As If – Idealization and Ideals Paperback – 29 March 2019

Appiah is an elegant writer on impossibly complex issues, and he does not disappoint here. In a world and country desperate for ideals, Appiah gives us tools for thinking about why ideals are necessary even though, at some level, they are empirically false. Ideals function as forms of what he calls "plausible empiricism," which is not so much vested in verifiability as is much empiricism, but rather is about how we think about issues, intelligibility.

This book is short, but sufficient for understanding the most important facts about the American philosophy. With this idea he refers his activity to a pragmatic sense. Appiah considers the role of Vaihinger in a particular sector of research: so the attention of the lector is about the definition of truth, in a sense near to the definition of Aristotile. The new conception of right doesn't avoid the paradoxes and the auto-references, which we can think to be normal for the skeptic philosophy in the ancien Greek polis. Next we pass to consider the context of Ramsey, who follows the model of Kahneman, so that we can value it in relation to the probability theory. Last but not least, we can observe the great importance of Rawls in the construction of the actual logics of American right: the context is partially related to an ideal-typic conception, but we can't forget the importance of game theory.

Terrific, as always, from Appiah.