Dr. Errol Lord – Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies

Dr. Errol Lord

University of Pennsylvania
Philosophy

Junior Fellow (Marie S. Curie FCFP Fellow)
September 2017 – August 2018

Last Update: 31.08.2018

Curriculum Vitae

Errol Lord is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He works in ethical theory, epistemology, aesthetics, and the philosophy of action. He won the 2013 Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics. He has published extensively in journals and edited collections. His first monograph, The Importance of Being Rational, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. He received his PhD from Princeton University in 2013. He received a Masters degree from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln and Bachelors degrees from Arizona State University. At FRIAS he is working on a book about how we learn about art and morality.

Selected Publications

The Importance of Being Rational, forthcoming from OUP
“How to Learn about Aesthetics and Morality through Acquaintance and Deference”, forthcoming in Oxford Studies in Metaethics
“What You’re Rationally Required to Do and What You Ought to Do (Are The Same Thing!)”, forthcoming in Mind
“On the Intellectual Conditions for Responsibility: Acting for the Right Reasons, Conceptualization, and Credit”, forthcoming in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
“Acting for the Right Reasons, Abilities, and Obligation”, 2015, Oxford Studies in Metaethics, Winner of the Marc Sanders Prize in Metaethics

FRIAS Project

Knowing the Normative World.

We all have lots of knowledge about the way the world is aesthetically and morally. I, for example, know that the Sistine Chapel is beautiful, that La Sagrada Familia is majestic, that The Brothers Karamazov is psychologically profound, and that Veep is hilarious. I also know that pain is bad, torture is wrong, kindness is good, and promises usually should be kept. My proposed book project is about how we acquire knowledge like this. There are very few discussions about the similarities between how we acquire aesthetic knowledge and moral knowledge. I think this is a missed opportunity. The main goal of the book is to make progress in both areas by thinking about them together. Taking a cue from a tradition in aesthetics reaching back to Kant, the thesis of the book is that acquaintance – having a kind of direct access to the aesthetically and morally relevant facts – is very important to how we acquire both kinds of knowledge. The book is intended to not only be of interest to philosophers, but also to researchers in other disciplines interested in the arts, from those in literature interested in how we learn from narratives to those in art history who think about how to set up museums to effectively teach people about art.