since it quite definitely ought not to be) and bad as a companion to Principia (since it sets students a bad example of slapdash, lazy and pretentious philosophizing and would tend to put them off reading Moore). As a conscientious reviewer I ploughed (...) through every page and I have to say that I resented every minute of my life that I wasted on the book. Don’t waste any of yours. (shrink)

As their title suggests, "legal philosophers" are more philosophers than lawyers; they are in the business of thinking generally about law rather than doing law in any practical way. While lawyers tend to be jurisdiction-specific in their affiliations and competence, legal philosophers are under no such restriction. At their most ambitious, legal philosophers claim dominion over a jurisprudential realm that is delineated by neither geography nor history. Indeed, presenting themselves as intellectual citizens of the whole legal world, their crafted contributions (...) are not intended to be judged by the contingent standards of local usefulness, but by the pure canons of universal validity. As such, the professional commitment and authority of legal philosophers is based upon their capacity to deal with parochial matters of law, but in a way that rises above and is not reducible to their local circumstances. Accordingly, while these legal philosophers might talk about morality and politics as they relate to law, they do so only in the most theoretical and abstract terms. For them, philosophy inhabits the realm of "truth and necessity" in which the contingent and the local holds little or no analytical sway. The contemporary champion of legal philosophy is undoubtedly Joseph Raz. His extensive and sophisticated work represents the high-water mark of analytical jurisprudence. With the recent publication of Between Authority and Interpretation, he has provided an accessible and stylish showcase of his philosophical theory of law that is as rigorous and demanding as it is provocative and controversial. Because this book builds on as it clarifies and develops the main themes of his work over the past four decades, it offers itself as a convenient focus for a more general assessment of Raz's whole oeuvre. In traversing law's terrain, he is adamant that, whatever the purposes and methods of other disciplines (e.g., sociology, history, anthropology, etc.), any philosophical analysis worth its name must concern itself with delivering insights and understanding about law that are of universal significance. While general conclusions about local laws and systems are important and helpful, they will have no philosophical value unless they can say something general and enduring about law as an institutional phenomenon. A corollary of this is that legal philosophy must insulate itself from contingent moral and political influences that will compromise or contaminate its project of making statements about law?s nature and operation that are not only universally valid, but also locally accurate. In this essay I challenge Raz's philosophical ambitions - and, therefore, much contemporary work in legal philosophy - by concentrating on his crucial methodological distinction between the local and contingent and the universal and necessary. It is my contention that, as there are no places where "moral and political desirability" do not play a role, "necessity" has no reign. Accordingly, I argue that legal philosophy cannot live up to its own methodological expectations and standards of validation. For all its impressive erudition and sophistication, therefore, Raz?s work is a manifesto of "local enthusiasms" that, while instructive and useful in themselves, can lay no claim to reveal the necessary features of law's existence. His work comprises some very contingent and localised generalisations that no amount of philosophical razzle-dazzle can elevate to universal and global truths about law. Blinded by the philosophical light, there is more formal brilliance than substantive bottom-line to Raz's jurisprudence. (shrink)

The usual way for new cells to come into being is by division of old cells. So the zygote, which is a—new—single cell formed from two, the sperm and ovum, is an exception. Textbooks of human genetics usually say that this new cell is beginning of a new human individual. What this indicates is that they suddenly forget about identical twins.

I want to suggest that Plato arrived at a revised theory of forms in the later dialogues. Or perhaps I might rather say that he constructed a new underpinning for the theory. This can be discerned, I believe, in the Sophist, taken together with certain parts of the dialectic of the Parmenides which use the same language as the Sophist.

This book comprises material on colour which was written by Wittgenstein in the last eighteen months of his life. It is one of the few documents which shows him concentratedly at work on a single philosophical issue. The principal theme is the features of different colours, of different kinds of colour and of luminosity—a theme which Wittgenstein treats in such a way as to destroy the traditional idea that colour is a simple and logically uniform kind of thing. This edition (...) consists of Wittgenstein's basic German text, together with an English translation. (shrink)

The usual way for new cells to come into being is by division of old cells. So the zygote, which is a—new—single cell formed from two, the sperm and ovum, is an exception. Textbooks of human genetics usually say that this new cell is beginning of a new human individual. What this indicates is that they suddenly forget about identical twins.

One of the ways of dividing all philosophers into two kinds is by saying of each whether he is an ordinary man's philosopher or a philosophers' philosopher. Thus Plato is a philosophers' philosopher and Aristotle an ordinary man's philosopher. This does not depend on being easy to understand: a lot of Aristotle's Metaphysics is immensely difficult. Nor does being a philosophers' philosopher imply that an ordinary man cannot enjoy the writings, or many of them. Plato invented and exhausted a form: (...) no one else has written such dialogues. So someone with no philosophical bent, or who has left his philosophical curiosity far behind may still enjoy reading some of them. (shrink)

I discuss the treatment by Chisholm of the problem posed by the fact that one can produce some neuro-physiological changes by moving a limb, namely the ones which cause the motions. I concentrate largely on the treatment Chisholm gave to this question before Person and Object, and I compare it with von Wright's discussion of it, I conclude that there are correct elements about both but that both are unsatisfactory, Chisholm's because it entails that we must know something which we (...) manifestly need not know when we move. (shrink)

I discuss the treatment by Chisholm of the problem posed by the fact that one can produce some neuro-physiological changes by moving a limb, namely the ones which cause the motions. I concentrate largely on the treatment Chisholm gave to this question before Person and Object, and I compare it with von Wright's discussion of it, I conclude that there are correct elements about both but that both are unsatisfactory, Chisholm's because it entails that we must know something which we (...) manifestly need not know when we move. (shrink)