New Essays on Normative Realism

It’s difficult to explain the point of normative judgments--judgments like ＂You ought to donate to charity,＂ or ＂You ought to believe that smoking is bad for you, given the evidence＂--without assuming that such judgments express objective truths. And yet philosophers have always been puzzled by such a ＂realism＂ about the normative, for an array of conceptual, epistemological, and metaphysical reasons.

This book gathers together a collection of essays on this classic philosophical problem, authored by a mix of senior and junior contributors. Taken together, they illustrate the great progress that has been made on these fundamental but thorny issues. They also introduce some new puzzles about normative realism which had not been previously appreciated. The topics covered include the objectivity, epistemology, and metaphysics of normative judgments; the possibility of alternative normative conceptual schemes; and the way in which normative issues arise in such disparate areas as arithmetic and aesthetics. The volume opens with a substantial Introduction by the editors that provides a contemporary overview of the landscape of issues facing a realism about the normative and situates the authors’ contributions within it.

Paul Boghossian, Silver Professor of Philosophy, New York University, Christopher Peacocke, Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy and Chair, Department of Philosophy, Columbia University

Paul Boghossian is Silver Professor of Philosophy at New York University. He was previously Associate Professor at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, Visiting Professor at Princeton, and Distinguished Research Professor at the University of Birmingham. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has written and lectured on a wide range of issues in epistemology, metaphysics, the theory of meaning and concepts, the nature of rules, self-knowledge, color, the aesthetics of music, and the concept of genocide.

Christopher Peacocke taught for many years in London and Oxford, eventually as Waynflete Professor of Metaphysical Philosophy at Magdalen College, Oxford, before moving to New York University in 2000. He has been at Columbia University since 2004, where he is currently the Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He has delivered the Whitehead Lectures at Harvard, the Kant Lectures at Stanford, the Evans Lecture at Oxford, and the Nicod Lectures in the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris.