Additional information
by Justin Snedegar (Author)
Justin Snedegar develops and defends contrastivism about reasons. This is the view that normative reasons are fundamentally reasons for or against actions or attitudes only relative to sets of alternatives. Simply put, reasons are always reasons to do one thing rather than another, instead of simply being reasons to do something, full stop. Work on reasons has become central to several areas of philosophy, but besides a couple of exceptions, this view has not been discussed. Contrastive Reasons makes the case that this is a mistake.
Snedegar develops three kinds of arguments for contrastivism. First, contrastivism gives us the best account of our ordinary discourse about reasons. Second, contrastivism best makes sense of widespread ideas about what reasons are, including the idea that they favor the things they are reasons for and the idea that they involve the promotion of certain kinds of objectives. Third, contrastivism has attractive applications in different areas of normative philosophy in which reasons are important. These include debates in normative ethics about whether better than might be intransitive and debates in both epistemology and practical reasoning about the rationality of withholding or suspending belief and intention.Author Biography
Justin Snedegar, University of St Andrews
Justin Snedegar is a lecturer in philosophy at the University of St Andrews. He received his PhD from the University of Southern California in 2013, and his BA in mathematics and philosophy from West Virginia University in 2008. His work in metaethics and the theory of rationality has been published in several journals and edited volumes including Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Ethics, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, and Philosophical Studies.
Number of Pages: 164
Dimensions: 0.9 x 8.3 x 5.8 IN
Publication Date: May 23, 2017
