Derek Parfit presents the third volume of On What Matters, his landmark work of moral philosophy. Parfit develops further his influential treatment of reasons, normativity, the meaning of moral discourse, and the status of morality. He engages with his critics, and shows the way to resolution of their differences.This volume is partly about what it is for things to matter, in the sense that we all have reasons to care about these things.
Much of the book discusses three of the main kinds of meta-ethical theory: Normative Naturalism, Quasi-Realist Expressivism, and Non-Metaphysical Non-Naturalism, which Derek Parfit now calls Non-Realist Cognitivism. This third theory claims that, if we use the word 'reality' in an ontologically weighty sense, irreducibly normative truths have no mysterious or incredibleontological implications.
If instead we use 'reality' in a wide sense, according to which all truths are truths about reality, this theory claims that some non-empirically discoverable truths-such as logical, mathematical, modal, and some normative truths-raise no difficult ontological questions.Parfit discusses these theories partly by commenting on the views of some of the contributors to Peter Singer's collection Does Anything Really Matter? Parfit on Objectivity. Though Peter Railton is a Naturalist, he has widened his view by accepting some further claims, and he has suggested that this wider version of Naturalism could be combined with Non-Realist Cognitivism. Parfit argues that Railton is right, since these theories no longer deeply disagree. Though Allan Gibbard is aQuasi-Realist Expressivist, he has suggested that the best version of his view could be combined with Non-Realist Cognitivism.
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Parfit argues that Gibbard is right, since Gibbard and he now accept the other's main meta-ethical claim. It is rare for three such different philosophical theories to be able to bewidened in ways that resolve their deepest disagreements. This happy convergence supports the view that these meta-ethical theories are true. Parfit also discusses the views of several other philosophers, and some other meta-ethical and normative questions.; December 2016. ISBN: 362. Read online, or download in secure PDF or secure ePub format.
Title: On What Matters. Author: Derek Parfit.Imprint: OUP Oxford. Subject categories.ISBNs. 608.
362. 379In The PressParfit's arguments are rigourous, his writing lucid. About The AuthorDerek Parfit is one of the leading philosophers of our time.
He is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, Global Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at New York University, and a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the author of Reasons and Persons (OUP, 1984), one of the most influential books in philosophy of the last several decades, and the acclaimed On What Matters: Volume Oneand Volume Two.
's book has been published and threatens to become an instant philosophical classic. The work is enormous in scope and range covering, as it promises, the theory of reasons, a description of principles, a general account of moral theories and an account of normativity. In addition the work also contains a series of responses to Parfit's work from a set of commentators as well as Parfit's responses to these commentators.Parfit's book is the product of many years work and is more than simply the follow-up to his earlier.
On What Matters originated as a series of lectures and the lecture version is in an extended PDF. Subsequent to the giving of the lectures, an initial version of the manuscript circulated under the title 'Climbing the Mountain'. There is also a substantially longer draft from 2008 on-line. So in some respects the build-up to the publication of On What Matters has been intense and engaged moral philosophers for sometime. Indeed Pea Soup ran a reading group of the manuscript.
The response of commentators now published as Part 4 in Volume 2 also was part of initial responses to the Tanner Lectures of 2002. All told, then, the textual network surrounding On What Matters is very dense and complicates further the reading of a work which is, given both its length and breadth, difficult enough to engage with.Nonetheless, such an engagement will be attempted on this blog. It will involve a certain amount of looking back at the earlier versions of the manuscript by contrast with the final published version and some reaction to other commentaries on Parfit's book. Like many others I was included in those to whom earlier versions of the manuscript were sent and, I have to confess, I failed to respond at that point, due to the usual reasons of lack of time and distraction by other tasks.
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However, the publication of On What Matters is surely a seminal event in contemporary moral philosophy since in the work Parfit attempts a task few others have deemed either desirable or possible.