In another thread, A.N. Prior’s attempted refutation of the is/ought gap came up. Here’s one of Prior’s examples: a. Tea-drinking is common in England.b. Therefore, tea-drinking is common in England, or all New Zealanders ought to be shot. (a) entails (b), (a) is descriptive, and […] Read More
I’ve been struggling with the question, What feature must a requirement exhibit in order to qualify as a categorical imperative?
There will be a conference on practical reason in Bowling Green April 7-9. Featured speakers are: Michael Bratman, Stephen Darwall, James Dreier, Elijah Millgram, Peter Railton, Joseph Raz, Michael Smith, and Gary Watson. For details check here: http://www.bgsu.edu/departments/phil/reasonconf/schedule.htm
Studies in the History of Ethics, a web-based, peer-reviewed journal dedicated to publishing high quality research and reviews in the history of ethics, announces a special call for papers for a symposium to be published in summer 2006. […] Read More
Robert N. Johnson has kindly accepted our invitation to become the latest contributor to PEA Soup. Robert is an Associate Professor at the University of Missouri. He has for sometime been a regular commentator here at PEA Soup. And we’re very glad to have him […] Read More
I really liked BEARS, though it seems to be extinct now. Uriah and Josh contributed a few juicy PEARs some weeks ago. I like this idea and think we should do more Pea-Soup Electronic Article Reviews. William Alston’s essay, "Moral Attitudes and Moral Judgments" (Nous […] Read More
A useful technique in thinking about a philosophical issue is to try to identify what we "pre-theoretically" believe about the subject at hand and see if any theory can account for these beliefs. If no theory can, then among our options are to discard one […] Read More
For those of you who haven’t heard yet, Sir Peter Strawson died on Monday. He was 86. Relative to the fields I work in these days (free will and agency generally), I can’t think of a more masterful philosophical essay than "Freedom and Resentment." Here […] Read More
According to Ethical Response-Dependent Realism (ERDR), moral properties are response-dependent: for something to instantiate a moral property is for it to be disposed to elicit the right kind of response in the right kind of respondent. Most mornings I like ERDR. I like it mostly […] Read More