Public Research Talk: Choosing Good or Evil—Royce and Emerson on Knowing the Difference with Scott Pratt

In Studies of Good and Evil, Josiah Royce argues that moral agents must know both good and evil: One can act morally only by choosing good despite temptation. Yet Royce’s own framework complicates this distinction. Although he establishes the necessity of good and evil, he also concludes that no particular goods or evils are necessary, leaving moral agents without a certain means of identifying either when making a choice. This talk considers whether Ralph Waldo Emerson—despite interpretations that portray him as denying the existence of evil—offers another way to discern good and evil through the cultivation of what John Dewey later called aesthetic experience.

Scott L. Pratt is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. His research and teaching focus on American philosophy, including pragmatism, feminist philosophy, philosophies of race, and Indigenous philosophy, as well as philosophy of education and the history of logic.
Pratt is the author of Native Pragmatism: Rethinking the Roots of American Philosophy and Logic: Inquiry, Argument and Order, and coauthor of American Philosophies from Wounded Knee to the Present. He has also co-edited several volumes and published widely on pragmatism, pluralism, logic, and Indigenous North American philosophy.
His current projects include Absolute Pragmatism; a co-authored history of natural logic; and Against Critical Reason: Logic, Colonization, and Indigenous Philosophy, which examines the role of logic in the colonization of North America and its implications for contemporary anti-colonial and decolonial thought.

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This event is being hosted elsewhere on campus, and not by the History Department. To learn more, please see the original event posting.