I have begun work with a working title of Norms, Natures and God, which should be a book on how positing Aristotelian natures solves problems in ethics (normative and meta), epistemology, semantics, metaphysics and mind, but also how, especially after Darwin, to be an intellectually satisfied Aristotelian one must be a theist. The central ideas for this were in my Wilde Lectures.
There is a github repository for the project with a PDF that will slowly grow (as of this post, it only has a table of contents) as I write. I welcome comments: the best way to submit them is to click on "Issues" and just open a bug report. :-)
The repository will disappear once the text is ready for submission to a publisher.
Hello Dr. Pruss, the announcement of this upcoming book is astounding. I just have one quick question concerning the content that will be covered by 'Chapter 2: Ethics' - Section 1: 'Mersenne Problems.' Since the book is an extension of the thoughts presented from your 2019 Wilde Lectures, is there any available document or video recording of the lecture which covers this section? The Baylor Philosophy News page states that you presented "the argument from apparently arbitrary boundaries and constants in physics, ethics, semantics, and epistemology" and that "[the argument] goes back to the French polymath Marin Mersenne in the 17th century . . . . " The section 'Mersenne Problems' under a chapter concerning ethics struck me as odd, but perhaps the lecture notes could elaborate, thank you!
ReplyDeleteThey were videotaped, but I haven't heard back from my host about availability.
ReplyDeleteCan you give us a brief summary/preview of the argument of why "after Darwin, to be an intellectually satisfied Aristotelian one must be a theist"?
ReplyDeleteThe book seems super interesting. Still waiting for the Oxford lectures, I hope they'll become available eventually.
By the way, another book project you might consider is a full treatment of the "gap problem", i.e. showing that a necessary concrete being is God, or that theism makes better sense of the existence of a necessary concrete being. It would be a really great addition to philosophy of religion, and in particular it would serve as a perfect "sequel" to your "Necessary Existence" book with Rasmussen. That is, once we have established that a necessary concrete being exists, let's see what implications this might have, and what the nature of such a being would be.
So does this book provide a sort of moral argument for theism, among other things?
ReplyDeleteRed: Yes, I think so.
ReplyDeleteExtremely impressed with the first few chapters. Do you have an estimated date of publication? Also, is there a newer version of the draft?
ReplyDeleteI have a computer science paper to finish and submit hopefully this week, and then a sexual ethics paper to finish this month, and then I will get back to reading and revising the draft.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the update! I'm curious to know your thoughts on the attributive vs predicative goodness debate. (Even Aristotle posits absolute goodness to explain the superiority of rational ends to bodily ends). It seems to me that a good metaethical theory will acknowledge both kinds of goodness (kind-relative and absolute). The challenge is explaining their relation such that they do not seem unduly orthogonal to each other. I've considered the thought that kind-relative goodness grounds normativity, while absolute goodness grounds value.
ReplyDelete