PEA Soup

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.

Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy Discussion - 16 June

Thanks everyone for the amazing discussion on Jack Woods's expressivism paper! On Monday the 16th of June, we'll be able to begin our first ever discussion of an article published in the Journal of Ethics & Social Philosophy (JESP). This wonderful paper is by Daniel Whiting (Southampton) and it's entitled "Keep Things in Perspective: Reasons, Rationality and the A Priori" (you can access the paper from that link freely). Errol Lord (currently at Franklin & Marshall College, soon to begin at the University of Pennsylvania) has promised to write a critical précis to kick off the discussion. I very much look forward to a discussion of this paper - I hope you can join us!  

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?

A Possibly New Take on Newcomb’s Problem

Consider Newcomb’s Problem: “A psychology professor at your school has a reputation for being brilliant as well as possessed of an enormous fortune she has dedicated to her research. One day you get a request to report to her office at a certain hour. On a table are two boxes. One of them, labeled A, is transparent; in it you can see an enormous pile of $100 bills. The other, labeled B, is opaque. She tells you that there is $10,000 in transparent box A and that in box B there is either $1,000,000 or nothing. She tells you that she is going to give you a choice between:"

Featured Philosopher: Jamie Dreier

I am pleased to introduce this month's featured philosopher: me. Please join me in welcoming me.

[Added Monday morning 18 November by Shoemaker: Because of some random spamming difficulties, all comments will now be moderated.  Please be patient, as comments must now be read and approved prior to being published.]

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

A Worry About Reasons Primitivism

A recently influential idea in the philosophy of normativity is reasons primitivism. Reasons primitivists hold that we can give no account of what it is for some consideration to be a (normative) reason. At most we can say that reasons are considerations that count in favour (or against) some response, or that when there is reason to do something, there is something to be said for doing that thing. In this post (which is intended in the spirit of Dave and Dave’s request for half-baked ideas…) I want to raise a worry about this view.

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)

Call For Abstracts: SLACRR 4

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 three years.

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

Keynote Speaker:
Michael Smith (Princeton)

St. Louis Annual Conference on Reasons and Rationality (SLACRR) provides a forum for new work on practical and theoretical reason, broadly construed. Please submit an abstract of 750-1500 words by December 31, 2012 to SLACRR (at) gmail.com. In writing your abstract, please bear in mind that full papers should suitable for a 30 minute presentation.

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?

For more information, see http://www.umsl.edu/~slacrr/