Russ Shafer-Landau (born 1963) is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

Education and career

Shafer-Landau is a graduate of

Brown University Brown University is a private research university in Providence, Rhode Island. Brown is the seventh-oldest institution of higher education in the United States, founded in 1764 as the College in the English Colony of Rhode Island and Providenc ...

and completed his PhD work at the University of Arizona under the supervision of

Joel Feinberg Joel Feinberg (October 19, 1926 in Detroit, Michigan – March 29, 2004 in Tucson, Arizona) 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 p ...

. He has been teaching philosophy at the University of Wisconsin, Madison from 2002, where he became chair of the department. From 1992 to 2002 Shafer-Landau taught at the University of Kansas. 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, 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.

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 they ...

, 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 about reasons for action, mind-independent moral realism, moral non-naturalism, moral rationalism, 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 Epistemologists Ethicists Living people Meta-ethics Metaphysicians Moral philosophers Moral realists Ontologists Philosophers of ethics and morality Philosophy writers University of Arizona alumni University of Kansas faculty University of Wisconsin–Madison faculty Brown University alumni {{US-philosopher-stub