Fred Feldman (Pleasure and the Good Life) and Chris Heathwood (“The Problem of Defective Desires”) point out the following paradox for desire satisfaction theory, which seems to have been first suggested by Richard Kraut. People sometimes desire to be badly off. Desire satisfactionists say that A’s desire […] Read More
Here’s a philosophical problem I’ve been thinking about lately. The problem is that an ethical position I like conflicts with a metaphysical position I like. On the one hand, human infants and adults enjoy full moral status whereas animals have lower moral status. On the […] Read More
After reading this interview in which Rev. John Paris, a bioethicist at Boston College, discusses the Terry Schiavo case, I began to wonder about the absence of philosophers in public discussions of ethical issues. The Schiavo case raises all the issues that are the stock […] Read More
This hiring season has been a busy one for several of our contributing PEA Brains, with four of them moving to new universities, all of which have Ph.D. programs. In alphabetical order . . . . Campbell Brown (grad work done at the Australian National […] Read More
Perhaps everyone is already aware of this, but I just wanted to mention that Harry Frankfurt is going to be on Comedy Central’s The Daily Show tonight (Monday, March 14) to talk about his small but quite entertaining book, On Bullshit. Harry was my dissertation […] Read More
We are very happy to welcome Chris Heathwood as the newest contributor here at PEA Soup. Chris is currently at UMass and has recently accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He specializes in ethics and metaphysics […] Read More
Proponents of intrinsic value have sometimes attempted to argue for its existence via the following sort of regress argument: Something is valuable; but if it is valuable, it must be valuable either as a means to something else that is valuable, or else […] Read More
The 2005 Inland Northwest Philosophy Conference is on Time and Identity. There will be a panel discussion on death featuring Harry Silverstein, Barbara Levenbook and me. I’ll post an update when the program is up.
I’m happy to report what looks to be a terrific conference coming up this Saturday, February 26, at UC Riverside, on the work of Gary Watson (timed in rough relation to the publication of his book Agency and Answerability). Follow this link for more details: […] Read More