PEA Soup

SLACRR 2016 Program

Registering for the St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality is free and easy: http://www.umsl.edu/~slacrr/registration.html

 

SLACRR 2016 Program

All talks are in the Moonrise Hotel. 

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SLACRR 2016: Call for abstracts

SLACRR: May 22-24, 2016 

Keynote Speaker: 
Paul Boghossian (NYU)

St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality provides a forum for new work on practical and theoretical reason, broadly construed. Please submit an anonymized abstract of 750-1500 words by January 15, 2016 to [email protected]. In writing your abstract, please bear in mind that full papers should be suitable for a 30 minute presentation. Please attach your abstract as a pdf file, the name of which should be based upon the title of your abstract.  (In other words, don't name your file FILE.pdf or ABSTRACT.pdf)

What to Submit

SLACRR includes papers in ethics, epistemology, and other areas of philosophy that deal with reasons, reasoning, or rationality. For instance, we would be interested in papers exploring such questions as:

• What is the relation between reasons for actions and reasons for beliefs?
• What are the sources of our reasons for belief?
• How are features of one's psychology relevant to reasons? 
• What is the relation between reasons and what we ought to do or believe?
• What is the relation between reasons and value?
• Are the requirements of practical and theoretical rationality normative? 
• What is the relation between individual rationality and collective rationality?
• Are actions or beliefs themselves structured by reasons?

Of course, this is just a small sample of questions. Further questions can also be directed to Eric Wiland, Julia Staffel, Kathryn Lindeman, or to [email protected]

 

Conference/CFP: Practical Reason and Metaethics

The Department of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska – Lincoln is hosting a conference on Practical Reason and Metaethics to be held April 22-23, 2016.  The invited speakers on the conference program are:

• Michael Bratman  (Stanford)

• Stephen Darwall  (Yale)

• Sarah McGrath  (Princeton)

• Sigrún Svavarsdóttir  (Tufts)

Call for Papers: Four additional papers will be selected though an anonymous review of submissions.  For each paper selected, the conference will contribute up to $800 to cover the travel and accommodations of the authors. Submissions are due December 1, 2015. More info below the fold.

Regret

Consider the question “Can regret be appropriate even apart from any belief that one’s choice was misguided or irrational if a monistic theory of the good is true?”  According to the relevant notion of regret, regretting is to be understood, roughly, as mourning the loss of a forgone good.  This notion of regret leaves room for the possibility that there may be cases of rational regret that do not involve the agent seeing her prior choice as in some way misguided.  It is commonly held that this can easily occur when there is a plurality of distinct kinds of goods at stake.  More controversial is the suggestion (which can be found in Hurka’s work) that this can also easily occur when there is only one distinct kind of good at stake.  According to Hurka (“Monism, Pluralism, and Rational Regret”), goods with different “intrinsic properties” can be distinct “in the way that matters for rational regret” without being goods of distinct kinds, and so monistic theories of the good can accommodate “rational regret” as well as pluralistic theories.  But it might be, and indeed has been, argued (by, in particular, Stocker (Plural and Conflicting Values)) that, insofar as different intrinsic properties can be distinct in the way that matters for rational regret, we can think of the different properties as tied to different values, and so we do not have a case of rational ‘monistic’ regret.  And here we seem to reach a stalemate grounded in what seems to be something like a terminological issue, namely whether to count a theory of the good that takes say, pleasure, as the only good as monistic, if it also allows for distinct kinds of pleasure that make room for rational regret.  I am trying to develop a position that gets beyond this stalemate, but am now wondering whether my characterization of stalemate seems fair or if there is a better interpretation of the dynamic of the debate that makes the dispute seem more substantial.  

 

Call for Abstracts: SLACRR 6

Call for Abstracts: SLACRR 6

I'm pleased to announce a call for abstracts for the next St. Louis Conference on Reasons and Rationality, sponsored by UMSL, Washington University, and Saint Louis University. Many PEA Soupers have participated the past five years.

May 17 – 19, 2015

Keynote Speaker:

Pamela Hieronymi (UCLA)

JESP Discussions at PEA Soup: Daniel Whiting's "Keep Things in Perspective: Reasons, Rationality and the A Priori" with a Critical Précis from Errol Lord

My apologies for the slight delay - we thought it would be nice to give some extra time for Nomy Arpaly's wonderful post about moral concerns and praiseworthiness (and I hope that the discussion of that post will still continue). In any case, I'm delighted that we can now start our first Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy discussion. It will be on Daniel Whiting's (Southampton) brilliant paper "Keep Things in Perspective: Reasons, Rationality and the a Priori". To kick things off, here's Errol Lord's (Franklin & Marshall College/University of Pennsylvania) equally helpful critical intro to Daniel's paper.

SLACRR 2014 Program

Below is the program for the next SLACRR.  You can learn more and register at the website.  

I hope to see you in St. Louis this May!

The Self-Torturer and Instrumental Rationality

Warren Quinn’s puzzle of the self-torturer is supposed to show that cyclic preferences can be rational, and that, in cases where they are, rationality can require resoluteness so that the agent does not end up with an alternative that is worse than the one with which s/he started. 

As Quinn makes explicit, his concern is with instrumental rationality.  It is thus natural to interpret Quinn’s use of “worse” as “worse, relative to the agent’s preferences.”  But how is “X is worse than Y, relative to the agent’s preferences” to be understood when X and Y are part of a preference cycle?

Call for Abstracts: SLACRR 5

I'm pleased to announce a call for abstracts for the next St. Louis Conference on Reasons and Rationality, sponsored by UMSL and Washington University. Many PEA Soupers have participated the past four years.

May 18 – 20, 2014
Moonrise Hotel in St Louis, MO

Keynote Speaker:
John Broome (Oxford), author of Rationality Through Reasoning

No Apocalypse - Final CFA for SLACRR 4

This is the final call for abstracts for the next St. Louis Conference on Reasons and Rationality, sponsored by UMSL and Washington University. Many PEA Soupers have participated the past three years.

May 19 – 21, 2013
Moonrise Hotel in St Louis, MO

Keynote Speaker:
Michael Smith (Princeton)