In Defence of the Open Question Argument

The purpose of this paper is to defend G. E. Moore's open question argument, understood as an argument directed against analytic reductionism, the view that moral properties are analytically reducible to non-moral properties. In the first section I revise Moore's argument in order to make it as plausible and resistant against objections as possible. In the following two sections I develop the argument further and defend it against the most prominent objections raised against it. The conclusion of my line of reasoning is that the open question argument offers the best explanation of our responses to the questions put in the argument, namely that analytic reductionism is mistaken. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

G. E. Moore and Bad Faith

Abstract: G. E. Moore claimed to know a variety of commonsense propositions. He is often accused of being dogmatic or of begging the question against philosophers who deny that he knows such things. In this paper, I argue that this accusation is mistaken. I argue that Moore is instead guilty of answering questions of the form ‘Do I know p?’ in bad faith.     

G. E. Moore on goodness and reasons

Several proponents of the ‘buck-passing’ account of value have recently attributed to G. E. Moore the implausible view that goodness is reason-providing. I argue that this attribution is unjustified. In addition to its historical significance, the discussion has an important implication for the contemporary value-theoretical debate: the plausible observation that goodness is not reason-providing does not give decisive support to the buck-passing account over its Moorean rivals. The final section of the paper is a survey of what can be said for and against the buck-passing account and Moore's views about goodness and reasons.     

G.E. Moore and the relation between intrinsic value and human activity

The Journal of Value Inquiry -     

Neglecting the Question of Being: Heidegger's Argument Against Husserl

This paper claims that the argument Heidegger leveled at Husserl in his Marburg lecture courses trades on a confusion. Heidegger confused neglecting the question of being with presupposing an answer to the question of being. No reasons have been given for thinking that the former is objectionable, and the latter is only as objectionable as the thing presupposed. This paper does not, thereby, show Heideggerian phenomenology is inferior to Husserlian phenomenology; but it does show that Heidegger's so-called “immanent critique of Husserl” was anything but, and hence that Husserlian phenomenology was not (as Heidegger claimed) “unphenomenological”.     

No Other Life: death and Catholicism in the novels of Brian Moore

There is a critical consensus (Dahlie, 1969, 1981; Flood, 1974; O'Donoghue, 1990; Sullivan, 1996) that one theme predominates in Brian Moore's fiction: the literary portrayal of Roman Catholicism. Yet over the past five decades, Moore's attitude to Catholicism, now more ambivalent than openly antagonistic, has changed and developed just as Roman Catholicism, especially post‐Vatican II, has changed and developed. Refining such a literary consensus, this article argues that the literary examination of a metaphysics and theology of death has been central to Moore's portrayal of Catholicism. A critical examination will be provided here of the portrayal of death in a representative sample of Brian Moore's novels before a more detailed focus upon the novel from which this article takes its main title, No Other Life (1993). By way of open conclusion, literary case study will be highlighted as a means of engaging in that interdisciplinary realm where literature and theology examine similar themes. In particular, such interdisciplinary research will be contextualised as part of an international literary‐theological programme from which one volume has arisen and which the present author is currently editing (Gearon, forthcoming).