The final-year undergraduate dissertation is commonplace in Education Studies programmes across the world and yet its philosophical assumptions are complex and not always questioned. In England there is evidence to suggest a tacit preference for empiricism in textbooks designed to support early researchers. This brings, we suggest, problems associated with dualism, instrumentalism and of accounting for value, redolent of the dilemmas that emerge from Hume’s empiricist epistemology. The paper suggests that if argumentation were explicitly taught to undergraduates it may help (...) oversee the more judicious use of empirical approaches that are currently privileged in dissertation guidance. (shrink)

The philosophical path that I propose finds its origin in a properly metaethical questioning. It was first of all a question about the meaning of our moral statements by considering a defense of some kind of moral realism according to which our moral judgments would refer to a “moral reality” which would make it possible to determine their truth or their falsity. However, the realistic interpretation of moral judgments poses many difficulties from a psychological, an ontological and an epistemological point (...) of view. The central idea of this thesis was to explore these difficulties in order to consider the possibility of defending a form of moral realism. Nevertheless, this exploration – which constitutes the first part of this work – led me to a dead end in which all metaethical positions appeared to me as interesting as they were unsatisfactory. Faced with this situation, a new problem emerged to me as central: the disagreement between epistemic peers in philosophy. Since all metaethical positions are, even today, defended by experts in the field, it seemed to me essential to treat this difficulty with the intuition that a skeptical solution would be necessary. But this first turnaround was also unsatisfying, and rather than a skeptical conclusion it led me to shift my questioning to philosophy itself: what is philosophy? what can we expect from it? Perhaps my conception of philosophy – a search for truth based on argumentation – was at the origin of these successive dissatisfactions. I thus explore, in the last chapter, another way of approaching philosophy. Maybe it's not about looking for solutions to problems, like in science, maybe it’s about dealing with individual embarrassments which, at best, could just disappear. Thus “success” in philosophy would only be its abandonment – as an individual practice, and not as a discipline – through the disappearance of our philosophical embarrassments. In the end, I must admit that I do not have the means to defend such a conception of philosophy, but I can only note that all this work on moral realism, disagreement and philosophy was, for me, a way to make my philosophical embarrassment disappear. This is how, far from its starting point, the philosophical path that was mine ended. (shrink)

This paper offers a simple and novel motivation for the Humean Theory of Reasons. According to the Humean Theory of Reasons, all reasons must be explained by some psychological state of the agent for whom they are reasons, such as a desire. This view is commonly thought¹ to be motivated by a substantive theory about the power of reasons to motivate known as reason internalism, and a substantive theory about the possibility of being motivated without a desire known as the (...) Humean Theory of Motivation. Such a motivation would place substantial constraints on what form the Humean Theory of Reasons might take, and incur substantial commitments in metaethics and moral psychology. The argument offered here, on the other hand, is based entirely on relatively uncontroversial methodological considerations of perfectly broad applicability, and on the commonplace observation that while some reasons are reasons for anyone, others are reasons for only some. The argument is a highly defeasible one, but is supposed to give us a direct insight into what is philosophically deep about the puzzles raised for ethical theory by the Humean Theory of Reasons. I claim that it should renew our interest in the relationship between these two kinds of reason, and in particular in the explanation of reasons which seem to depend on desires or other psychological states. (shrink)