Electric Agora (archive)

Tag: W.D. Ross

  • philosophy as diplomacy

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ During a conversation with Megan Fritts of Utah State, I suggested that perhaps philosophical disputes should be conducted as negotiations rather than arguments. I’d like to develop this idea a bit more. That philosophy is a primarily argumentative business is, I trust, evident enough that I don’t need to expand…

  • The Underground Marriage

    by Anonymous One has not only a legal, but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that an unjust law is no law at all.  – Martin Luther King, Jr. ___ Hope is a double-edged sword. When I was…

  • Prolegomena for a Pluralist Metaphysics: Philosophy, Science, and “Common Sense”

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ As these prolegomena begin to wind down, I want to step back and speak a bit more generally about the conception of philosophy – and of inquiry more generally — from which they spring. Sellars, of course, in the opening paragraphs of “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” gave…

  • Moral Theory and Moral Life

    by Daniel A. Kaufman ___ A venerable strategy in arguing against theism involves the observation that the world looks exactly as you’d expect it to, if there is no God and not at all like it should if there is one.  I want to say the same thing here about moral life and traditional moral…

  • Course Notes – W.D. Ross, The Right and the Good, Ch. 2.

    by Daniel A. Kaufman http://spot.colorado.edu/~heathwoo/readings/ross.pdf School is back in session, so it’s time, once again, for Course Notes.  This semester I am teaching two sections of Ethics and Contemporary Issues, a course that is part of the General Education curriculum, and Aesthetics, an upper-division offering that runs every Fall. I have made a significant change…