Current graduate students
Aaron Abma (chair): Aaron explores and critiques the view that good is good for, arguing that some symbolic acts are valuable—refusing to participate in harmful systems, or standing for certain ideals—despite being inefficacious and even costly. He argues that good-for theory cannot satisfactorily account for the value of these acts—they are at best disvaluable side-effects of beneficial dispositions or practices. Understanding good-simpliciter as the value of that which is worthy of love, Aaron maintains that symbolic acts are valuable as appropriate responses to whatever is good-simpliciter.
Sofia Berinstein (second reader): Sofia is interested in the perception of value, specifically value as conceived relationally, in a way that doesn’t distinguish between moral and non-moral good. She is working on an account of how this sort of value may figure in perceptual appearances. She defends the idea that the affective character of these appearances is discerning, such that it stands to have a genuine epistemic role. She hopes this project will eventually help us to understand perception’s role in valuing, practical reasoning, and aesthetic experience.
Rajiv Hurhangee (chair): Rajiv works on the theory of value. His project defends a monistic conception of value conceived along classical, eudaimonist lines. On the eudaimonist proposal, value is a notion of what is good for us, with virtue constituting part of the good. The account departs from various contemporary frameworks, most notably Kantianism and British intuitionism, which treat virtue and the good as normatively distinct in kind. Rajiv’s project investigates various difficulties that these frameworks have been thought to pose to the eudaimonist conception and examines how they might be handled.
Jason Kay (chair): Jason’s project is chiefly concerned with the relationship between value, reasons, and normativity. It encompasses such issues as whether practical reasons are grounded in value, what to do when our reasons run out, and what matters of taste tell us about normativity.
Vivian Feldblyum (chair): Vivian works on the nature of pleasure, and her dissertation develops an account on which pleasure is best understood as a non-intellectual form of evaluative cognition. Ultimately, her research aims at bridging the gap and enabling dialogue between three approaches to investigating pleasure: scientific approaches to understanding pleasure as a biological mechanism involved in action, approaches in philosophy of mind which seek to understand the phenomenal experience of pleasure, and traditional moral philosophy which asks questions about the relationship between pleasure and value, as well as the role pleasure should play in a good life.