The Critical Project Today

As befits its title and heft, The Domain of Reasons is a magisterial work. John Skorupski presents nothing less than a systematic account of the normative realm as a whole, which he interprets in terms of reasons to believe, to do, and to feel. Moreover, he situates his account within an illuminating discussion of developments in thinking about normativity from Kant’s ‘‘Critical turn’’ onward—connecting his view dialectically not only with Kant, but with a series of important postKantian thinkers, including Hegel, the Intuitionists, the Logical Positivists, and the later Carnap and Wittgenstein. In so doing Skorupski makes a number of novel and important contributions to our understanding of these thinkers, and constructs a compelling philosophical narrative that leads to his own view, the ‘‘Normative view’’, a form of ‘‘irrealist cognitivism’’. Skorupski takes from Kant’s Critical project the idea of arguing that: (i) however opposed they might seem, skepticism and traditional responses to skepticism share certain assumptions; (ii) these assumptions are part of the problem, not of the solution, in systematic philosophy; and (iii) they can and should be rejected—opening up the way for new and more credible ways of thinking about reality and establishing the possibility of knowledge and morality. The Domain of Reasons does not shrink from any of these tasks. The key defective assumption uniting skeptics and their adversaries, in Skorupski’s view, is ‘‘global realism’’, the conjunction of two theses: