Normative Concepts: thinking with them and thinking about them.  This seminar has two purposes: (i) to canvass extent accounts of what is distinctive and important about normative concepts and (ii) to identify -- or, as I am thinking now, develop -- an adequate account.  A big part of the challenge will be to identify what an account needs to do in order to be adequate.  My current view is that there is a surprising amount of useful work to be done when it comes to characterizing these criteria of adequacy and also when it comes to developing a plausible view that satisfies them. Predictably, given the wide role of normative concepts, we'll be looking at theoretical reasoning as well as practical reasoning, at thick concepts and thin, at epistemology no less than ethics.  In the process it may emerge that a single account of normative concepts is unavailable, or that the very idea of a normative concept is wrongheaded.  I am optimistic on both counts but am going in to the seminar not so much with the conviction that the optimism will be vindicated as with confidence that discovering whether, and to what extent, it is, will be important.

First Meeting, September 8:

Part I: Over-view of the problem and initial framework for exploration. (You might look at the second half of my "Evolution and Rational Agency.")
Part II: Hume on Reason, Motivation, and Morality. (Read "Of the influencing motives of thewill" (Book II, Part III, Section III of the Treatise of Human Nature) and "Moral Distinctions not deriv'd from Reason" and "Moral distinctions deriv's from a moral sense" (Book III, Part I, Sections I and II of the Treatise). (You might look at my "Hume's Representation Argument Against Rationalism.")

Part I: The Naturalistic Fallacy and the Open Question Argument (Read: G.E. Moore, "The Subject-Matter of Ethics" from Principia Ethica, which is available on the web HERE and William Frankena's "The Naturalistic Fallacy")
Part II: Noncognitivism, Emotivism, and Prescriptivism (Read: A.J. Ayer, Chapter 6 of Language, Truth, and Logic; C.L. Stevenson, "The Emotive Meaning of Ethical Terms," and R.M. Hare, Chapters 1 and 2 of The Language of Morals. Copies of the Hare are in an envelope in the common room.)

Continue discussion of last week's readings. Add Chapters 1 and 2 of Mackie's Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong. (Copies are available in an envelope in the common room.  People asked for a copy of the overhead concerning the variety of views that count as internalist.  You can find it HERE.  I have also posted a paper of mine that takes up the open question argument in the context of theories of direct reference.  You can find it HERE and you can find my reply to comments on it by Jaegwon Kim and Ernest Sosa HERE.)

Continue discussion of last week's readings.  Add Chapters 1-3 of Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings.

Rescheduled for December 15

Chapters 4-6 of Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings.

Chapters 8-9 of Gibbard's Wise Choices, Apt Feelings.

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