Passions and Projections Themes from the Philosophy of Simon Blackburn

This volume presents fourteen original essays which explore the philosophy of Simon Blackburn, one of the UK's most influential contemporary philosophers. Blackburn is best known to the general public for his attempts to make philosophy accessible to those with little or no formal training, but in professional circles his reputation is based on a lifetime pursuit of his distinctive version of a projectivist and anti-realist research program. As he sees things, we must always try first to understand and explain what we are doing when we think and talk as we do. This research program reaches into nearly all of the main areas of philosophy: metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, moral philosophy, and moral psychology. The books and articles he has written provide us with perhaps the most comprehensive statement and defense of projectivism and anti-realism since Hume. The essays collected here document the range and influence of Blackburn's work. They reveal, among other things, the resourcefulness of his distinctive brand of philosophical pragmatism.

1 - Defending Folk Psychology: The Limits of Coalitions
2 - Causation, Projection, Inference, and Agency
3 - Singular Belief
4 - What Quasi-Realists Can Say About Knowledge
5 - The Metaphysics of Artistic Expression: A Case Study in Projectivism
6 - The Impossible Necessity of 'Filling in Space'
7 - What is Colour? A Defense of Colour Primitivism
8 - From Quasi-Realism to Global Expressivism--and Back Again?
9 - Another World: The Metaethics and Metametaethics of Reasons Fundamentalism
10 - Improving Sensibilities
11 - Modest Quasi-Realism and the Problem of Deep Moral Error
12 - Just How Do Passions Rule? The (More) Compleat Humean
13 - Higher-Order Attitudes, Frege's Abyss, and the Truth in Propositions
14 - The Fugitive Thought: Blackburn on Reasons

Robert Johnson is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at the University of Missouri, Columbia, and was a student of Blackburn's at UNC Chapel Hill in the 1990s. Michael Smith is McCosh Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Philosophy Department at Princeton University; he was a student of Blackburn's at Oxford University in the 1980s.