The paper reconstructs G.E. Moore's account of common-sense moral rules in Chapter V of Principia Ethica. It argues against both a conservative reading and a liberationist one. Moore instead defends a qualified conservatism and a conditional freedom. A small set of universal rules (e.g., prohibitions on murder and protections of property) is consequentially justified as necessary for civilised society, which enables the pursuit of intrinsic goods. By contrast, non-universal rules and moral innovations have no default standing and must be evaluated case by case for their optimific tendencies. For individual action, rule-following is a reliable decision procedure when rules tend to promote utility. Direct consequentialist judgment is permitted when rules are merely contingently useful or suboptimal. Freedom to deviate is real but constrained by epistemic limits, social practices, and the duty to maximise the good. Overall, Moore's pluralist consequentialism balances rule adherence with direct evaluation.
This paper suggests a possible new path for investigating the influence of Karl Marx's Jewish background on his thought. Unlike previous research, it proposes to relate the materialist conception of history not so much to the doctrinal content of Judaism, but rather to the historical experience of the Jewish minority in mid-19th-century Germany and Europe, that is to the historical and biographical context of its genesis. More specifically, it argues that the emergence out of the bosom of bourgeois society of a new and at the same time ancestral phenomenon such as modern antisemitism should be counted among the problems that have contributed to shaping the dialectical conception of historical time that informs Marx's social criticism.
This article examines the influence of G.E. Moore on the Oxford philosophers who, from the 1950s onward, initiated the revival of virtue ethics. Although Moore is often portrayed as responsible for the sharp divide between facts and values, his work provided the conceptual background against which Anscombe, Foot, Geach, and Midgley developed a naturalistic response aimed at grounding normativity in human nature. The paper critically analyzes Philippa Foot's neo Aristotelian naturalism, highlighting its reliance on a biologically conceived "first nature" and the tensions between human function and practical reason. It then contrasts this approach with Iris Murdoch's alternative reading of Moore: non naturalist, realist, and markedly Platonic. Murdoch's defense of the indefinability of the Good and of moral attention offers a different strategy for reconnecting facts and values without reverting to biologism. The article argues that this minority position deserves renewed attention in contemporary ethical theory.
I address the metaphysical core of Moore's conception of intrinsic value: a pattern of modalities such that intrinsic value is a property, is intrinsic, but it is not an intrinsic property. Or such that intrinsic value depends necessarily only on the intrinsic nature of its bearers, but it is not an intrinsic property of its bearers. In this way, I also aim to give support to the view that Moore's later moral philosophy (from the early 1910s on) includes a metaethical theory radically different from that of Principia Ethica. Moore's difficulty with intrinsic value depends on a potential incoherence between its modal ontology and the inferential role individuation of its concept, which includes the features of non-naturalism and a constitutive connection with deontic notions like right and ought. (Both these assumptions are in radical contrast with Principia Ethica.) I suggest that the consideration of Moore's own philosophy of modality (developed in the same years as his conception of intrinsic value) may indicate how to rethink the necessity of intrinsic value, even though this would require the additional resources of a Two-Dimensional conception of modality. I also hint at how this formal apparatus can be applied to the distinctively moral-theoretical issue of the supervenience of ethical on natural properties. My conclusion is that Moore's modal conception of intrinsic value holds important lessons for today's metaethical discussion.
The reception of Plato's thoughts in Schelling's philosophy as well as the persistence of certain Platonic elements throughout Schelling's entire philosophical production are already considered commonplace. However, the scholarship seems to not fully understand the debts that Schelling has toward Plato's doctrines and their meaningful role in Schelling's strategy, highlighting, instead, the presence of Kant's work in it. My paper aims to challenge this commonplace and prove the crucial importance of Plato's Timaeus and Philebus in Schelling's early production from a peculiar and yet unexplored perspective. I will show that Schelling's notion of synthesis is built not on Kant's philosophy, but on Plato's one and represents what Schelling will refer to as Band in his late production. Thus, I will first present the philosophical issues that are found in Kant's Kritiken and represent the beginning of Schelling's reflections. Then, I will reconstruct the genealogy of Schelling's Band in his commentary on Plato's Timaeus and Philebus. Finally, I will take into account some passages in Schelling's Ideen and Weltseele where he borrows some crucial elements of Plato's thought and applies them to his analysis of nature.
