Helen Knight and Margaret Macdonald on the meaning of ‘good’

British Journal for the History of Philosophy:1-19 (forthcoming)
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Abstract

I argue that Helen Knight and Margaret Macdonald expressed views on the nature of ‘good’ in aesthetic contexts which anticipate to a striking extent the dispute between Peter Geach and R. M. Hare over ethical uses of ‘good’ several years later. I show that Knight introduced a distinction between uses of adjectives later drawn also by Geach, and that she employed that distinction, as Geach did, in order to defend a descriptivist approach to ‘good’ according to which ‘good’ is not ambiguous. I also show that Macdonald conceived of evaluative statements as commendatory, and that her conception of evaluative language therefore closely resembles the position which Hare would later advance.

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Oliver Thomas Spinney
University College London

References found in this work

Categories of Art.Kendall L. Walton - 1970 - Philosophical Review 79 (3):334-367.
Principia Ethica.George Edward Moore - 1903 - International Journal of Ethics 14 (3):377-382.
Good and Evil.Peter Geach - 1956 - Analysis 17 (2):33 - 42.
I: A lecture on ethics.Ludwig Wittgenstein - 1965 - Philosophical Review 74 (1):3-12.
Margaret MacDonald’s scientific common-sense philosophy.Justin Vlasits - 2022 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30 (2):267-287.

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