Nick Zangwill

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Honourary Research Fellow at University College London

I defend logical realism. I begin by motivating the realist approach by underlining the difficulties for its main rival: inferentialism. I then focus on AND and OR, and delineate a realist view of these two logical constants. The realist view is developed in terms of Alexander's Principle-showing that AND and OR have distinctive determining roles....

I foreground the principle of epistemic dependence. I isolate that relation and distinguish it from other relations and note what it does and does not entail. In particular, I distinguish between dependence and necessitation. This has many interesting consequences. On the negative side, many standard arguments in epistemology are subverted. More po...

I argue that non‐naturalist moral realism does not have a problem with supervenience. The necessities may be explained as flowing from the essence of moral properties. It is still true that non‐naturalism embraces necessary connections between distinct things, thus offending against ‘Hume's Principle’ according to which there are no such connection...

I argue that eating meat is morally good and our duty when it is part of a practice that has benefited animals. The existence of domesticated animals depends on the practice of eating them, and the meat-eating practice benefits animals of that kind if they have good lives. The argument is not consequentialist but historical, and it does not apply t...

This paper addresses the role of feeling and emotion in Eduard Hanslick’s On the Musically Beautiful. His views on musical listening are probed while drawing attention to his normative agenda. Hanslick thinks that there are better and worse ways to listen to music: proper aesthetic attention as against wallowing in feeling. This normative view assu...

Categorial approaches to metaphysical issues about the mind are explained and defended, and naturalistic approaches are criticized for begging categorial questions. Categorial properties are a certain kind of essential properties and are not understood terms of concepts, although categorial knowledge is necessary for thinking. The debate over mater...

Understanding religious music is challenging. Indeed, the whole idea can seem perplexing and problematic. In this paper, a number of ways of understanding religious music are sketched. Seven main models are distinguished: the side-effect model, the ringtone model, the honey model, the addition model, the fitting beauty model, the organic unity mode...

Yuval Harari believes that humans make myths, and that these can be powerful engines for social change. One of these myths, claims Harari, is the existence of ‘liberal rights’. This article challenges that claim and defends the idea of grounding rights in human nature.

Kant makes modest and ambitious claims with his idea of disinterested pleasure. The modest claim is that all aesthetic pleasure is disinterested. The ambitious claim is that all and only aesthetic pleasure is disinterested. I defend only the modest claim. I initially give a basic explication of what Kant had in mind by the doctrine. I then argue th...

I analyze and defend Kant’s claim in the Critique of the Power of Judgement that pleasure in the good is interested.

I raise the issue over why human beings should be concerned with God even if He created the world and even if He is responsible for Morality. I describe God's apparent irrelevance to human beings. In response, I consider and reject a Neo-Aristotelian solution. Instead I propose a Neoplatonist approach, which is cautiously endorsed. The nature of pa...

I raise the issue over why human beings should be concerned with God even if He created the world and even if He is responsible for Morality. I describe God’s apparent irrelevance to human beings. In response, I consider and reject a Neo-Aristotelian solution. Instead I propose a Neoplatonist approach, which is cautiously endorsed. The nature of pa...

I argue against inferentialism about logic. First, I argue against an analogy between logic and chess, before considering a more basic objection to stipulating inference rules as a way of establishing the meaning of logical constants. The objection-the Mushroom Omelette Objection-is that stipulative acts are partly constituted by logical notions, a...

This commentary discusses various shortcomings in Chapman & Huffman’s (2018) denial of differences between human beings and animals and the ethical consequences they think turn on this. Rationality is proposed as a candidate for such a difference, one that also has acceptable ethical consequences.

I give an informal presentation of the evolutionary game theoretic approach to the conventions that constitute linguistic meaning. The aim is to give a philosophical interpretation of the project, which accounts for the role of game theoretic mathematics in explaining linguistic phenomena. I articulate the main virtue of this sort of account, which...

This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving interdisciplinary field of Western music and philosophy. It seeks to represent this area in all its fullness, including a diverse array of perspectives from music studies (notably historical musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology), philosophy (incorporating both analytic and continental approa...

Hanslick has a subtle and compelling account of non-absolute music. I articulate and defend that account so that it throws light on his conception of absolute music. Hanslick thinks that aiming at musical-beauty is the essence of (most) music. Nevertheless, Hanslick recognizes the variety of things that music does apart from aiming at musical-beaut...

This Handbook offers an overview of the thriving interdisciplinary field of Western music and philosophy. It seeks to represent this area in all its fullness, including a diverse array of perspectives from music studies (notably historical musicology, music theory, and ethnomusicology), philosophy (incorporating both analytic and continental approa...

In this paper epistemic pluralism concerning knowledge is taken to be the claim that very different facts may constitute knowledge. The paper argues for pluralism by arguing that very different facts can constitute the knowledge‐making links between beliefs and facts. If pluralism is right, we need not anxiously seek a unified account of the links...

I defend the application of the notion of essence to music. I appeal to the essences of events rather than objects, and I focus on functional events, such as handshakes, which have historical essences. Musical essences are like that. This allows us to clear up a number of worries about essences in music. I then celebrate and defend Hanslick’s appea...

Experimental philosophy has blossomed into a variety of philosophical fields including ethics, epistemology, metaphysics and philosophy of language. But there has been very little experimental philosophical research in the domain of philosophical aesthetics. Advances to Experimental Philosophy of Aesthetics introduces this burgeoning research field...

I probe the judgments of the agreeable that we make about food and drink. I first separate different concerns that we might have with food and drink. After that, I address expressive language by first sketching an evolutionary language-game-theoretic approach for referential language. I then try to extend it to expressive language, showing how expres...

I argue that direct consequentialism is not rationally believable. I focus on duties of love. Those feelings are so fundamental to us that believing consequentialism creates insanity. For it entails negative judgements not just about our loyal acts, but also about our deepest feelings. If direct consequentialism is true we should be able to believe...

I argue that there is a problem for a wide class of theories of art that arises from counterexamples drawn from everyday artistic activity, rather than high artworld artistic activity. I explore how the counterexample functions. Part of the point is to reflect on methodological issues concerning the use of examples when considering theories of art....

This article replies to Manuel Fasko’s “The Demystification of Nick Zangwill’s ‘Myth of Religious Experience’” (2017), showing how author’s argument against the possibility of religious experience presented in “The Myth of Religious Experience” (2004) remains in tact.

Uma parte importante do realismo estético é a ideia de que os conceitos estéticos designam propriedades estéticas. No caso da música, o realista estético sustenta que os conceitos estéticos que aparecem nas experiências e nos julgamentos estéticos em muitos casos designam propriedades estéticas da música (e talvez dos sons que a constituem). Empreg...

Negative conclusions about private language are widely supposed to derive from Ludwig Wittgenstein’s discussion of rule-following and the impossibility of following a rule privately. I argue that this is incorrect as an interpretation as well as being implausible on independent grounds.

We question Mark Evan Bonds' interpretation of the deleted ending of Eduard Hanslick's On the Musically Beautiful. We argue that there is no evidence that it reveals a commitment to Pythagoreanism or Idealism. We supply an alternative explanation of the deletion. © British Society of Aesthetics 2017. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf o...

I argue for the view that we all believe that we exist from the fact that the belief is a presupposition of some of our mental life. We cannot argue from perceptual experience, but we can argue from action. I defend an essentially active (or perhaps "existentialist") view of the self, and I argue that acting (but not perceiving) presupposes the bel...

I argue that once we prioritize epistemic dependence and cast scepticism in those terms, rather than in modal terms, it is clear that skeptical arguments are no good. Skeptical arguments necessarily make dogmatic assumptions about what makes for knowledge or justification, or about what makes for lack of knowledge or justification. A dogmatist asse...

In this volume, Zangwill develops a view of the nature of music and our experience of music that foregrounds the aesthetic properties of music. He focuses on metaphysical issues about aesthetic properties of music, psychological issues about the nature of musical experience, and philosophy of language issues about the metaphorical nature of aesthet...

I defend a non-reductionist view of music, according to which music should be understood in terms of musical beauty. I suggest that general theories of music are legitimate, and I discuss sublimity and argue that it is a species of beauty. Musical experience is the experience of aesthetic properties of that are realized in sounds. Sometimes, when w...

I argue that metaphor may be understood as the appropriation of the literal meanings of words, in order to give them a use that differs from their functions. Just as Duchamp took the Mona Lisa, or rather a reproduction of it, and added a moustache, a maker of a metaphor takes a literal word or sentence and uses and abuses it. This allows for a solu...

The aesthetic realist interprets many descriptions of music as metaphorical descriptions of aesthetic properties of music. I argue that aesthetic realism requires that nonaesthetic words are used to express both aesthetic and nonaesthetic concepts. But having distinguished the concepts, some plausible account must be given of their relation. A caus...

I argue that musical experience has little to do with understanding or imagining emotion. I draw on experimental work done by Rory Allen and his colleagues on musical experience and autism.

I argue that an evaluational conception of love collides with the way we value love. That way allows that love has causes, but not reasons, and it recognizes and celebrates a love that refuses to justify itself. Love has unjustified selectivity, due to its arbitrary causes. That imposes a non-tradability norm. A love for reasons, rational love or e...

I defend extreme formalism about the aesthetics of inorganic nature. I outline the general issue over aesthetic formalism as it manifests itself in the visual arts. The main issue is over whether we need to know about the history of artworks in order to appreciate them aesthetically. I then turn to nature and concede that with organic nature we nee...

We propose addressing the theme of this special issue by examining the affective responses that music evokes in the individual. The logical first step is to enquire how far these responses resemble naturalistic emotions, i.e., those that are not specifically musical, but have ordinary non-musical content. The literature is ambivalent on this. Many...

I discuss the social dimension of musical experience. I focus on the question of whether there is joint musical listening. One reason for this focus is that Adorno and those in his tradition give us little in the way of an understanding of what the social dimension of musical experience might be. We need a proper clear conception of the issue, whic...

What can a moral realist say about why we should take morality seriously and about the relation between morality and rationality? I take off from Christine Korsgaard's criticism of moral realism on this score. The aim is to achieve an understanding of the relation between moral and rational properties and of the role of practical deliberation on a...

That knowledge does not depend on truth is a consequence of a basic principle concerning dependence applied to the case of knowledge: that A depends on C, and that B depends on C, do not mean that A depends on B. This is a standard causal scenario, where two things with a common cause are not themselves causally dependent. Similarly, knowledge that...

I defend the view that morality depends on God against the Euthyphro dilemma by arguing that the reasons that God has for determining the moral–natural dependencies might be personal reasons that have non-moral content. I deflect the ‘arbitrary whim’ worry, but I concede that the account cannot extend to the goodness of God and His will. However, h...

This paper argues that theorists who want to respect common sense morality must respect not just verdicts but also grounds for verdicts. Just as theories that baldly deny that there is any value in personal commitments or who say that personal commitments do not generate duties are problematically reversionary, so are theories that say that there i...

What Is It To Be Fashionable?Appearing FashionableTwo Concepts of FashionFashion and AlienationThe Metaphysics of Fashion

I argue that the constitution relation transmits causal efficacy and thus is a suitable relation to deploy in many troubled areas of philosophy, such as the mind–body problem. We need not demand identity.

En este artículo, sostengo que hay mucho de verdadero en el formalismo. Ofrezco una explicación de cómo los valores estéticos no-formales se relacionan con los valores formales y otros aspectos de la obra de arte. Mi explicación de las propiedades formales hace uso de la noción kantiana de belleza adherente, y nos permite formular una posición de “...

I argue that attempts to demarcation ethics from science are not jeopardized by the fact that conjunctions of moral claims may have empirically verifiable logical consequences

I consider the metaphysical consequences of the view that propositional attitudes have essential normative properties. I argue that realism should take a weak rather than a strong form. I argue that expressivism cannot get off the ground. And I argue that eliminativism is self-refuting.

Roger Scruton's account of the nature of music and our experience of it foregrounds the imagination. It is a particularly interesting and promising ‘non-realist’ view in the aesthetics of music, in the sense that it does not postulate aesthetic properties of music that we represent in musical experience. In this paper I critically examine both Scru...

I argue that we should avoid a unitary account of what makes metaphorical descriptions of music in terms of emotion appropriate. There are many different ways in which musical metaphors can be appropriate. The right view of metaphorical appropriateness is a generously pluralist one.

It is usually thought, following Hume, that considerations to do with motivation favour non-cognitivism over cognitivism about moral judgements. Hume’s motivation argument was that non-cognitivism does better than cognitivism at respecting the common observation that there is an immediate or internal connection between moral judgements and motivati...

Oxford Studies in Metaethics is the only publication devoted exclusively to original philosophical work in the foundations of ethics. It provides an annual selection of much of the best new scholarship being done in the field. Its broad purview includes work being done at the intersection of ethical theory and metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy...

I argue against motivational internalism. First I recharacterise the issue over moral motivation. Second I describe the indifference argument against motivation internalism. Third I consider appeals to irrationality that are often made in the face of this argument, and I show that they are ineffective. Lastly, I draw the motivational externalist co...

This article addresses a number of difficulties and complications in the standard formulations of motivational internalism, and considers what besires might be in the light of those difficulties and complications. Two notions of besire are then distinguished, before considering how different kinds of motivational internalism and different conceptio...

Must mental properties figure in psychological causal laws if they are causally efficacious? And do those psychological causal laws give the essence of mental properties? Contrary to the prevailing consensus, I argue that, on the usual conception of laws that is in play in these debates, there are in fact lawless causally efficacious properties bot...

I ask four questions: (1) Why should we think that our hominid ancestor's predation is not just a causal influence but the main causal factor responsible for human cruelty? (2) Why not think of human cruelty as a necessary part of a syndrome in which other phenomena are necessarily involved? (3) What definitions of cruelty does Nell propose that we...

I defend extreme formalism about inorganic nature against arguments put forward by Glenn Parsons. I begin by laying out the general issue over aesthetic formalism, and I describe the position of extreme formalism about inorganic nature. I then reconsider -Ronald Hepburn's beach/seabed example. Next I discuss the notions of function in play in our t...

I describe and defend the view in a philosophy of mind that I call 'Normative Essentialism', according to which propositional attitudes have normative essences. Those normative essences are 'horizontal' rational requirements, by which I mean the requirement to have certain propositional attitudes given other propositional attitudes. Different propo...

I argue that people do not and cannot have religious experiences that are perceptual experiences with theological content and that provide some justification for the belief in God. I discuss William Alston's resourceful defence of this idea. My strategy is to say that religious perception would either have to be by means of one of the ordinary five...

I argue that Hanslick was right to think that music should not be understood in terms of emotion. In particular, it is not essential to music to possess emotions, arouse emotions, express emotions, or represent emotions. All such theories are misguided.

Without Abstract

This article discusses several related issues about beauty. These are: the place of beauty among other aesthetic properties; the general principle of aesthetic supervenience; the problem of aesthetic relevance; the distinction between free and dependent beauty; the primacy of our appreciation of free beauty over our appreciation of dependent beauty...

This article considers the nature of our aesthetic thought and experience. It does not tackle head-on the issue of whether or not we should think that reality includes mind-independent aesthetic properties and thus mindindependent aesthetic states of affairs in which objects or events possess mind-independent aesthetic properties. However, thinking...

L'A. se propose de defendre la validite de la these du formalisme esthetique tant denigree ces dernieres annees. L'A. presente un formalisme modere qui s'appuie sur la distinction esthetique/non-esthetique, d'une part, et sur la distinction entre la beaute libre et la beaute dependante chez Kant, d'autre part. L'A. montre que seul un formalisme mod...

I defend traditional aesthetics against sociological criticism. I argue that ª historicistº approaches (a) are not supported by arguments and (b) are intrinsically implausible. Hence the traditional ahistorical philosophical approach to the judgment of taste is justified. Many Marxist, feminist and postmodernist writers either eliminate aesthetic v...

I defend moderate formalism about the aesthetics of nature. I argue that anti-formalists cannot account for the incongruousness of much natural beauty. This shows that some natural beauty is not kind-dependent. I then tackle several anti-formalist arguments that can be found in the writings of Ronald Hepburn, Allen Carlson, and Malcolm Budd.

I begin this paper by describing and making attractive a physicalist aesthetic realist view of aesthetic properties. I then argue against this view on the basis of two premises. The first premise is thesis of aesthetic/sensory dependence that I have defended elsewhere. The second premise is the denial of a mind-independence thesis about sensory pro...