‘Normative Accounts of Fundamentality’

The Titus-Hepp Lecture Series and the Department of Philosophy welcome Kristopher McDaniel, professor of philosophy at Syracuse University, presenting “Normative Accounts of Fundamentality.”

McDaniel will defend a normative account of the distinction between fundamental and nonfundamental properties. On the proposed account, some normative properties are more fundamental than the property of being fundamental. Given this view, there is no need to ‘fit’ normativity into the natural world since normativity is already needed to even characterize the very joints of the natural world.

McDaniel works primarily in metaphysics and has published on ontology, persistence through time, composition, and modality. He also has interests in the history of philosophy and ethics.