As many of you know, Michael Kelly, the executive director of the American Philosophical Association, recently resigned his position. This is just the latest evidence that the APA, the principal organization of American philosophers, is in crisis: The immediate precursor of Kelly’s resignation appears to […] Read More
Brian Weatherson, at Thoughts, Arguments, and Rants, has a recent post that may be of interest to PEA-Soupers. Weatherson takes issue with a test, proposed by David Chalmers, for determining when a philosophical dispute is merely terminological. Interestingly, Weatherson suggests an ethical counterexample to the […] Read More
This is my Left2Right wanna-be post. Many evangelical Christians recently advocated various state measures that would have prolonged the life of Terri Schiavo. I doubt that they should have.
As a number of philosophers (e.g., Nussbaum and Elster) have noted, what desires we actually have can depend on what we perceive our options to be. So, for instance, I don’t sit around desiring to fly, because I don’t see this as an available option. […] Read More
All of us here at Pea Soup are very happy to welcome Kris McDaniel as our newest contributor. Kris is currently an assistant professor at Syracuse University. He works primarily in metaphysics but has a number of related interests in ethics. He is the author […] Read More
One of our readers has suggested that one of us post something on last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine piece on stem cells and animals. It seems that scientists have now been injecting human stem cells into some animals to figure out the ways in […] Read More
A quick alert to those who haven’t already seen it over at Fake Barn Country (or elsewhere): there’s a new ethics journal, the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy. The first issue contains articles by Joseph Raz, Gideon Jaffe, and John Brunero. Here’s the first […] Read More
So here is an idea that seems potentially fun. Some people explain their favorite objection to consequentialism (or at any rate an objection they think worth taking seriously) and then others (or I suppose the same person) attempt to explain why they think the objection […] Read More
Recently I gave some lectures on Kant’s moral philosophy in my introductory ethics class. After explaining the “first formulation” of the Categorical Imperative — act only according that maxim which you can will to be a universal law — and working through a few toy […] Read More