Essays on the Philosophy of T.M. Scanlon

Reasons and Recognition
Essays on the Philosophy of T.M. Scanlon

ed. by R. Jay Wallace, Rahul Kumar,
and Samuel Freeman

(Oxford University Press, October 2011)

480 pages


Description

For close to forty years now T.M. Scanlon has been one of the most important contributors to moral and political philosophy in the Anglo-American world. Through both his writing and his teaching, he has played a central role in shaping the questions with which research in moral and political philosophy now grapples. Reasons and Recognition brings together fourteen new papers on an array of topics from the many areas to which Scanlon has made path-breaking contributions, each of which develops a distinctive and independent position while critically engaging with central themes from Scanlon's own work in the area.

Content [Preview]

I. Reason, Value, and Desire

1. Christine M. Korsgaard - The Activity of Reason [pdf]
2. Samuel Scheffler - Valuing
3. Niko Kolodny - Aims as Reasons [pdf]
4. Michael Smith - Scanlon on Desire and the Explanation of Action

II. Ethical Themes: Contractualism, Promissory Obligation, and Tolerance

5. Pamela Hieronymi - Of Metaethics and Motivation: The Appeal of Contractualism [draft]
6. Rahul Kumar - Contractualism on the Shoal of Aggregation
7. Seana Valentine Shiffrin - Immoral, Conflicting, and Redundant Promises
8. Angela M. Smith - The Trouble with Tolerance

III. Political Themes: Conservatism, Justice, and Public Reason

9. G. A. Cohen - Rescuing Conservatism: A Defence of Existing Value [video]
10. Charles R. Beitz - Global Political Justice and the "Democratic Deficit"
11. Joshua Cohen - Establishment, Exclusion, and Democracy's Public Reason [pdf]
12. Aaron James - The Significance of Distribution [pdf]

IV. Responsibility

13. Gary Watson - The Trouble with Psychopaths
14. Susan Wolf - Blame, Italian Style [pdf]
15. R. Jay Wallace - Dispassionate Opprobrium: On Blame and the Reactive Sentiments [draft]

R. Jay Wallace is Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Rahul Kumar is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Queen's University, Canada. Samuel Freeman is Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania.