PEA Soup

The Good vs. The Desirable

I was just reading the bit of Gibbard's Thinking How to Live where he talks extensively about the good and the desirable—specifically, about its being a conceptual truth that they are one in the same. I know that this is a common line people take, and I'm curious how many of you agree with it, because I'm not entirely convinced.

A New Blog: The Venue Poll

Thanks to everyone who offered feedback on my new blog ideas. After considering the comments, I have decided to forge ahead with one of the projects: The Venue Poll. This will be a blog dedicated to helping Philosophers get feedback on the best potential venues for their work. The blog is now live, though publication of abstracts will be delayed a week or two to make time for ironing out any kinks and getting a stockpile of abstracts from people. If you are interested in submitting, commenting, offering further feedback on the blog's format, or just seeing what this is all about, please head over to:

http://thevenuepoll.blogspot.com

I hope others will be as excited about this project as I am.

Feedback on Two (Potential) New Blogs

I'm thinking of starting two new blogs. Rather than just jumping in and creating them, I thought I would turn to the folks here at PEA Soup to get some feedback. I am interested, first, in feedback on whether these blogs are good ideas. This includes both the question of whether there are independent reasons to (not) have such blogs as well as the question of whether people would actually read and/or contribute to these blogs (i.e., whether I would be wasting my time creating them). Assuming one or both of these blogs is a good idea, I'm also looking for more specific feedback concerning how they should be set up.

Metaethics Flowchart

I am teaching a graduate-level metaethics survey course this semester and would like to give my students a flowchart to help them keep track of the field. I've seen a couple around but none were quite what I was looking for. So I'm making my own. I'm posting it here in the hopes that (selfishly) I get feedback and (somewhat less selfishly) others will be able to make use of it. The current draft is here:

http://filebox.vt.edu/users/faraci/metaethics.pdf

Expressivism vs. Nihilism

Three and a half years ago I had the pleasure of doing a guest post here on PEA Soup. I'm still working on the same stuff, so I thought I'd start my non-guest posting with an update. There's quite a few things going on in the paper, so I'll just try to hit the highlights here in the hopes that it generates discussion. (I'll also be talking about this stuff at RoME in August, for those of you who will be there.)

I think that expressivism is incompatible with the possibility of expressing certain kinds of negated normative judgements that further express nihilism or nihilistic doubt. And I think that because nihilism is a view that we must at least be able to entertain, this is a serious problem for expressivism.