“Humeanism and the Categorical Character of Epistemic Normativity”
Talk by Dr. Neil Mehta, Yale NUS College
Monday April 17th |3:30 – 5:30 pm | Wyatt 305
The talk brings together issues in philosophy of mind, meta-ethics, and epistemology. Refreshments will be served. All are welcome!
Abstract: According to the Humean view, any subject’s having a foundational practical reason to φ is fully grounded in her having desires or desire-regulating systems of a certain kind. According to the unity view, foundational reasons form a genuine kind that subsumes both foundational practical reasons and foundational epistemic reasons. And according to the epistemic categoricity view, no subject’s having a foundational epistemic reason to φ is ever grounded even partly in her having desires or desire-regulating systems of any kind. I find all of these claims very attractive; the rub is that they appear to be jointly incompatible. This paper, however, is a possibility proof to the contrary: I construct a theory, the telic theory, that accommodates them all.
PUGET SOUND PHILOSOPHY 