Russ Shafer-Landau (born 1963) is an American philosopher and professor of philosophy at the

University of Wisconsin, Madison A university () is an institution of tertiary education and research which awards academic degrees in several academic disciplines. ''University'' is derived from the Latin phrase , which roughly means "community of teachers and scholars". Univ ...

Education and career

Shafer-Landau is a graduate of

Brown University Brown University is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Providence, Rhode Island, United States. It is the List of colonial colleges, seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the US, founded in 1764 as the ' ...

and completed his PhD work at the

University of Arizona The University of Arizona (Arizona, U of A, UArizona, or UA) is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Tucson, Arizona, United States. Founded in 1885 by the 13th Arizona Territorial Legislature, it ...

under the supervision of

Joel Feinberg Joel Feinberg (October 19, 1926 – March 29, 2004) was an American political and legal philosopher. He is known for his work in the fields of ethics, action theory, philosophy of law, and political philosophy as well as individual rights and t ...

. He has been teaching philosophy at the

from 2002, where he became chair of the department. From 1992 to 2002 Shafer-Landau taught at the

University of Kansas The University of Kansas (KU) is a public research university with its main campus in Lawrence, Kansas, United States. Two branch campuses are in the Kansas City metropolitan area on the Kansas side: the university's medical school and hospital ...

. He is the founder and editor of the periodical ''Oxford Studies in Metaethics.'' Shafer-Landau returned to UW after a brief stint at the

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC, UNC–Chapel Hill, or simply Carolina) is a public university, public research university in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, United States. Chartered in 1789, the university first began enrolli ...

, where he also served as the director of the Parr Center for Ethics. Shafer-Landau is the founder and organizer for the annual Madison Metaethics Workshop (also referred to as MadMeta, founded in 2004) which followed him to North Carolina under the name "CHillMeta," before re-assuming its original identity when Shafer-Landau returned to UW. From 2020 to 2021, Shafer-Landau served as the Central President of the

American Philosophical Association The American Philosophical Association (APA) is the main professional organization for philosophers in the United States. Founded in 1900, its mission is to promote the exchange of ideas among philosophers, to encourage creative and scholarl ...

Philosophical work

Shafer-Landau is a leading defender of a non-naturalistic

moral realism Moral realism (also ethical realism) is the position that ethical sentences express propositions that refer to objective features of the world (that is, features independent of subjective opinion), some of which may be true to the extent that t ...

, holding that moral statements are not reducible to natural terms. For example, the term 'good' cannot be described in terms of what is pleasurable and painful, nor conclusions within science. This view is established in his major work '' Moral Realism: A Defence,'' which, as one reviewer expressed it, "defends an unorthodox combination of claims, including anti-

Humeanism Humeanism refers to the philosophy of David Hume and to the tradition of thought inspired by him. Hume was an influential eighteenth century Scottish philosopher well known for his empirical approach, which he applied to various fields in philosop ...

about reasons for action, mind-independent moral realism, moral non-naturalism,

moral rationalism Moral rationalism, also called ethical rationalism, is a view in meta-ethics (specifically the epistemology of ethics) according to which moral principles are knowable ''a priori'', by reason alone. Some prominent figures in the history of philoso ...

, and reliabilist moral epistemology." Shafer-Landau is also the author of two other introductory books, ''Whatever Happened To Good And Evil?'' and ''The Fundamentals of Ethics.'' Besides editing the annual ''Oxford Studies in Metaethics,'' he also has co-edited ''Reason and Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy'', an anthology covering many aspects of ethics with the late

and two Blackwell anthologies, ''Foundations of Ethics'' (with Terence Cuneo), and ''Ethical Theory''.

References

1963 births American philosophy academics Analytic philosophers American epistemologists American ethicists Living people American metaphysicians Moral realists Ontologists University of Arizona alumni University of Kansas faculty University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty Brown University alumni {{US-philosopher-stub