Presents the author’s view of the best current positions on certain core philosophical and psychological problems. These positions together suggest a skeptical or nihilist perspective modified by evolutionary psychology and contemporary philosophy that embraces our desire to live as best we can and the relative and psychological reality of values, free will and other phenomena while recognizing limitations on their foundations and our understanding. Readers may want to start with the first entry. - Marc Krellenstein (personal info here)
Burgess, J. (2007). Against ethics. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 10(5), pp. 427-439.
Caputo, J. (2000). The end of ethics. In LaFollette, H. (Ed.), The Blackwell guide to ethical theory (pp. 111-128). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Garner, R. (2007). Abolishing morality. Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 10(5), pp. 499-513.
Greene, J. (2002). The terrible, horrible, no good, very bad truth about morality and what to do about at. Doctoral dissertation, Department of Philosophy, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ.
Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review, 108, 814-834.
Harman, G. & Thomson, J. (1996). Moral relativism and moral objectivity. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing.
Joyce, R. (2001). The myth of morality. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Kramer, P. (1993). Listening to rrozac. New York: Penguin Books.
Krellenstein, M. (1995). Unsolvable problems, visual imagery and explanatory satisfaction. Journal of Mind and Behavior, 16:235-254.
Krellenstein, M. (2006). Morality without a net: A reply to Pinker on avoiding nihilism.
Mackie, J. (1977). Ethics: Inventing right and wrong. New York: Penguin.
McGinn, C. (1989). Can we solve the mind-body problem? Mind, 391, 349-366.
Miller, A. (2003). An introduction to contemporary metaethics. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press.
Nozick, R. (1974). Anarchy, state, and utopia. New York: Basic Books.
Nozick, R. (1981). Philosophical explanations. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Nozick, R. (2001). Invariances: The structure of the objective world. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.
Pinker, S. (1997). How the mind works. New York: W.W. Norton and Company.
Pinker, S. (2002). The blank slate: The modern denial of human nature. New York: Viking Penguin.
Singer, P. (1993). Practical ethics. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1961). Tractatus logico-philosophicus [D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness, Trans.]. New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (Original work published 1921)
(Revised December 31, 2009)