Cheryl Misak, DPhil
Professor of Philosophy
University of Toronto
Born in 1961 in Lethbridge, Canada
BA in Philosophy from the University of Lethbridge, MA in Philosophy from Columbia University, and DPhil in Philosophy from the University of Oxford
Project
Progress and Regress in Morals and Politics
We are in a disturbing age, rife with moral and political regress. In some major liberal democracies, we can no longer take it for granted that politicians need even pay lip service to the rule or law; to honesty; to the rights of refugees; or to the need to protect the environment for future generations. Conspiracy theories about public health measures and election results are thick on the ground. On the other hand, there is moral progress as well. The rights of women and those in non-heterosexual relationships have meaningfully improved in many parts of the world; apartheid in South Africa has been replaced by a more just system.Yet it is a formidable task to articulate just what moral progress and regress is and how to resolve disagreements about whether we are going forward or backward. These disagreements play out around the family dinner table, as well as in philosophy.
My project is to make sense of how moral and political beliefs are objective or aimed at getting things right. We all think that it is not merely an individual’s values or a culture’s conventions that makes it wrong to torture an animal or sexually assault a child. But we also know that our beliefs have developed in ways that are contingent on all sorts of historical accidents – the evolution of the human brain; the way language-users have posed questions and answered them; power relations; the ways in which different technologies developed in different societies at different times; and political and economic aims. We human beings, with our evolved and historically contingent characters, capacities, and limitations, bring moral norms into being and then go on to shape them.
How can we aim at getting things right, yet see, as the American pragmatist Williams James put it, that “the trail of the human serpent is over everything”? Are we not left with a relativist “anything goes” or “might is right” position – a position that seems alien to our actual human moral practices?
I will try to resolve these fundamental tensions by developing a theory of truth and objectivity, along pragmatist lines, that does justice to both the subjective and objective dimensions of our moral and political lives and deliberations.
Recommended Reading
Misak, Cheryl. Truth and the End of Inquiry: A Peircean Account of Truth. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991. Expanded paperback 2004.
–. Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
–. Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. Revised and expanded paperback 2022.
Colloquium, 24.09.2024
Truth and Progress
We seem to live in a post truth world, where truth seems irrelevant to some politicians, where fundamental disagreements are fuelled by social media silos, and where experts are ignored in favour of "doing one's own research".
In this talk, I will explore why we need a concept of truth and I will argue that some ways of thinking about truth are not fit for purpose. I will suggest that there is a concept of truth that governs all inquiry – scientific, political, ethical, and aesthetic. I will try to make the claim that we aim for truth in all these areas of human endeavour less contentious than it seems on the surface. I will also argue that the concept of truth I outline will allow us to make sense of objectivity and subjectivity, as well as progress and regress.
Publications from the Fellows' Library
Misak, Cheryl (Oxford, 2020)
Frank Ramsey : a sheer excess of powers
Misak, Cheryl (Oxford, 2018)
Cambridge pragmatism : from Peirce and James to Ramsey and Wittgenstein
Misak, Cheryl (Oxford, 2013)
The American pragmatists The Oxford history of philosophy
Misak, Cheryl (Chicago, Ill., 2008)
Experience, narrative, and ethical deliberation
Misak, Cheryl (Oxford [u.a.], 2004)
Truth and the end of inquiry : a Peircean account of truth Oxford philosophical monographs
