In addition to thin concepts like the good, the bad and the ugly, our evaluative thought and talk appeals to thick concepts like the lewd and the rude, the selfish and the cruel, the courageous and the kind -- concepts that somehow combine evaluation and non-evaluative description. Thick concepts are almost universally assumed to be inherently evaluative in content, and many philosophers claimed them to have deep and distinctive significance in ethics and metaethics. In this first book-length treatment of thick (...) concepts, Pekka Väyrynen argues that all this is mistaken. Through detailed attention to the language of thick concepts, he defends a novel theory on which the relationship between thick words and evaluation is best explained by general conversational and pragmatic norms. Drawing on general principles in philosophy of language, he argues that many prominent features of thick words and concepts can be explained by general factors that have nothing in particular to do with being evaluative. If evaluation is not essential to the sort of thinking we do with thick concepts, claims for the deep and distinctive significance of the thick are undermined. The Lewd, the Rude and the Nasty is a fresh and innovative treatment of an important topic in moral philosophy and sets a new agenda for future work. It will be essential reading to anyone interested in the analysis and the broader philosophical significance of evaluative and normative language. (shrink)

This paper defends doubts about the existence of genuine moral perception, understood as the claim that at least some moral properties figure in the contents of perceptual experience. Standard examples of moral perception are better explained as transitions in thought whose degree of psychological immediacy varies with how readily non-moral perceptual inputs, jointly with the subject's background moral beliefs, training, and habituation, trigger the kinds of phenomenological responses that moral agents are normally disposed to have when they represent things as (...) being morally a certain way. (shrink)

Cosmology and the development of human society.

Critical and comparative analysis on the philosophical thoughts of ʻAlī Sharīʻatī and Sir Muhammad Iqbal, 19th and 20th centuries Muslim philosophers.

Bakhsh-i avval. Akhlāq-i Islāmī -- Bakhsh-i duvvum. Ādāb-i ijtimāʻī.

A comparison of the political ideas of the 18th-century Vietnamese poet, encyclopedist, and government official Lê Quý Đôn and the younger Korean agronomist, philosopher and poet Chŏng Yag-yong as expressed in their commentaries on the Shu jing.

Islamic ethics -- Early works to 1800. ; Kāshifī, Ḥusayn Vāʻiẓ, -1504 or 150; Akhlāq-i Muḥsinī.

Sanskrit text, with Sanskrit commentary of Anantaśaktipāda and English explanation on Śaivism, and Hindu philosophy.

Study on the contributions of Vācaspatimiśra, fl. 976-1000 and Vijñānabhikṣu, 16th cent., commentrators and philosophers to Sankhya and Yoga philosophy.

jild 1. Majmūʻah-i maqālāt-i iraʼah shudah -- jild 2. Majmūʻah-i maqālāt-i rasīdah.

Verse work Dvaita philosophy criticising the religious and metaphysical tenets of Jainism and Buddhism.

Interpretation of Amr̥tānubhava, work on Advaita philosophy, by Jñānadeva, fl. 1290.