R. Jay Wallace

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R. Jay Wallace
Jay-wallace-2019.jpg
Wallace in 2019
Born1957 (age 6667)
Education Princeton University (Ph.D.)
Era 21st-century philosophy
Region Western philosophy
Thesis Practical Reason and the Claims of Morality: On the Idea of Rationalism in Ethics  (1988)
Doctoral advisor Gilbert Harman
Doctoral students Elif Özmen
Main interests
Moral Philosophy
Website https://www.rjaywallace.net

R. Jay Wallace (born 1957) is Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and William and Trudy Ausfahl Chair at the University of California, Berkeley. His areas of specialization include moral philosophy and philosophy of action. He is most noted for his work on practical reason, moral psychology, and meta-ethics.

Contents

Education and career

Wallace received his B.A. degree in 1979 from Williams College. He earned the degree of B.Phil. from the University of Oxford in 1983. In 1988, he got his Ph.D. from Princeton University. [1]

He has taught philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania (1988-1996),and the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (1996-2000), joining the Berkeley faculty in 1999. [2] He has held visiting positions at the Universität Bielefeld, in the Research School of Social Sciences (RSSS) at the Australian National University, at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, and at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch (New Zealand). He was the department chair at UC Berkeley from 2005 to 2010. [1] He declined the position of White's Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford University in 2013. [3]

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 2021. [4]

Philosophy

In his first major book, Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments, Wallace defended a view associated with P.F. Strawson according to which attributions of moral praise and blame do not depend on metaphysical claims about freedom of the will but on our moral practices. The philosopher Annette Baier wrote that “This beautifully organized and lucidly argued book might be taken as a model of how a sustained philosophical argument should proceed. Wallace’s thesis is that our practices of holding persons responsible for their choices and actions, and reacting to those that offend against moral norms with blame, indignation or resentment, make perfectly good sense, even if determinism is true." [5]

His collection of papers, Normativity and the Will, brings together essays mostly written in the decade after the 1996 book Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments, which "develop the moral psychology behind his Strawsonian account of moral responsibility as depending on our practices of holding people morally accountable." [6]

His 2013 book, The View from Here, was described by Thomas Nagel in the London Review of Books as follows: "This interesting, careful and occasionally outrageous book explores the complex interaction and competition between the attitudes of affirmation and regret that are almost inevitable as we look back on our lives and celebrate or deplore the conditions and choices that have made us what we are – that underlie our successes and failures, and our personal attachments." [7]

In 2019 he published The Moral Nexus, which defends a relational interpretation of the domain of interpersonal morality. In his review of the book, Rahul Kumar calls it "a major contribution to moral theory", writing that it "brilliantly explores, with nuance and in detail, the reasons embedded in ordinary moral thought that undergird the appeal of a relational interpretation of moral reasoning."

Selected publications

Books

Edited books

Selected articles

Related Research Articles

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References

  1. 1 2 "R. Jay Wallace". philosophy.berkeley.edu. Archived from the original on 21 August 2018.
  2. "R. Jay Wallace - Curriculum Vitae".
  3. "Senior offers declined in 2013". Leiter Reports: A Philosophy Blog.
  4. "New Members". American Academy of Arts & Sciences.
  5. "Responsibility and the Moral Sentiments — R. Jay Wallace".
  6. Davenport, John J. (12 December 2007). "Normativity and the Will: Selected Essays on Moral Psychology and Practical Reason".
  7. Nagel, Thomas (2 April 2014). "An Invitation to Hand-Wringing". London Review of Books. 36 (7).