Abstract

Quentin Smith’s new book appears at a time appropriate for judgment of what analytic ethics and philosophy of religion have accomplished during a century of their existence. His emphasis is on ethics, presumably because only recently analytic philosophers have devoted attention to the philosophy of religion. Much of the book is a judicious historical account that distinguishes four stages in the development of analytic philosophy: logical realism, logical positivism, ordinary language analysis, and what Smith calls linguistic essentialism. It begins with a sympathetic discussion of Moore’s Principia Ethica, which, mainly through the discussion in its first chapter of simple and complex properties, and of definitions, inaugurated analytic ethics, indeed, together with Russell’s “On Denoting,” analytic philosophy generally. Moore’s chief interest was in substantive ethical propositions, e.g., that personal affection and aesthetic appreciation are the greatest goods, but his successors usually did not go beyond the first chapter, which alone is included in the standard anthologies.