I think Heath’s previous excellent post on the problems of expressivism brings up another problem – a version of the Frege-Geach problem, or a new aspect of it, that I hadn’t thought about. I’m sure someone has already spotted this and that there is an […] Read More
As regular readers of this blog will no doubt have noticed, I have a continuing fascination with expressivism. It both attracts and repels me, much like a David Lynch movie. I’ve been trying to figure out what it is, exactly, that I don’t like. Consider, […] Read More
Something has always bothered me about Parfit’s treatment of Scanlon’s contractualism both in his "Justifiability to Each Other" and in the new Climbing the Mountain. Finally after years of being troubled by this I think I’m starting to be able to put my finger on […] Read More
I’m a huge fan of sixties and seventies soul. I also love many of these songs for their lyrics. Some of them offer philosophical insights in a style that few philosophers are able to even come close. Here’s a great example from Stevie Wonder.
How much does it cost a department to interview job candidates at the Eastern APA? And is the information about the job candidates that one acquires worth that money?
In “Contractualism and Utilitarianism” Scanlon introduces what he calls “philosophical utilitarianism” (PU). PU is the view that “the only fundamental moral facts are facts about individual well-being.” PU is supposed to be answering a different question from the one answered by more familiar versions of utilitarianism. It is […] Read More
Winter is a good time for a bit of navel-gazing. Blogging is an interesting medium of philosophical discourse; its virtues and vices, it seems to me at any rate, are considerably different from those of the more standard, tenure-relevant sorts of philosophical work. Posts and […] Read More
Inspired by the Philosophy Job Market Wiki, I decided to start a wiki that will allow authors, editors, and referees to share information on philosophy journals: their editorial practices, response times, backlogs on publishing, policies on providing comments to authors, etc. There is, I think, […] Read More
Having just taught Aristotle’s ethics, I want to discuss an element of his ethical theory that I find plausible but lack a satisfactory account of why it’s plausible: In contrast to the Socratic/Platonic tradition, which held that one must know the good in order to […] Read More