Volume 14, Issue 1

Iris Murdoch is known for defending metaphysical thinking in the anti-metaphysical atmosphere of mid- and late 20th-century analytic philosophy. Yet, she does not present anything easily recognizable as a metaphysical theory in her own writings, but rather circles around her preferred neo-Platonic metaphysical imagery in various ways. But what, then, does she mean by metaphysics? I argue in this paper that it is essential for understanding Murdoch’s place in 20th-century thought - and the direction she points out - to understand the peculiar nature of her own contribution to metaphysics in her late work. To elucidate this issue, I will discuss three aspects of what she means by metaphysics in her late book Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: 1) traditional metaphysical theories or systems (and why she doesn’t present one); 2) metaphysics as underlying worldviews; and 3) metaphysics as ‘heuristic images’ of our understanding of the world.

One of the hardest questions in environmental philosophy is the debate between anthropocentric and ecocentric accounts of value. I argue that a great deal of the disagreement in this debate arises from a) misunderstanding of the concepts used in the debate and b) unfruitful reading of vaguely framed arguments. The conceptual and argumentative analysis of the debate shows that many arguments can be ignored as they either contain conceptual confusion or concern issues that are actually irrelevant to the centrism division. However, there are arguments that maintain their relevance, and these arguments have important consequences on the practical environmental ethics. Hence, contrary to Bryan G. Norton’s optimism about the “centrism convergence” on the level of practical environmentalism, I contend that disagreements prevail even in practice. As a solution, I suggest that the centrism debaters should focus on the practical level and work to find space for agreement.

Naturalism about the mind is typically associated with some kind of physicalism. This paper argues that this association is a mistake and that, given the naturalist’s commitment to the primacy of empirical evidence, naturalists should be open to different commitments. It is further argued that naturalists about the mind should be emergentists because of the epistemological attitude that is at the core of the emergentist position, properly understood.

Surely, I am the same person I was several years prior. I must be identical to something that persists. First, I argue that the reductive materialism and Lockean view of personal identity are plausible accounts of our mental life and survival conditions. Second, although these positions appear to be in tension, I argue that a plausible way to reconcile them is a novel kind of animalism. This view says that I am identical to my properly functioning brain (or a part of that brain). Thus, I am identical to my properly functioning brain. Call this view neural animalism .