Abstract In 2008 I published a paper making the case that Wittgenstein's On Certainty reflections can be fruitfully extended to cast light on the foundations of our moral lives and practices. My primary example was that the wrongness of killing is a basic moral certainty. This proposal has come in for sustained criticism, with critics arguing that there is can and can be no such moral certainty. In this paper, I respond to the dominant line of critique, which I call ‘the exceptions objection’ to the wrongness of killing being a basic moral certainty. My diagnosis shows that, and how, this objection is predicated on a ‘propositional’ (mis)interpretation of the concept of basic certainty. In its stead, I present and develop an opposing ‘non‐propositional’ conception, which is crucial to seeing aright the claim that the wrongness of killing is a basic moral certainty.

Abstract I argue that the essence of ‘free will’ is control, the ability to do otherwise and that this ability is an acquired skill: We can and do see people acquire it, as for example small children learn to play and to do all the other things that human agents characteristically do.

Abstract Wittgenstein's naturalism illuminates our ordinary normative practices of giving and asking for reasons and also related ‘philosophical’ conceptions of knowledge inspired by, for example, Sellars's image of the ‘space of reasons’. Some propose that the relevant naturalism motivates scepticism about the ‘space of reasons’ insofar as it allegedly renders inexplicable how the space of reasons, intentionality and normativity quite generally, can be reconciled with the space of causation or the ‘space of nature’. Sellars insists that the normativity of knowledge is constitutively tied to our capacities of providing justifications. Arguably, Wittgenstein's insights into the limits of our capacity to give reasons and provide justifications show how normativity is both pervasive and more extensive than the practices of justification as actions or occurrences in the ‘space of reasons’. I situate those insights with respect to competing accounts of Wittgenstein's naturalism and recommend a more ‘liberal’ interpretation.

Abstract The central insight of Wittgenstein's critique of psychology can be summarized fairly plainly: when we talk about ‘minds’, ‘thoughts’, ‘feelings’ and other psychological phenomena, we are not talking about states and processes inside our heads, whether those states be further imagined as physical or transcendent. Our psychological language has many functions, Wittgenstein's work implies, but we can roughly describe it as a system of tools that evolved to operate within the course of human social life, and it is the complexity of our lives that psychology all too often mistakes for a complexity of a hidden system. This essay is an attempt to invoke a Wittgensteinian shift in the reader's way of thinking about psychological language while working largely within the idiom of science. By thinking carefully about the evolution of psychological language in human prehistory, I hope to help clarify the sense and importance of Wittgenstein's philosophy of psychology.

Abstract Einstein's acknowledgement of a serious debt to Hume should alert us to central philosophical—in the first instance, epistemological—aspects of his thinking. We see this in his emphasis on difficulties—initially raised by the discovery that light has a finite speed—in establishing the times of distant happenings. But common articulations in everyday language of the claims of Special Relativity, along with criticisms or corrections of our everyday thought and talk, reflect misconstruals of those. These misconstruals are grounded in two, related, philosophical preconceptions: Cartesian individualism and an aspiration to a view of reality that is free from the contingencies of our nature. When we acknowledge the social dimension of our thought and talk about time, and that what is called for is a proper acknowledgement of those contingencies (cf Wittgenstein), the reports of the physicists may appear in a different light.

Abstract This paper reconstructs a trajectory of theoretical influence on the concept of disposition among C.D. Broad, F.P. Ramsey and L. Wittgenstein. The central thesis is that the form of dispositionalism Wittgenstein criticizes in his post‐Tractarian philosophy—particularly in relation to belief, meaning and understanding—corresponds closely to the conception found in Broad's The Mind and Its Place in Nature , and Ramsey's On Truth . The argument unfolds in two parts: the first outlines the methodological framework and reconstructs the Cambridge philosophical context shared by the three thinkers; the second analyses their accounts of dispositions, distinguishing between a logical‐grammatical approach and a metaphysical reification Wittgenstein aims to avoid. The paper concludes that Wittgenstein's critique responds to a specific intellectual climate, demonstrating his engagement with contemporaneous debates and offering insights still relevant to current discussions on human behaviour, against reductive and behaviouristic accounts of human capacities and tendencies.

Abstract In “The Universalizability of Moral Judgments,” Peter Winch argues against the universalizability of first‐person moral judgments. He does so by appealing to a moral dilemma faced by Captain Vere in Melville’s short story Billy Budd . In this paper, I motivate the possibility of the kind of moral dilemma Winch proposes and show what that possibility reveals about morality’s indeterminacy and our contribution as co‐authors of morality’s requirements. Some moral dilemmas arise because agents occupy multiple morally grounded roles—roles that, from the point of view of morality writ large, do not always have a clear priority. Even for a moral theory that rests on one central principle or value, a lot of an agent’s practical life is left underdetermined. Winch’s insight is that persons can discover something important about themselves that bears on what they should do when faced with such a dilemma. By making a judgment about what to do, an agent can create a new moral obligation, and in doing so, develop an aspect of their moral identity.