Background
Edwards, Paul was born on September 2, 1923 in Vienna, Austria.
Analytic philosopher infs: Ethics naturalism
Edwards, Paul was born on September 2, 1923 in Vienna, Austria.
University of Melbourne and Columbia University.
University of Melbourne. 1945-1947; New York University. 1949-1966; Brooklyn College of the City University of New York, from 1966.
In the area of ethics Edwards developed a position which ‘combines features of objective naturalism with features of emotive theories’. Defending his version of naturalism/emotivism against intuitionism and all other forms of nonnaturalism, he finds the latter to have but one Purpose, namely, ‘to help support the morality of self-denial and sin’. And he pleads guilty to undermining the moralities of the fuddy-duddies and the sour-pusses’. In the Introduction to his great Encyclopedia Edwards observed that an unavoidable, but nonpolemical, bias towards ‘the empirical and analytic tradition of Anglo-Saxon philosophy’ governed the space allotments and selected topics °f the text. An absence of neutrality is character- >stic of all his work. In his Foreword to still another work, he listed his religion as atheism, asserting that 'all the metaphysical claims of 'raditional religions are untenable’ and that 'the decline of religion will be of incalculable benefit to Ihe human race’ The Encyclopedia of Unbelief, v°i- 1 (1985), p. xiii). Consistent with this attitude finds many of the key terms of religious Ihinkers meaningless on analytic grounds. Religious existentialists confuse genetic with logical questions: ‘there is something very confused in Buber’s notion that God can be "addressed" but n°t "expressed". Heidegger's diverse statements on death and nonbeing play a ‘perYerse game’ with the word ‘possibility’. Although his editorial decisions in the Encyclopedia were, indeed, nonpolemical the same is not true of his views of religion. Echoing Hume's statement about the ‘religious principles’ which have prevailed in the world, Edwards writes: ‘The sooner these sick dreams are eliminated from the human scene, the better’.