Author: Andrew Taggart

• April 9, 2013

  Looking for the man you’ve never met… On specifying

  Let’s suppose that you’re a detective and that you’re looking for a man you’ve never met before. Let’s suppose further that your initial specification–‘a man I’ve never met before’–is correct: namely, that you are looking for a man (not a woman, an animal, a child, a god, an angel, or a spirit) and that you’ve…
• April 8, 2013

  The art of everyday eloquence; or, ordinary charisma

  One of the arts I have been practicing over the past three years has been ‘the art of everyday eloquence.’ I believe I am chiefly alone in this, but I also believe that it is one of the most important arts to learn for individuals who seek to lead good and decent lives outside of…
• April 6, 2013

  Do we desire what is good, or do we call good what we desire?

  Socrates and Aristotle both say that we desire what is (or what we perceive to be) good. Spinoza and Nietzsche both believe that we call good what is it that we (already) desire. Who is right? David Wiggins suggests that we do not have to choose. Parsing Aristotle, he writes, ‘The good is the sort…
• April 4, 2013

  The Daoist ethic without principles

  ‘Now the Taoist ideal,’ writes the ever-quarky Raymond Smullyan in his best Lewis Carroll The Tao is Silent, ‘is not so much to feel that he shouldn’t be moral (which is, of course, a morality all its own), but rather to be independent, free, unentangled from moral “principles”‘ (112). The poem from the first chapter of the…
• April 2, 2013

  A moral particularist’s friends

  A moral particularist thinks we can get on well enough, in a moral sense, without a ready supply of principles. What is right to do in one context may not be right to do in some other, but what is right to do in this context is determined by what is revealed in this context.…