Practical Tortoise Raising: and other philosophical essays

Simon Blackburn

Sep 2010 · OUP Oxford

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Simon Blackburn presents a selection of his philosophical essays from 1995 to 2010. He offers engaging and illuminating discussions of various problems which arise when such familiar notions as representation, truth, reason, and assertion are applied in the sphere of practical thought. It is puzzling how our thinking gets to grip with such things as values and norms. Blackburn explores how we can try to understand what we say in terms of what we are doing when we say it. He investigates how propositions interact with linguistic expressions whose primary function is identified in terms of actions performed in expressing commitments with them, when those commitments are thought of in practical rather than descriptive terms. He broadens his investigation from semantic questions to wider issues of pluralism, pragmatism, philosophy of mind, and the nature of practical reasoning.

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Simon Blackburn is currently the Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He has held visiting appointments at the University of Melbourne, the University of British Columbia, Oberlin College, Princeton University, Ohio State University, the Universidad Autonomia de Mexico, and was for ten years Adjunct Professor at the Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University, Canberra.