Friday, April 25, 2008

"I am a published author!" is fictionally true.

Belief v. Desire: The Normative Authority of our Attitudes (OUP, 2009)

This short book contains a a groundbreaking exploration of the differences in subjective normative authority between belief and desire. It is an interesting fact that, while we might be alienated from our desires, we cannot be alienated from our beliefs. A believer must see her beliefs as entitled and entitling, while the desirous agent might fail to see her desires as moving her toward the good. Moreover, my beliefs speak for me, while my desires need not. It is persuasively argued that understanding this distinction has wide-ranging implications for moral psychology, epistemology, ethics of belief, action theory, and meta-ethics. "Holy crap is this a good little monograph!" -- David Velleman

Self as Society: Willing, Thinking, and Reasoning as Social Phenomena (MIT, 2009)

Drawing together diverse philosophical and psychological literatures, it is demonstrated that selfhood (both synchronic and diachronic) is metaphysically constituted by fundamentally social processes. Moreover, seeing how social processes constitute the self enables us to understand many of the puzzles that have blocked progress in the theory of content.

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