Lights! Camera! Being! by Simon Blackburn
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Why did I know he was English, before I looked him up? Because, I recognized ye olde heart of tin for anything smacking of passion. What is it with the English?
Here is a short list of books by Blackburn:
Being Good
Essays in Quasi-Realism
Lust
The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy
Ruling Passions
Spreading the Word
Think
Truth
I was trying to remember who his writing reminded me of, and although the style and content (what else is there?) are different, the sensibility seems very similar. I was reminded of E.H. Gombrich's loathing for anything smacking of Hegel. Here is a quote of one review of Ruling Passions:
Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling and original philosophy of human motivation and morality. Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is our ethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers to such questions in an exploration of the nature of moral emotions and the structures of human motivation. He develops a naturalistic ethics, which integrates our understanding of ethics with the rest of our understanding of the world we live in. His theory does not debunk the ethical by reducing it to the non-ethical, and it banishes the spectres of scepticism and relativism that have haunted recent moral philosophy. Ruling Passions reveals how ethics can maintain its authority even though it is rooted in the very emotions and motivations that it exists to control.
(from http://www.frontlist.com/detail/0198247850)
Chuck Grimes