A writes:
Can readers suggest women philosophers to incorporate into a metaethics syllabus? I’m perfectly willing to stretch the canonical definition of “metaethics.” Thanks!
14 thoughts on “Query from a reader: Women for Metaethics Syllabus?”
Comments are closed.
Feminist Philosophers 
Off the top of my head: Sharon Street, Chris Korsgaard, Ulrike Heuer, Carolina Sartorio, Judy Thomson, Phillipa Foot, Kate Manne, Julia Markovits.
Right off the top of my head: Connie Rosati. Her AOS is Ethics but if you look at her publications a number of them are metaethical.
Her CV with links to some of her articles can be found here: http://dingo.sbs.arizona.edu/~crosati/CVpage.htm
– G.E.M. Anscombe ;-)
– Philippa Foot
– Cora Diamond has somehow done metaethics in a wider sense
– Christine Korsgaard (The Source of Normativity)
– Sharon Street (NYU)
– Stephanie Beardman (Columbia)
– Connie Rosati (Arizona)
Carolina Sartorio (Arizona)
Among others I guess!
JJ Thomson of course!
This might also be helpful: http://www.lenmanethicsbibliography.group.shef.ac.uk/Bib.htm
Sarah McGrath (Princeton)
Sigrun Svavarsdottir!
Rosalind Hursthouse
Christine Swanton
Jackie Taylor
Some of these are more practical reason or abstract theoretic ethics, but people draw the boundary in different places.
If you want suggestions for more specific subfields of metaethics, please follow up!
Carla Bagnoli
Annette Baier
Marcia Baron
Ruth Chang
Patricia Greenspan
Jean Hampton
Barbara Herman
Pam Hieronymi
Maggie Little
Sabina Lovibond
Laura Schroeter (with Francois Schroeter)
Sarah Stroud
Valerie Tiberius
Caroline West
Also:
Michelle Moody-Adams
Margaret Urban-Walker
Anita Superson
Deborah Heikes
Iris Murdoch
Lovely lists, kudos to our commenters. Everyone I thought of appears above.
Awesome, thanks! I have always taught the class (an advanced survey) by starting with Moore and then working through emotivist, expressivist, error theoretic, naturalist-realist, etc alternatives, with some stops along the way for moral internalism/externalism. I’ve been sad about how male-dominated this left the syllabus, and these lists give me some great ideas for expanding out in various directions.
A: I taught a grad seminar in metaethics this summer, and I am teaching an upper-level undergrad metaethics class this semester. I found it natural to include several pieces by women on both syllabi. Some of them have already been mentioned. (You’d have to drag Street’s “Darwinian Dilemma” off of my syllabi kicking and screaming.) But particularly in the grad seminar, I also tried to include work outside of traditional metaethics that it is nonetheless useful for metaethicists to read. For example, I had my students read a recent paper in PPR on Hume’s Dictum by my colleague Jessica Wilson. (I paired it with a recent paper in OSME on Hume’s Dictum by Tristram McPherson.) E-mail me if you’d like copies of the syllabi.
In addition to the good mentions above I’d add Rachel Cohon. Both her work on Hume and her more contemporary work (maybe especially her piece in the Philosophical Review from a few years ago) are great and useful on meta-ethics. Her writing is also easy to read.