Dr. Emer O'Hagan

Associate Professor (on sabbatical Jan - Jun, 2012)
M.A. (Calgary) Ph.D. (Toronto)

(306) 966-5634
622 Arts

Emer.OHagan@usask.ca

Recent Courses
PHIL 110 Intro to Philosophy
PHIL 202 Philosophy of Religion
PHIL 206 Early Modern Philosophy
PHIL 233 Ethical Theory
PHIL 294 Philosophy of Human Nature

Recipient of College of Arts and Science Teaching Excellence Award 2005-06


Advanced seminar topics have included:
Kant's Ethical Theory, Korsgaard’s Kantian Ethics, Metaethics (Darwall, Gibbard, and Railton eds., Moral Discourse and Practice: Some Philosophical Approaches), Metaethics (Michael Smith's The Moral Problem.)

Research
The problem of how reason makes authoritative demands on belief and action has a distinguished philosophical pedigree. Concerning action, how could a moral reason place authoritative rational demands on what an agent does? The question of how reason constrains action has been thought to be particularly puzzling, while the question of how reason constrains belief has received less attention, having been thought to be relatively unproblematic. The normative authority of theoretical reasoning, its power to legitimately command assent, is often assumed to be straightforward; what we ought to believe will be constrained by theoretical reasoning. However the problem of epistemic norms is real, as Lewis Carroll’s famous parable of Achilles and the Tortoise shows. The question “why ought you believe what you have reason to believe?" demands an answer. My program of research is focused on the question of how judgements, both practical and theoretical, are normatively binding. My aim is to develop a more complete understanding of the merit and implications of a constitutive view of agency. Constitutive views, roughly those which hold that the normative authority of practical and theoretical reasons is found within the practice of reasoning itself, have recently had an influential role in focusing important discussions within meta-ethics. Constitutive views offer the promise of increased understanding of the significance and nature of norms for agents and in doing so make the normative authority of moral norms less mysterious than they appear on other views. A major aim of my research program is to develop and advance arguments showing that the authority of reasons is bound up in the practice of reasoning itself; reasons function within a public network of inferentially articulated commitments and entitlements. My program of research has two stages. In the first stage I work through recent objections to the constitutive view. These objections are varied: some philosophers have argued that the constitutive view is too weak to show that normativity itself can be justified, others have argued that it is viciously circular. Still, a number of these criticisms of the constitutive view arise from the conviction that the constitutive view cannot be squared with a broader commitment to naturalism. The supervenience of the moral on the non-moral, it is supposed, forestalls the view that reasoning is constitutively normative. I aim to show that this supposition is groundless, as are these recent criticisms of the constitutive view. In stage two of my research program I will explore the consequences of a unified constitutive conception of reason for classic problems concerning the boundaries of rationality and agency. Failures to be governed by norms of practical rationality are well-documented in the literature on akrasia, less so in the case of failures to be governed by norms of theoretical rationality (epistemic akrasia or doxastic incontinence), but the issue is no less important. I hope to show how the constitutive view provides a supportive platform for a robustly naturalistic account of these boundary issues as well as broader issues regarding the emergence of rational norms in early childhood development and their modes of disintegration in dementia. These issues show themselves to be problems for the understanding of rationality itself.

Selected Publications

"Self-Knowledge and Moral Stupidity," Ratio, XXV (3), 2012.  Forthcoming.

"Kant and the Buddha on Self-Knowledge," in Stephen R. Palmquist (ed.), Cultivating Personhood: Kant and Asian Philosophy (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010), 695-708.

"Moral Self-Knowledge in Kantian Ethics,"Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 12, (2009), 525-537.

"Animals, Agency, and Obligation in Kantian Ethics," Social Theory and Practice, 35, 4, (2009), 531-554.

“Generosity and Mechanism in Descartes’s Passions,” Minerva: An Internet Journal of Philosophy, 9 (2005), 237-261.

“Belief, Normativity and the Constitution of Agency,” Philosophical Explorations, 8, 1, (2005), 39-52.

“Practical Identity and the Constitution of Agency,” The Journal of Value Inquiry, 38, (2004), 49-59.