Normally when I’m posting reviews from Notre
Dame to the philosophy papers blog, I post the first paragraph as a
kind of blurb. But in this case I think I’m going to have to make an exception.
It’s from David
Sussman’s review of Praise and Blame by Daniel Robinson. The
first paragraph is relatively uneventful, but here is the last paragraph.

Praise and Blame is a strangely unfocussed work
that flits back and forth amongst a wide array of philosophical topics but
fails to sustain any substantive line of argument for very long. Despite all
the ground he covers, Robinson leaves us with conclusions that are either
fairly jejune versions of familiar positions or hopelessly vague if high-minded
gestures. The “moral realism” of the title turns out to be something
of a red herring, as there is no serious discussion anywhere in the book about
the objectivity, rationality, or epistemology of morality so construed. Rather,
such realism seems to be merely an excuse for treating a variety of loosely
related (if interesting) topics together. What results is a farrago that does
not advance the current debate about moral realism and the moral sentiments,
and indeed does not even seem to have caught up with it.

I guess that review won’t be going in
the folio.