Sublime

adding further premises can alter the conclusion.

In both cases I have argued that we are confronted with what is intelligible only as the end-product of a process of historical change; in both cases I have confronted theoretical positions whose protagonists claim that what I take to be the historically produced characteristics of what is specifically modern are in fact the timelessly necessary

Brandom’s complex alternative is that our descriptions constitute a system of socially constituted rational commitments, and that only linguistic rules, socially articulated and enforced, are capable of giving our words any meaning at all. Saying something meaningful requires making explicit what is already implicit in our use of concepts, rather

the faith of a man who has considered the very real possibility that chaos and bloodshed are simply all there is.

attempted in his positive arguments to base morality on human nature, each in his negative arguments moved toward a more and more unrestricted version of the claim that no valid argument can move from entirely factual premises to any moral or evaluative conclusion—

What opened the new heaven was Moore’s quiet but apocalyptic proclamation in 1903 that after many centuries he had at last solved the problems of ethics by being the first philosopher to attend with sufficient care to the precise nature of the questions which it is the task of ethics to answer. What Moore believed that he had discovered by

intentions lead to mental actions, and repeated mental actions become mental habits.

valid.

What Sidgwick portrays as failure Moore takes to be an enlightening and liberating discovery. And Moore’s readers, for whom, as I noticed earlier, the enlightenment and the liberation were paramount, saw themselves as rescued thereby from Sidgwick and any other utilitarianism as decisively as from Christianity. What they did not see of course was