PEA Soup

Welcome, Simon Keller!

We are pleased to announce that Simon Keller has accepted our invitation to become a contributor here at PEA Soup.  Simon is presently a Senior Research Fellow at CAPPE at the University of Melbourne and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Boston University, and he is slated to join the Philosophy Program at Victoria University of Wellington as an Associate Professor.  His book, The Limits of Loyalty, has recently come out, and he works on such topics as patriotism, love, and welfare (among others).  It's great to have you aboard, Simon!

Three Cheers for These PEA Brains!

In lieu of the customary "here-are-some-amazing-statistics-about-PEA-Soup" birthday message, we thought it would be better to post a "Yearbook" to share some good things that have happened to some of our fellow PEA brains over this past year.  A lot of good news appears below the fold.  If there is any more good news that should be shared, by all means please add it in the comments section.

Welcome Dale Miller!

We are pleased to announce that Dale Miller has accepted our invitation to be a contributor here at PEA Soup.  Dale is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Co-Director of the Institute for Ethics and Public Affairs at Old Dominion University, and specializes in history of ethics (especially Mill), ethical theory (especially consequentialism), and social-political philosophy.  It's great to have you aboard, Dale!

Happy 3rd Birthday!

Today marks the third anniversary of PEA Soup's burst (okay, limp) onto the blogosphere. We're celebrating with a new look, about which we'll say a bit more below. But first, right up front, we want to thank all of you—our fellow contributors, commentators, and readers—for helping to turn PEA Soup into "the ethics blog." 

We also wanted (without turning this post into a self-congratulatory love fest) to take this opportunity to say a few things about the blog, find out especially how folks have benefited from participating here at PEA Soup, ask for some feedback on the new look, and share the statistics for our three year run.

When we started PEA Soup, the four of us were all working in Southern California, Dave and Doug at CSU Northridge, Josh and Dan at CSU Bakersfield. At the time, there were few multiple-contributor, topic-oriented blogs. Certain Doubts, Experimental Philosophy, The Garden of Forking Paths, Philosophy of Art, and Prosblogion were also just starting up operations, and the few other multiple-contributor blogs that existed were either not topic-oriented or the contributors were usually restricted in some way, typically, to those in the same philosophy department or graduate program. We believed that so long as it remained an ethics-oriented blog, and so long as it encouraged participation from folks in any geographical area, PEA Soup would be able to provide a valuable service to those around the world working in ethics. In these respects, it has been great to see PEA Soup's healthy growth over the last three years, and we hope to continue to open up the conversation, both in terms of our contributors and our subject matter.

We would especially love to hear from all of you about the benefits and successes (e.g. publications, insights) that have resulted from participating in or reading PEA Soup. 

We would also like to hear from everyone about the new look of the blog. Do you prefer this new look, or would you rather we revert to the "traditional" look? This really is a decision that will be based on consensus (assuming there is one), so please let us know what you think, especially those of you who like the new look, since those in favor are usually those who remain silent.

Here are PEA Soup's three-year statistics as of this morning: 

371 Posts

5194 Comments

326 Page views per day (lifetime)

560 Page views per day (2007)

Thanks again to all of you! 

Welcome, Mark Schroeder

The roster continues to grow in quantity and quality.  Over the past two days, we were pleased to announce that Jimmy Lenman and Sally Haslanger have agreed to contribute to PEA Soup, and we are now pleased to announce that Mark Schroeder has also accepted our invitation to join the roster.  Mark is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at USC, specializes in all areas of philosophy related to metaethics,  and has commented regularly on posts here at PEA Soup.  It's great to have you aboard, Mark!

Welcome, Sally Haslanger

We're very pleased to announce the addition of Sally Haslanger to PEA Soup's roster of contributors.  Sally is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT and is affiliated with MIT's Women's Studies Program.  Among her many contributions to the profession, she is an editor of another exciting Web-based forum, the Symposium on Gender, Race, and Philosophy, where readers can find her much-discussed paper on women in the profession.

It's great to have you join, Sally!

Welcome, Jimmy Lenman!

We are pleased to announce that Jimmy Lenman, a regular commentator on PEA Soup, has accepted our invitation to be contributor here at PEA  Soup.  Most of you know that Jimmy is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sheffield, President of the British Society for Ethical Theory, and maintains the useful Bibliography in Metaethics.  Great to have you aboard, Jimmy!

Part II, Expressivism and Logic

Thank you all for helping me, in the previous thread, to clarify what is at stake in being able to provide, for expressivism, a logic based on the preservation of content rather than one based on the (ir)rationality of holding certain combinations of attitudes. In this follow up post, I wanted to give some of the basic ideas of the semantic and logical story for exclamative sentences that I'm trying to make work for expressivism. I can't possibly give all the details of the theory, but I'll try to say most of the important things and then respond to a few of the most serious questions or concerns. Even so, however, I'm afraid this is a rather long post.

Expressivism and Logic

I have started in on a paper in which I show how expressivists can use a certain kind of semantic theory. The semantic theory, which originated with Kirk Ludwig, is based on the story Kirk and I tell here about the semantics for nondeclaratives and, in particular, a semantics for exclamative sentences. So, for example, we provide, in part, a semantics for 'Congratulations!', one that explains what is contributed to more complex sentences like 'If you won the race, congratulations!'. (In short, what exclamatives contribute to the more complex sentence is their sincerity conditions, that is, conditions that must obtain in order to warrant the application of the predicate 'is sincere (relative to a speaker and a time) in English'.) Since most expressivists think ethical sentences work very much like exclamatives, I claim that expressivists can use the theory, with appropriate modifications, of course.  My question is not, in particular, about the theory—I might write something up on that in a future post—but about something more general, namely, what is at stake if expressivists can provide a logic that is based, in the first instance, on sentential content or implication rather than on attitudes.  So…

Welcome, Samantha Brennan!

We are pleased to announce that Samantha Brennan, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Western Ontario, has accepted our invitation to be a contributor here at PEA Soup.  Samantha's research interests are in normative ethics, especially deontological, consquentialist, and feminist ethics.  She has published or edited numerous articles and books in these areas, as well as in the interesting and important area of children's rights.  Welcome, Samantha.  It's great to have you aboard!