Mission PEA Soup is a blog designed to provide a forum for discussing philosophy, ethics, and academia. Its mission is to transcend geographical barriers so that moral philosophers from across the globe can converse in much the way that they would with their nearby colleagues. […] Read More
The Humanities Center at the University of Pittsburgh invites applications for a residential fellow for the academic year 2010-11. For more info, see here: http://www.humcenter.pitt.edu/call-for-applications.php.
There's an excellent new resource for those interested in keeping up with, or contributing to, the wide variety of fascinating work being done in experimental philosophy. It's the Experimental Philosophy Page, and it's set up in wiki format so anyone can edit and update it. […] Read More
A great deal of ink has been spilled attempting to show that contractualism, alternately, can or cannot accommodate “numbers” in a plausible way. Contractualism aspires to provide an attractive and theoretically robust alternative to consequentialism and the unrestricted interpersonal aggregation that it implies (foundationally anyway), […] Read More
This posting is about one fictional philosopher and one real one, and how their theories interact. The real philosopher’s theory has to mis-characterize the fictional philosopher’s theory. The fictional philosopher’s theory also has some problems, but they will not concern me.
Those in New England and the Northeast may want to drop in on the conference that Boston University is holding September 25-26. The topic is Ronald Dworkin's forthcoming book Justice for Hedgehogs. The lineup is power packed: Michael Smith, Shafer-Landau, Scanlon, Sen, David Lyons, Appiah, […] Read More
Walter Sinnott-Armstrong has given us a new argument for consequentialism (“How strong is this obligation? An argument for consequentialism from concomitant variation,” Analysis 69 (2009): 438-442). The datum: other things kept equal, the obligation to keep a promise to take a friend to the airport […] Read More
As summer comes to a close and we get ready to return to the classroom, I’ve been thinking more about the different shapes my colleagues’ summers have taken, about how much we’ve written and how much real holidays we’ve taken. As a philosophy department chair, one of my responsibilities is chairing the department’s annual performance evaluation committee and each year I’m struck anew by how hard some of my colleagues work. I feel humbled by how much very high quality work some colleagues publish.
Coming to exist is always a harm. Or so argues David Benatar in his provocative book, Better Never to Have Been.A central pillar of Benatar's defense of this offputting 'anti-natalist' thesis is what he calls the asymmetry argument (BNHB, p. 30):Pleasure benefits us and pain […] Read More