Value Concepts

Welcome to the public site for the workshop Value Concepts, to be held at the University of Leeds on March 5-6, 2010.

The workshop provides a venue for a focused discussion of two clusters of issues which have been emerging in recent work on the semantic and metaphysical presuppositions of different accounts of evaluative discourse across a variety of domains. One cluster concerns the implications and merits of invariantist, contextualist, and relativist accounts of the contents of moral and other evaluative and normative expressions, including their implications regarding disagreement and misevaluation and regarding traditional debates between realists and various kinds of anti-realists about value. Another cluster concerns the distinction between “thick” and “thin” concepts in ethics, aesthetics, and epistemology, including the best way to understand the relationship between the two sorts of concepts (or the properties they ascribe) and the relationship of each to aspects of the world as represented in purely descriptive terms.

Support for the workshop is gratefully acknowledged from the Centre for Ethics and Metaethics, the Centre for Mind and Metaphysics, and the Department of Philosophy at the University of Leeds, and the European Community’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013) under grant agreement n° 231016.

The workshop program and other further information can be accessed via the links to your right.