Just Published: The International Encyclopedia of Ethics

Editor in Chief: Hugh LaFollette
(Read an interview with Hugh)

We are delighted to announce the publication of The International Encyclopedia of Ethics. Unmatched in scholarship and scope, The International Encyclopedia of Ethics is the definitive single-source reference work on Ethics for students, scholars and professionals, publishing online and in print February 2013. Work on the Encyclopedia has been shepherded by an Editor-in-Chief and two Associate Editors. Its content was shaped by the distinguished members of the Editorial Board, and all entries have been blind reviewed by an independent Review Board.

This ground-breaking 9-volume reference work, presented in A-Z format:

• Comprises over 700 entries, ranging from 1,000 to 10,000 words in length, written by an international cast of subject experts
• Is arranged across 9 fully cross-referenced volumes including a comprehensive index
• Provides clear definitions and explanations of all areas of ethics including the topics, movements, arguments, and key figures in Normative Ethics, Metaethics, and Practical Ethics
• Covers the major philosophical, legal and religious traditions
• Offers an unprecedented level of authority, accuracy and balance with all entries being blind peer-reviewed

Free Nietzsche Virtual Issue

The European Journal of Philosophy is delighted to bring you this Virtual Issue on the theme of Nietzsche. Please click on the articles below to read for free, along with the introduction by Robert Pippin from the University of Chicago.

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.Introduction, Robert Pippin

Section One: Nietzsche and First Philosophy
Nietzsche’s Positivism, Nadeem J.Z. Hussein
Nietzsche’s Post-Positivism, Maudmarie Clark and David Dudrick
Nietzsche on Truth Illusion and Redemption, R. Lanier Anderson
Nietzsche’s Theory of Mind, Paul Katsafanas
Nietzsche and Amor Fati, Beatrice Han-Pile
Nietzsche’s Metaethics, Brian Leiter

Section Two: Nietzsche and the Philosophical Tradition
Nietzsche’s Critiques: The Kantian Foundations of His Thought, R. Kevin Hill
Nietzsche and the Transcendental Tradition, Tsarina Doyle
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Death and Salvation, Julian Young
Nietzsche’s Illustration of the Art of Exegesis, Christopher Janaway

Section Three: Genealogy and Morality
Nietzsche, Revaluation and the Turn to Genealogy, David Owen
Nietzsche and Genealogy, Raymond Geuss
Nietzsche and Morality, Raymond Geuss
Nietzsche’s Minimalist Moral Psychology, Bernard Williams
The Second Treatise in the Genealogy of Morals: Nietzsche on the Origin of Bad Conscience, Mathias Risse
Nietzsche on Freedom, Robert Guay

Section Four: Nietzsche and Art
Nietzsche’s Metaphysics in The Birth of Tragedy, Beatrice Han-Pile
Nietzsche on Art and Freedom, Aaron Ridley
The Genealogy of Aesthetics, Dabney Townsend

The value of an Olympic medal

The Royal Canadian Mint has a neat website about the medals from the Vancouver games.  It helps drive home the huge variety of perspectives from which an Olympic medal can be valued.  Wacky goldbugs are focused on the exchange value of the underlying metals.  For the artists who designed them, they’re the fruits of creative labor.  For the mint workers who solved a series of technical problems to realize the artists’ vision, they represent the height of their craft.  For the athletes who win them, the enduring proof that grueling years of training left them the best in the world at what they do.  For people who attended the games, a short-hand reminder of a rare experience.

Quickly and crudely, anti-realist views about value are a family of views that maintain that, at the end of the day, things are valuable just because we value them.  Contrast with realism about value, which holds that when we value something appropriately, we are responding to something valuable– valuableness is something that exists independently of us.

Back to gold, silver, and bronze medals:  the huge variety of ways to value Olympic medals makes them a nice illustration of the kinds of intuitions that drive anti-realists about value.  It sure looks like the artist, the minter, the athlete, the spectator, and the goldbug are projecting different values onto the same object.

Related articles:

Four Faces of Moral Realism
By Stephen Finlay, USC (October 2007)
Philosophy Compass