Welcome to our Ethics review forum on Rachana Kamtekar’s Plato’s Moral Psychology (OUP 2018), reviewed by Nicholas Smith. Excerpts from the blurb and the review are below, but you can read both in their entirety via OUP’s website and Ethics, respectively. (You are welcome to participate in the forum even if you haven’t read either. Though as you’ll see below, if you believe it is best to read both, you will read both.)
We are very pleased to announce the all-new PEA Soup Prizes, generously funded by The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University, totaling over $5,000!! There will be yearly and quarterly prizes awarded. The Yearly Prizes will be announced at the end of January (for the previous year’s posts), and the Quarterly Prizes will be announced shortly after the Featured Months (explained below the fold). These are very generous prizes, aimed at increasing the amount of high-quality content we’ve had the good fortune to have on the Soup for going on 15 years now(!), as well as to encourage more posts and discussion by our official contributors as well as submissions for publication on the blog by those not listed as official contributors. This information will also soon be permanently up under the tab “PEA Soup Prizes” at the top.
I’ve always thought that Philosopher’s Annual thing that puts out a top 10 articles of the year list 
tries to come up with such a list too quickly. It takes most of us some years to get around to reading stuff and even longer to have a sense of whether the paper was really interesting and valuable. But obviously if you wait too long papers from a particular year will no longer be vivid before us. So how long would it be ideal to wait before attempting such a thing–2 years? 4 years? Also, how would one best do it? Is there a voting system where all with a background in philosophy—say anyone who attended philosophy grad school–could vote that would be tolerably safe from voting mischief? Who ought to be able to vote on such a thing? Should it only be specialists in the area of the paper? Finally, is such a thing worth doing at all? It could seemingly helpfully pool our collective wisdom concerning papers that are important and perhaps not widely known. Or it could possibly just be an elitist exercise that is bound to work the benefit of the already well-known? Finally, I had in mind such a thing only for ethics stuff broadly construed. Is this worth doing and if so how should it be done?
We’re pleased to announce our next Ethics review forum on Rachana Kamtekar’s Plato’s Moral Psychology (OUP 2018), reviewed by Nicholas Smith. Excerpts from the blurb and the review are below, but you can read both in their entirety via OUP’s website and Ethics, respectively. (You are welcome to participate in the forum even if you haven’t read either. Though as you’ll see below, if you believe it is best to read both, you will read both.)
The forum will start on the morning of Friday, January 11.
Herewith our top 10 posts of 2018. Thanks to all who read and participated this year!
January 28: Jonathan Quong
Feb 11: Heidi Maibom
Feb 18: Ellie Mason
Feb 25: Japa Pallikkathayil
March 7: Valerie Tiberius
March 20: Julia Driver
April 8: Hille Paakkunainen
April 22: Stephanie Leary
May 1: Luvell Anderson
May 13: Nate Sharadin
Very pleased today to be able to introduce our next fantastic featured philosopher: Alex Guerrero. Take it away Alex:
Much of my work has focused on the way in which ignorance,uncertainty,expertise,intellectual difficulty, and other epistemic considerations raise problems in moral,legal, and political philosophy.
A common thread throughout this work is that we are regularly in complicated, murky epistemic situations in our moral, legal, and political lives—and this is something that we as philosophers should take seriously, rather than ignore or idealize away.
