Research Interests

Ira Singer
Department of Philosophy, Hofstra University

New: I have posted HTML versions of (1) "Demea's Challenge," a paper on Hume's Dialogues that I presented to the American Philosophical Association Central Division meeting in 1992; and (2) "Freedom and Revision," a paper on free will presented at the APA Pacific Division meeting in 1993.

My main research interests are in ethics and in the history of modern philosophy.

In ethics I am especially interested in foundational issues: what sort of objectivity can ethical claims have? How far can ethics be "naturalized"? How can naturalism (of some sort or other) be compatible with genuine normativity? I also think about the issues of free will and of personal identity, insofar as these bear on ethics.

In the history of philosophy I am especially interested in the modern period, particularly Hume. One general issue that I have worked on is the kind of conflict Hume describes so vividly, a conflict between the general skepticism that rigorous philosophical thinking seems to lead to, and the fact that we inevitably return to some basic or indispensable beliefs in spite of all our philosophical scruples.

I have secondary interests in contemporary epistemology, in political philosophy, and in philosophy of religion.

Woven throughout my philosophical interests is an interest in metaphilosophy: what can philosophy hope to achieve? (If it does not offer us a definitive account of the truth about ourselves, what sort of insight can it nevertheless provide?) When two philosophical tendencies are at an impasse, what is the best way to proceed? (I suspect that, with respect to a wide range of philosophical problems, we would do well to think more about the flexibility of our concepts, and to pursue a "perspicuous overview" that does justice to the variability of the conceptual terrain.)