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116Norms and Necessity, by Amie Thomasson (review)Mind 133 (529): 267-276. 2024.Imagine you’re teaching someone how to play chess. You might start by saying ‘White must move first’, where the word ‘must’ is used to convey a rule. You would
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68What is This Thing Called Metaethics?Routledge. 2017.Are moral standards relative to cultures? Are there any moral facts? What is goodness? If there are moral facts how do we learn about them?_ _These are all questions in metaethics, the branch of ethics that investigates the status of morality, the nature of ethical facts, and the meaning of ethical statements. To the uninitiated it can appear abstract and far removed from its two more concrete cousins, ethical theory and applied ethics, yet it is one of the fastest-growing and most exciting area…Read more
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68Philosophy for Everyone: second editionRoutledge. 2016.Philosophy for Everyone begins by explaining what philosophy is before exploring the questions and issues at the foundation of this important subject. Key topics in this new edition and their areas of focus include: Moral philosophy – the nature of our moral judgments and reactions, whether they aim at some objective moral truth, or are mere personal or cultural preferences; and the possibility of moral responsibility given the sorts of things that cause behavior; Political philosophy – fundamen…Read more
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66Deontic ModalsRoutledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2015.Encyclopedia article on deontic modals
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59EmotivismIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.This is a brief overview of the view in metaethics called Emotivism.
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51Performance Normativity and Here-and-Now Doxastic AgencySynthese (12): 1-9. 2017.Sosa famously argues that epistemic normativity is a species of “performance normativity,” comparing beliefs to archery shots. However, philosophers have traditionally conceived of beliefs as states, which means that they are not dynamic or telic like performances. A natural response to this tension is to argue that belief formation rather than belief itself is the proper target of epistemic normativity. This response is rejected here on grounds of the way it obscures the “here and now” exercise…Read more
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51Speaking and Listening to Acts of Political DissentIn Casey Johnson (ed.), Voicing Dissent, . pp. 164-81. 2018.In the past few years, the United States has seen violent street protests in response to police killing unarmed people of color, angry protests by university students concerned about the racist legacy of their institutions, and verbally disruptive protests inside rallies of the (then) Republican nominee for president, Donald Trump. Some of these acts of protest have been clearly legal, protected by the First Amendment of the United States Constitution; others, by contrast, have not, but may neve…Read more
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47Review of William P. Alston's Beyond Justification (review)International Journal of Philosophical Studies 15 (2). 2007.
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41What Is a Theory of Normative Concepts For?Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 86 63-85. 2019.This paper compares and contrasts two recent approaches to the theory of normative concepts with each other and with more traditional theories in metaethics, in order to highlight several different projects one could be engaged in when developing a theory of normative concepts. The two accounts derive from Millgram, The Great Endarkenment and Chrisman The Meaning of ‘Ought’. These accounts share in rejecting traditional attempts to explain what ‘ought’ is about or expresses. Instead these accoun…Read more
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39Performance normativity and here-and-now doxastic agencySynthese 197 (12): 5137-5145. 2017.Sosa famously argues that epistemic normativity is a species of “performance normativity,” comparing beliefs to archery shots. However, philosophers have traditionally conceived of beliefs as states, which means that they are not dynamic or telic like performances. A natural response to this tension is to argue that belief formation rather than belief itself is the proper target of epistemic normativity. This response is rejected here on grounds of the way it obscures the “here and now” exercise…Read more
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28Deontic Modality (edited book)Oxford University Press. 2016.An extraordinary amount of recent work by philosophers of language, meta-ethicists, and semanticists has focused on the meaning and function of language expressing concepts having to do with what is allowed, forbidden, required, or obligatory, in view of the requirements of morality, the law, one's preferences or goals, or what an authority has commanded: in short, deontic modality. This volume presents new work on the much-discussed topic of deontic modality by leading figures in the philosophy…Read more
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27Philosophy for EveryoneRoutledge. 2013.Philosophy for Everyone begins by explaining what philosophy is before exploring the questions and issues at the foundation of this important subject.Key topics and their areas of focus include:Epistemology - what our knowledge of the world and ourselves consists in, and how we come to have it;Philosophy of Science - foundational conceptual issues in scientific research and practice;Philosophy of Mind - what it means for something to have a mind, and how minds should be understood and explained;…Read more
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17On the Meaning of “Ought” 1Oxford Studies in Metaethics 7. 2012.Discussions about the meaning of the word “ought” are pulled in two apparently competing directions. First, in ethical theory this word is used in the paradigmatic statement of ethical principles and conclusions about what some agent is obligated to do. This leads some ethical theorists to claim that the word “ought” describes a real relation, roughly, of being obligated to or expresses some non-cognitive attitude toward agents acting in certain ways. Second, in theoretical linguistics this word…Read more
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12The Aim of Belief and the Goal of Truth: Reflections on RosenbergIn Martin Grajner & Pedro Schmechtig (eds.), Epistemic Reasons, Norms and Goals, De Gruyter. pp. 357-382. 2016.
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7Review of Confusion of Tongues: A Theory of Normative Language (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews. 2014.Review of Stephen Finlay's book _Confusion of Tongues_.
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6Ethical ExpressivismIn Christian Miller (ed.), Continuum Companion to Ethics, Continuum. pp. 29. 2011.This is an advanced overview of ethical expressivism, which discuss some of the history of the research program and recent developments in the work of Michael Ridge and Mark Schroeder.
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1Believing as We Ought and the Democratic Route to KnowledgeIn Sebastian Schmidt & Gerhard Ernst (eds.), The Ethics of Belief and Beyond: Understanding Mental Normativity, Routledge. pp. 47-70. 2020.In the attempt to understand the norms governing believers, epistemologists have tended to focus on individual belief as the primary object of epistemic evaluation. However, norm governance is often assumed to concern, at base, things we can do as a free exercise or manifestation of our agency. Yet believing is not plausibly conceived as something we freely do but rather as a state we are in, usually as the mostly automatic or involuntary result of cognitively processes shaped by nature, bias, a…Read more
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University of EdinburghRegular Faculty
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