Russ Shafer-Landau
CONTACT INFORMATION
Department of Philosophy
University of Wisconsin, Madison
600 N. Park Street
Madison, WI 53706
608.263.3700
I'm a philosopher. Most of my work has been in metaethics, which is that area of philosophy that focuses on questions about the status (rather than the content) of morality. Such questions include:
Is morality created by human beings, or is it in some way objective?
How do we gain moral knowledge?
Is there always excellent reason to obey moral requirements? Are immoral people necessarily irrational?
How can moral values exist in a world governed by scientific laws?
My interest in the field led me to inaugurate the annual Madison Metaethics Workshop (a.k.a. MadMeta), which celebrated its 20th anniversary last year. I also edit a book series on these topics, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, whose contents are based largely on papers given at each workshop. (See link below.) I am also the Director of the Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics for Younger Scholars.
My research over the past decade has focused on a 3-book collaboration with John Bengson and Terence Cuneo. The first of our books, Philosophical Methodology, was published in 2022 by Oxford University Press. The second, The Moral Universe, will be published by OUP in Summer 2024. The last book, Grasping Morality, is in progress and likely will take us another few years to complete.