Raymond G. Critch

New Teaching and Publication

rgcritch — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 01:56:28 +0000

Good news. I’m teaching this semester and a paper I wrote in Vienna is going to be published. I’m teaching an online section of Health Ethics at MUN, while the paper – ‘Positivism and Relativism in Post-war Jurisprudence,’ will be coming out in Jurisprudence this coming fall. Because most of the teaching materials for the online course are already online I won’t be updating the teaching page for that, but the research page will now be changed to reflect the publication status of the paper.

Christmas in Newfoundland too

rgcritch — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 03:41:51 +0000

It feels like it can’t have been a year since last december, but here we are. In the midst of applying for a host of academic jobs at working as a Coordinator of MUN’s writing centre, I’ve managed to finish a couple of papers – one on aggregation and fairness, another a modified version of the old ‘Rescuing Justice from Equality’ paper – for which the abstracts should be on the research page shortly. In the meantime, I’ll enjoy Reid’s first christmas and my first christmas in Newfoundland in 5 years.

Summer in Newfoundland

rgcritch — Mon, 22 Aug 2011 12:48:48 +0000

The weather has been unusually terrible, so I’ve managed to have a pretty productive summer so far. In addition to applying for a wide array of jobs, I’ve finished two papers that I had set aside during my time in Vienna: one on whether the service conception of love can be amended to account for the problems of paternalism posed by Ebels-Duggan’s shared ends conception; one on why aggregation is a problem for those who would claim that a lottery is a fair solution to ‘numbers cases.’ Abstracts for both are now available on the research page.

Back Home

rgcritch — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 11:33:04 +0000

Having finished my contract in Vienna at the end of May, Erin, Reid and I have moved back to Newfoundland for the summer. Still, it’s going to be busy. I’ll be presenting papers at the Association for Legal and Social Philosophy Conference in Warwick and the Joint Sessions in Sussex in a couple of weeks. In the meantime, I’ve submitted one paper, polished up another, and will finish writing the long-version of the Joint Sessions paper soon. Abstracts and presentations will be on the research page as available.

New Beginnings

rgcritch — Mon, 07 Mar 2011 14:01:58 +0000

It’s been too long. That’s because I’ve been too busy. First, our son – Reid Jonathan Drover Critch – was born three weeks early. Then, I finished one paper – on Legitimacy – before finishing another – on Exclusionary Reasons – during my “week off.” Abstracts for both of these are available on the Research page, here.

But what really brings be back to make an update here is teaching. This semester I’m offering a course on Joseph Raz’s The Morality of Freedom at the University of Vienna. The syllabus and the lecture notes (after class, as they become available) are on the teaching page here.

Hopefully things will get a little more regular from here, or at least over the summer, but I’m told a newborn can complicate life in ways unimaginable to the uninitiated.

Making Plans

rgcritch — Mon, 10 May 2010 19:00:12 +0000

Well, I got a job. I’ve been hired as a postdoctoral fellow with a European Research Council funded project called ‘Distortions of Normativity.’ It’s about the impact of National Socialism on central questions of the authority of law in legal and political philosophy. This means two things:

1: You can get a job with a PhD (or almost a PhD) in Philosophy; and

2: I am moving to Vienna.

For the time being, my academic work is going to have to take a back seat to my efforts to learn German, but I’ll continue to post any research developments in the coming weeks.

What’s Next?

rgcritch — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 10:39:38 +0000

I submitted my thesis today. That felt good, though I won’t get to defend it until sometime in June due to my busy external examiner. In the meantime, I thought I’d mention a couple of projects I’m going to start working on (in some cases, again) in the coming weeks.

First, it’ll be good to get back to my equality paper. While I’ve got a solid conference draft, it’ll be nice to work it up to something publishable based on the feedback I should get on it this spring.

Second, I spent some time last summer thinking, while not writing, about David Velleman’s account of love here. It contrasts quite deliberately with Harry Frankfurt’s account here. I think that while both accounts have something to recommend them, neither really gets to the heart of the matter. So, this paper will be a critique of their positions and an attempt to present a third that I’ve only just begun to formulate. I’d expect something like an abstract here in a month or two.

Third, in anticipation of some research I’d like to get into in the fall, I’m going to look at the problem of whether or to what extent we can choose to see something as a reason. Put simply, Scanlon (here) thinks we can’t and this affects the limits of moral responsibility. I think he’s wrong about both, though right about almost everything else. Still, if I want to get the bigger project off the ground, it would be helpful to have a solid critique of his view in my arsenal, so that’ll be a third paper I hope to have started by may.

I didn’t get into this for the vacations. I got into it to be curious about whatever I happen to be curious about. So that’s what I’ll do with my supposedly free time.

Major Thesis Update

rgcritch — Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:32:50 +0000

I’ve finished writing it, now to spend the next two weeks revising and re-revising and re-re-revising, with a short break for the Leeds Value Concepts Workshop. That will be a nice chance to go to a workshop and just learn for once. Of note, I’ve changed the title and have a new introduction posted on the research page here.

Revised Equality Paper

rgcritch — Thu, 04 Feb 2010 15:46:07 +0000

Having presented the old equality paper once, I’ve done a substantial rewrite. I frame the paper more clearly in the views that I think make it interesting. It still contends that equality doesn’t matter, but it explains why it matters that equality doesn’t matter, and cuts off a couple of egalitarian escape hatches that were never fully dealt with in the earlier version. This is still an abstract for the short, conference version (which has been accepted at the CEU Graduate Philosophy Conference), but it’s nonetheless worth putting on the Research page, here.

Lectures on Value

rgcritch — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 11:26:37 +0000

I’ve got a week’s worth of lecturing to do this year, and it’s ongoing right now. I’m doing a week on ‘Value’ for the department’s introductory ‘Morality, Rationality, and Value’ course. You can find copies of the slideshows for each lecture on the Teaching page, here.