Russ Shafer-Landau

Russ Shafer-Landau
Born (1963-02-18) February 18, 1963
Alma mater University of Arizona (Ph.D.)
Era 21st-century philosophy
Region Western philosophy
School Analytic
Institutions University of Wisconsin, Madison
Thesis Moral Indeterminacy (1992)
Doctoral advisor Joel Feinberg
Main interests
 moral philosophy
Website https://sites.google.com/site/shaferlandau/home

Russ Shafer-Landau (born 1963) is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Career

Shafer-Landau is a graduate of Brown University and completed his PhD work at the University of Arizona under the supervision of Joel Feinberg.[1] He is the founder and editor of the periodical Oxford Studies in Metaethics.[2] Shafer-Landau returned to UW after a successful stint at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he also served as the Director of the Parr Center for Ethics. Shafer-Landau is the founder and organizer for the annual Madison Metaethics Workshop (also referred to as MadMeta, founded in 2004) which followed him to North Carolina under the name "CHillMeta," before re-assuming its original identity when Shafer-Landau returned to UW. He has been teaching philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from 2002, where he became Chair of the Department. From 1992 to 2002 Shafer-Landau taught at the University of Kansas.

Works

He is a leading defender of a non-naturalistic moral realism, holding that moral statements are not reducible to natural terms. For example, the 'good' cannot be described in terms of pleasures and pains nor the conclusion of any of the natural sciences (physics, biology). This view is set out in his major work Moral Realism: A Defence, which, as one reviewer expressed it, "defends an unorthodox combination of claims, including anti-Humeanism about reasons for action, mind-independent moral realism, moral non-naturalism, moral rationalism, and reliabilist moral epistemology. Shafer-Landau’s book will be useful to any student of philosophy who wants to gain a synoptic view of contemporary metaethics, and also to professionals with a stake in the many ongoing debates to which the book makes valuable contributions."[3]

Shafer-Landau is also the author of two other introductory books, Whatever Happened To Good And Evil? and The Fundamentals of Ethics.[4] Besides editing the annual Oxford Studies in Metaethics, he also has co-edited Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy, an anthology covering many aspects of ethics with the late Joel Feinberg and two Blackwell anthologies, Foundations of Ethics (with Terence Cuneo), and Ethical Theory.

References

  1. ↑ https://sites.google.com/site/shaferlandau/home
  2. ↑ http://ukcatalogue.oup.com/category/academic/series/philosophy/osmet.do
  3. ↑ http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/23768-moral-realism-a-defense/
  4. ↑ Tännsjö, Torbjörn (2009-12-01). From Reasons to Norms: On the Basic Question in Ethics. Springer. pp. 41–. ISBN 978-90-481-3284-3. Retrieved 25 May 2011.


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