2025.05.9 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Crispin Wright, Essays on Relativism: 2001–2021, Oxford University Press, 2023, 272pp., $80.00 (hbk), ISBN 9780192845993.
Reviewed by Derek Ball, University of St Andrews
This volume collects Crispin Wright’s work on relativism. It consists of 10 essays, all previously published (though one, ‘Alethic Pluralism, Deflationism, and Faultless Disagreement’, is revised and extended). The essays cover a wide range of topics: vagueness, matters of taste and inclination, epistemic modality, the open future, knowledge, truth. Many are reactions to what Wright calls ‘New Age Relativism’: the view, defended by John MacFarlane and others, that ‘our actual discourse, in certain regions of thought, displays patterns of which the best—empirically most adequate—semantic theory will make central use of a notion of relative truth’ (228). Wright contrasts New Age relativism with relativism construed as ‘a normative thesis: a thesis about the proper way to think about a certain subject matter and its claims to…
Read the full article which is published on Notre Dame's Philosophical Reviews (external link)
