Sarah McGrath

Last updated
Sarah McGrath
Born1972 (age 5051)
Education MIT (PhD), Tufts University (MA), University of Arizona (BA)
Awards John Templeton Foundation grant (2014-15)
Era 21st-century philosophy
Region Western philosophy
Institutions Princeton University
Thesis Causation in Metaphysics and Moral Theory  (2002)
Doctoral advisor Ned Hall
Other academic advisors Elizabeth Harman, Carolina Sartorio, Robert Stalnaker, Judith Thomson
Main interests
metaethics, moral epistemology
Notable ideas
moral peer disagreement [1] [2] [3]
Website https://sites.google.com/view/smcgrath/home

Sarah McGrath (born 1972) is an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at Princeton University. She is known for her works on meta-ethics and moral epistemology. [4] [5] [6] [7]

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Related Research Articles

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Experience refers to conscious events in general, more specifically to perceptions, or to the practical knowledge and familiarity that is produced by these processes. Understood as a conscious event in the widest sense, experience involves a subject to which various items are presented. In this sense, seeing a yellow bird on a branch presents the subject with the objects "bird" and "branch", the relation between them and the property "yellow". Unreal items may be included as well, which happens when experiencing hallucinations or dreams. When understood in a more restricted sense, only sensory consciousness counts as experience. In this sense, experience is usually identified with perception and contrasted with other types of conscious events, like thinking or imagining. In a slightly different sense, experience refers not to the conscious events themselves but to the practical knowledge and familiarity they produce. In this sense, it is important that direct perceptual contact with the external world is the source of knowledge. So an experienced hiker is someone who actually lived through many hikes, not someone who merely read many books about hiking. This is associated both with recurrent past acquaintance and the abilities learned through them.

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Moral particularism is a theory in meta-ethics that runs counter to the idea that moral actions can be determined by applying universal moral principles. It states that there is no set of moral principles that can be applied to every situation, making it an idea appealing to the causal nature of morally challenging situations. Moral judgements are said to be determined by factors of relevance with the consideration of a particular context. A moral particularist, for example, would argue that homicide cannot be judged to be morally wrong until all the morally relevant facts are known. While this stands in stark contrast to other prominent moral theories, such as deontology, consequentialism, and virtue ethics, it finds its way into jurisprudence, with the idea of justifiable homicide, for instance. In this case, the morally relevant facts are based on context rather than principle. Critics would argue that even in this case, the principle still informs morally right action.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Quietism (philosophy)</span> View on the purpose of philosophy

Quietism in philosophy sees the role of philosophy as broadly therapeutic or remedial. Quietist philosophers believe that philosophy has no positive thesis to contribute, but rather that its value is in defusing confusions in the linguistic and conceptual frameworks of other subjects, including non-quietist philosophy. For quietists, advancing knowledge or settling debates is not the job of philosophy, rather philosophy should liberate the mind by diagnosing confusing concepts.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Geoffrey Sayre-McCord</span> American philosopher

Geoffrey Sayre-McCord is an American philosopher who works in moral theory, ethics, meta-ethics, the history of ethics and epistemology. He teaches at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is also the director of the Philosophy, Politics and Economics Society.

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<span class="mw-page-title-main">Scottish philosophy</span> History of philosophy in Scotland

Scottish philosophy is a philosophical tradition created by philosophers belonging to Scottish universities. Although many philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, Thomas Reid, and Adam Smith are familiar to almost all philosophers it was not until the 19th century that the notion of 'Scottish philosophy' became recognized and held to high regard on an international level. In the 20th century, however, this tradition declined as Scottish educated philosophers left for England.

Humeanism refers to the philosophy of David Hume and to the tradition of thought inspired by him. Hume was an influential Scottish philosopher well known for his empirical approach, which he applied to various fields in philosophy. In the philosophy of science, he is notable for developing the regularity theory of causation, which in its strongest form states that causation is nothing but constant conjunction of certain types of events without any underlying forces responsible for this regularity of conjunction. This is closely connected to his metaphysical thesis that there are no necessary connections between distinct entities. The Humean theory of action defines actions as bodily behavior caused by mental states and processes without the need to refer to an agent responsible for this. The slogan of Hume's theory of practical reason is that "reason is...the slave of the passions". It restricts the sphere of practical reason to instrumental rationality concerning which means to employ to achieve a given end. But it denies reason a direct role regarding which ends to follow. Central to Hume's position in metaethics is the is-ought distinction. It states that is-statements, which concern facts about the natural world, do not imply ought-statements, which are moral or evaluative claims about what should be done or what has value. In philosophy of mind, Hume is well known for his development of the bundle theory of the self. It states that the self is to be understood as a bundle of mental states and not as a substance acting as the bearer of these states, as is the traditional conception. Many of these positions were initially motivated by Hume's empirical outlook. It emphasizes the need to ground one's theories in experience and faults opposing theories for failing to do so. But many philosophers within the Humean tradition have gone beyond these methodological restrictions and have drawn various metaphysical conclusions from Hume's ideas.

Casey O'Callaghan is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy and Philosophy-Neuroscience-Psychology at Washington University in St. Louis. He is known for his works on philosophy of perception.

Moral Knowledge is a 2019 book by Sarah McGrath in which the author discusses possibilities, sources, and vulnerabilities of moral knowledge.

References

  1. Doris, John; Stich, Stephen; Phillips, Jonathan; Walmsley, Lachlan (2020). "Moral Psychology: Empirical Approaches". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
  2. Tersman, Folke (2022). "Moral Disagreement". The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University.
  3. King, Nathan L. (2011). "McGrath on Moral Knowledge:". Journal of Philosophical Research. 36: 219–233. doi:10.5840/jpr_2011_10. ISSN   1053-8364.
  4. Lillehammer, Hallvard (December 2020). "Moral knowledge. SarahMcGrath. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2019, × + 218 pp., £50 Hbk". European Journal of Philosophy. 28 (4): 1103–1106. doi:10.1111/ejop.12616. ISSN   0966-8373.
  5. Phillips, David (14 October 2020). "Review of Moral Knowledge". NDPR. ISSN   1538-1617.
  6. Wilkinson, Eric (2021). "Sarah McGrath, "Moral Knowledge."". Philosophy in Review.
  7. Ceri, Luciana (24 March 2023). "Moral Knowledge, by Sarah McGrath". Philosophical Inquiries . 11 (1): R9–R13. ISSN   2282-0248.