Amia Srinivasan writes:

In The Ethical Project, Philip Kitcher attempts to show that there is adequate room for moral reasons in a causal world. As a philosopher and historian of science, Kitcher is wedded to Naturalism, the doctrine that philosophy should posit nothing that cannot be found in our best science. Like many Naturalists, he is convinced of the power of Darwinian theory to explain not only biological but also cultural development, and wants to draw on it to elucidate morality. But he is also a humanist – he has written in the past about political philosophy, the history of early modern philosophy, and the aesthetics of Wagner and Joyce – and wants to do justice to the texture of our moral lives. His goal is to provide a meta-ethics – an account of the nature of ethical truth – that respects the demands of both Naturalism and humanism.

(LRB 6 December 2012)

Harvard | Hardback 432 pp. |ISBN: 9780674061446