Dear all, Just a reminder that the final meeting of the Serious Metaphysics Group for the year is on tomorrow. Annika Boeddeling will be speaking on 'Between Scylla and Charybdis: what happens when you relax? - Scanlon's domain-specific account of existence' (abstract below). We're meeting at the earlier than usual time of 11:30 - 1:00, so that it's possible to go to Stephen Yablo's talk in the afternoon. We'll also be in a different room: the graduate common room.
Hope to see you there, Georgie Between Scylla and Charybdis: what happens when you relax? - Scanlon's domain-specific account of existence In his most recent book “Being Realistic About Reasons” (2014) Scanlon develops a domain-specific account of what it takes for normative objects to exist: the existence of normative objects is not determined by some general criterion that holds across all domains, but by standards internal to the normative domain itself. This proposal is part of what has become known as relaxed realism, a position that enjoys increasing popularity in the recent metaethical debate. It is defended among others by Derek Parfit, Ronald Dworkin and Matthew Kramer. In many ways, relaxed realists endorse the same metaethical claims as traditional non-natural realists. However, and as opposed to traditional positions, they seek to make these metaethical claims without importing any metaphysical baggage that leads to traditional metaphysical and epistemological worries; they want to be “metaphysically light”. In this talk, I want to ask: How – if at all – can an “anti-metaphysical” position such as Scanlon’s be distinguished from more traditional versions of non-natural normative realism? In particular, I want to suggest that this might prove difficult without Scanlon’s view collapsing into some non-cognitivist position about the normative. -- Georgie Statham PhD Candidate Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
