Dear All, Next Tuesday (27th November) Chris Heathwood, from the University of Colorado at Boulder, will give a talk entitled `Irreducibly Normative Properties'.
The meeting will start at 5.15pm and will be held in the Fisher Building of St. John's College in either the Boys Smith Room, the Dirac Room, or the Castlereagh Room. As usual, the speaker will present for no longer than 45 minutes, followed by a discussion until 7.00pm. If you would like to join Chris for dinner after the talk, then please let me know by noon on Tuesday. The abstract is as follows: Metaethical non-naturalists maintain that normative or evaluative properties cannot be reduced to, or otherwise explained in terms of, natural properties. They thus have difficulty explaining what these irreducibly normative properties are supposed to be, other than by saying what they are not (e.g., they are not identical to any natural property, they are not causally efficacious, they are not empirically observable, etc.). I offer a partial, positive characterization of irreducibly normative properties in naturalistic terms. At a first pass, it is this: that to attribute a normative or evaluative property to something is necessarily to commend or condemn that thing, due to the nature of the property. The view characterizes normativity in terms of the natural phenomenon of performing certain familiar speech acts. Regards, Daniel Brigham Secretary of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge _____________________________________________________ Sent by the CamPhilEvents mailing list. To unsubscribe or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents Posts are archived here: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive
