Needs, Values, Truth: Essays in the Philosophy of Value

Needs, Values, Truth brings together of some of the most important and influential writings by a leading contemporary philosopher, David Wiggins; they are drawn from twenty-five years of his work in the broad area of the philosophy of value. The author passes to and fro between problems of ethics, meta-ethics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of logic and language. The following themes are prominent:

the elucidation of the ideas of truth, objectivity, subjectivity and intersubjectivity

the scope and limits of the attribution of the status of plain truth among the judgements of morals, politics and aesthetics

the compatibility of moral cognitivism both with criticism and with a 'no-foundations' view of morals, politics and aesthetics

the part played in the fixation of the sense of evaluative language by the antecedent possibility of agreement not only in judgements but also (the Humean addendum) in sentiments

the philosophical ineliminability of explanations that explain a subject's thought by vindicating it, and the indispensability of evaluative and subjective categories to such vindications

the irreplaceability and irreducibility for practical or valuational thinking of such ideas as those of need, self and metaphysical freedom.

For this third edition the author has added a new essay on incommensurability, in addition to making minor revisions to the existing text. The volume will stand as a definitive summation of his work in this area.