
"Realism and the Absence of Value"
Abstract: Much recent metaphysics is built around notions such as naturalness, fundamentality, grounding, dependence, essence, and others besides. In this paper I raise a problem for this kind of metaphysics, the “problem of missing value”. I survey a number of possible solutions to the problem and find them all wanting. This suggests a return to a kind of Goodmanian view that the world is a structureless mess onto which we project our own categorizations, not something that comes with categories already built in.
Shamik Dasgupta is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at UC Berkeley.
The talk is sponsored by the Language or Logic Society