Values

John Leslie Mackie famously declared that there are no objective values and defended an error theory for evaluative judgments. Impressed by the phenomenology of value experience and our everyday evaluative discourse, we are not fully convinced. 

The second conference within the framework of the DFG-project "Emotions and Values" therefore deals with two central questions. The first question is the basic ontological question whether there are any values – or better: whether there are any (instantiated) evaluative properties. Are they part of the furniture of the world? This basic question is naturally followed by a second one concerning the nature of evaluative properties. What are they? Are they monadic, mind-independent properties as the strict realist believes or are they in some sense to be specified relational, mind-dependent properties? The two questions are intimately related. For some of those who answer the first question to the negative, the second question seems more or less meaningless. For others, in contrast, this second question may still make sense because they construe evaluative properties as mind-dependent but accept only mind-independent properties as genuinely real. Hence there is a multitude of possible positions. 

This conference shall initiate a dialogue between various different positions concerning evaluative properties with the central aim of illuminating the nature and the ontological status of evaluative properties. As the conference is part of the “Emotions and Values” project we are of course especially interested in papers that comment on the putative relation between values and emotions.

Organization

Conference chair: Prof. Dr. Sabine Doering, Philosophy Department, Eberhard Karls University Tuebingen.
Co-organizer: Anika Lutz, M.A. (Eberhard Karls University Tuebingen).
Organizational support: Anton Hase.
For any queries about the conference, please send us an email at: [email protected]