Description:
The EPP Chair of the Université de Fribourg is organising a Summer School with Gideon Rosen (Princeton). The week-long summer school will focus on the metaphysics of morality, with a special focus on non-naturalist moral realism: the view that moral thought and discourse are concerned with real, mind-independent facts that are distinct from the empirical psychological and sociological facts that underly them. Topics to be discussed include the proper characterization of this view, the main motivations for it, and questions that arise with in it, including questions about the explanatory structure of moral reality, the role of moral laws in moral explanation, the modal status of those moral laws, and the distinctive forms of grounding that figure in them. One recurrent theme will be analogies (and disanalogies) between non-naturalist moral realism and other forms of dualism in recent metaphysics, including property dualism in the philosophy of mind and platonism in the philosophy of mathematics. The seminar will be designed to expose advanced students to the most important recent work on these topics and to provide a forum for the discussion of student work on open problems.
Application:
The summer school is aimed at graduate students and early-career researchers. Those interested in participating should send their CV and a brief letter of motivation (max 1 page) to sarah.koeglsperger@unifr.ch.
The summer school will include four sessions where participants have the opportunity to present
their work-in-progress in metaethics. Those interested in presenting should send an abstract (max.
1000 words, excluding references, language: English) to sarah.koeglsperger@unifr.ch by 01 May
2024. Abstracts should be prepared for blind-review.
Funding:
The summer school is funded by CUSO. Expenses for PhD students (as well as a limited number of
post-docs) at universities associated with CUSO (Fribourg, Genève, Lausanne, Neuchâtel) will be fully
covered.
Thanks to the generous support of the ‘Beyond Reductionism’ project run by Prof. Anandi Hattiangadi (Stockholm) and Dr. Alex Moran (Fribourg) and funded by Vetenskaprådet (Swedish Research Council), the costs of those participants not affiliated with CUSO will be partially covered. These participants will have to pay a fee of CHF 575 (this fee includes meals during the summer school and four nights of accommodation). Those selected to give presentations will have their travel expenses covered.
For further questions, please contact Sarah Köglsperger (sarah.koeglsperger@unifr.ch).