Emotivism

By Smith, Michael

Emotivists held that moral judgments express and arouse emotions, not beliefs. Saying that an act is right or wrong was thus supposed to be rather like saying ‘Boo!’ ...

Emotion

By Richardson, Louise

As befits the variety of roles that emotion plays in our lives, emotion is a topic of consideration in a variety of areas of philosophy and this is ...

Ayer, Alfred Jules (1910–89)

By MacDonald, Graham

A.J. Ayer made his name as a philosopher with the publication of Language, Truth and Logic in 1936, a book which established him as the leading English representative ...

Expressivism

By van Roojen, Mark

Expressivism is a kind of noncognitivism, usually about morality. And noncognitivism is a metaethical theory, that is a theory about the subject matter of morality, about the nature ...

Aesthetics and the philosophy of language

By Green, Mitchell

Article Summary ...

Emotions, philosophy of

By Solomon, Robert C.

Emotions have always played a role in philosophy, even if philosophers have usually denied them centre stage. Because philosophy has so often been described as first and foremost ...

Frege–Geach problem

By Schroeder, Mark

The Frege–Geach problem is an important and well-known obstacle to metaethical theories belonging to the broadly noncognitivist tradition, including emotivism, prescriptivism and expressivism. It is also sometimes called ...

Moral scepticism

By Nelson, Mark T.

Scepticism in general is the view that we can have little or no knowledge; thus moral scepticism is the view that we can have little or no moral ...

Analytic ethics

By Railton, Peter

Moral philosophy has traditionally been divided into normative ethics and meta-ethics. Normative ethics concerns judgments about what is good and how we should act. Meta-ethics, with which ’analytic ...

Emotive meaning

By Phillips, David

Emotive meaning contrasts with descriptive meaning. Terms have descriptive meaning if they do the job of stating facts: they have emotive meaning if they do the job of ...

Stevenson, Charles Leslie (1908–79)

By Dreier, James

Stevenson’s major contribution to philosophy was his development of emotivism, a theory of ethical language according to which moral judgments do not state any sort of fact, but ...

Hägerström, Axel Anders Theodor (1868–1939)

By Dahlquist, Thorild; Henschen-Dahlquist, Ann-Mari

Hägerström was professor of philosophy at Uppsala University, Sweden, from 1911 until 1933, and together with his pupil Adolf Phalén founded the Uppsala school of conceptual analysis. He ...

Moral realism

Moral realism is the view that there are facts of the matter about which actions are right and which wrong, and about which things are good and which ...

Fact/value distinction

By Crisp, Roger

According to proponents of the fact/value distinction, no states of affairs in the world can be said to be values, and evaluative judgments are best understood not to ...

Good, theories of the

By Korsgaard, Christine M.

‘Good’ is the most general term of positive evaluation, used to recommend or express approval in a wide range of contexts. It indicates that a thing is desirable ...

Prescriptivism

By Hare, R.M.

Prescriptivism is a theory about moral statements. It claims that such statements contain an element of meaning which serves to prescribe or direct actions. The history of prescriptivism ...

Intuitionism in ethics

By Frazier, Robert L.

To intuit something is to apprehend it directly, without recourse to reasoning processes such as deduction or induction. Intuitionism in ethics proposes that we have a capacity for ...

Legal realism

By Duxbury, Neil

‘Legal realism’ is the term commonly used to characterize various currents of twentieth-century legal thought which stand opposed to idealism. (Hence, ‘realism’ in this context ought to be ...

Metaethics

By Finlay, Stephen

A tripartite distinction is often drawn in moral philosophy between (i) applied ethics, (ii) normative ethical theory, and (iii) metaethics. Applied ethics seeks answers to moral questions about ...

Moral motivation

By Wallace, R. Jay

Questions about the possibility and nature of moral motivation occupy a central place in the history of ethics. Philosophers disagree, however, about the role that motivational investigations should ...

Naturalism in ethics

By Sturgeon, Nicholas L.

Ethical naturalism is the project of fitting an account of ethics into a naturalistic worldview. It includes nihilistic theories, which see no place for real values and no ...

Ontology

By Craig, Edward

The word ‘ontology’ is used to refer to philosophical investigation of existence, or being. Such investigation may be directed towards the concept of being, asking what ‘being’ means, ...

Pragmatism in ethics

By Tiles, J.E.

Two components of the pragmatist outlook shape its ethical philosophy. It rejects certainty as a legitimate intellectual goal; this generates a nondogmatic attitude to moral precepts and principles. ...

Smart, John Jamieson Carswell (1920–2012)

By Jackson, Frank

J.J.C. (Jack) Smart was born in England and studied at Glasgow and Oxford universities before moving to Australia to take up the Chair of Philosophy at Adelaide University. ...

Evolution and ethics

By Sober, Elliott

The fact that human beings are a product of biological evolution has been thought to impinge on the study of ethics in two quite different ways. First, evolutionary ...