Alan Gibbard’s Thinking how to live constitutes a defence of expressivism regarding the meaning of normative statements. Its core thesis is that statements containing normative terms such as ‘ought’, ‘good’ or ‘preferable’ aren’t succesfully understood by postulating the existence of normative properties, whether natural or non-natural. The best way to explain the meaning of statements containing normative predicates is, on the one hand, to show what kind of mental states are expressed by using them and, on the other hand, to explain why we need such normative vocabulary. Regarding the first question, Gibbard holds that the mental states expressed by normative statements are different from beliefs, since they are directly tied to action; regarding the latter, Gibbard’s view is that we need an apparently descriptive normative language not because there are any normative properties but because such a language enables us to construct complex statements containing both normative and descriptive predicates, i.e., the kind of statements suitable for drawing the logical inferences required for practical reasoning.

Schedule: sessions will be held at Blasco’s Room (fifth floor) every Wednesday from 12am to 2pm during the first term, and from 10:30 to 12am during the second. All readings are taken from Gibbard, Alan (2003) Thinking how to live. Harvard University Press.