Name Alice Crary Region Western philosophy | Role Philosopher | |
Born 1967 Seattle, WA Main interests Moral Philosophy, Philosophy and Literature, Philosophy and Animals, Wittgenstein and Austin, Feminism and Philosophy Notable ideas Moral thought beyond moral judgment; Wider view of objectivity; Faulty logic of the math wars Areas of interest Philosophy and literature, Ethics Books Beyond Moral Judgment, Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought Alma mater | ||
Philosophical era 20th-century philosophy Schools of thought Analytic philosophy | ||
Wittgenstein & Ethics
Alice Crary (; born 1967) is an American philosopher, Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Faculty, and founding Co-Chair of the Gender and Sexuality Studies program at The New School for Social Research (NSSR) in New York City. She is well known for her numerous scholarly works on the moral dimension of language, as well as edited collections on Wittgenstein, Cora Diamond, and Stanley Cavell. Crary is the author of two monographs on ethics, Beyond Moral Judgment (Harvard, 2007) and Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought (Harvard, 2016), an Association of College and Research Libraries Choice Outstanding Academic Title of 2016.
Contents
- Wittgenstein Ethics
- Alice Crary Wikipedia audio article
- Scholarship
- Graduate students and teaching
- Popular writing
- Selected publications
- Invited lectures and awards
- References
While finishing her doctorate in philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh in the 1990s, she co-edited and wrote the introduction to the The New Wittgenstein, which continues to influence debates over Wittgenstein's philosophy. She was a Humboldt Foundation Scholar in 2009–10 at Goethe University in Frankfurt and a Rockefeller Fellow in 2003–4 at Princeton University. Crary has lectured and taught widely in the U.S. and abroad in academic and public fora, including the International Wittgenstein Symposium in Kirchberg Austria, the Columbia University Society of Fellows in the Humanities, the Center for Philosophy, Art, and Literature at Duke University, the University of Stavanger, Queen's University in Kingston Ontario, Colgate University, and Brooklyn Public Philosophers in NYC.
Crary's writings address moral philosophy, Wittgenstein, philosophy and literature, feminism and philosophy, the writings of J.M. Coetzee, W.G. Sebald, and Leo Tolstoy, and issues surrounding philosophy and animals and cognitive disability.
Alice Crary | Wikipedia audio article
Scholarship
Beyond Moral Judgment "defends a version of moral objectivism which turns on the idea that participation in moral life involves sensitivities, affective responses, and acquired proclivities: subjective capacities which nevertheless allow us to be receptive to objective features of the world," and has been influential in recent discussions on ethics in aesthetics, film theory, feminism, and metaethics.
Crary's second book, Inside Ethics: On the Demands of Moral Thought (January 2016, Harvard University Press), discusses the nature and difficulty of moral thought about human beings and animals, addressing topics ranging from moral development to cognitive disability. As noted in a contemporary review,
Most contemporary ethicists assume that any objective representation of human and animal life must be developed outside of ethics, using the normatively neutral methods of, for example, the natural sciences. Crary, in contrast, argues that humans and animals have empirically observable moral characteristics, recognition of which is crucial to moral thought, but which are inaccessible to us when we limit ourselves to neutral methods. Good, "world-guided" moral thought, according to Crary, requires the use of capacities such as moral imagination, the exercise of which is elicited by methods (including various narrative techniques) that are characteristic of the arts and humanities. Works employing such methods contribute directly to moral understanding by drawing us into the imaginative exploration of other moral perspectives....Crary embarks on a radical re-visioning of objective reality as including, rather than excluding, moral values. The idea that reality includes objective moral values combines objectivism (the idea that moral judgments are essentially concerned with how things are) with internalism (the idea that moral judgments have direct bearing on our reasons for acting). The dominant stance in philosophical ethics, she points out, is to embrace a hard metaphysic that rejects one or both of these ideas. Crary identifies, as the unquestioned starting point for such a metaphysic, the "familiar and allegedly scientific worldview" (31) according to which the natural sciences have exclusive authority to tell us what reality is objectively like. A central part of [the book] is devoted to showing how both Peter Singer and Christine Korsgaard accept this starting point and embrace, in different ways, the hard metaphysic to which it leads.
Another review summarizes the main claims of Inside Ethics as follows:
Among the theses that Crary propounds in service of her ultimate goal are: there are observable and essentially practical moral properties, objectively describing humans and animals requires an ethical sensitivity to those moral properties, being a human and being an animal are by themselves morally significant properties, and literature is an irreplaceable vehicle of moral reflection for grasping the moral significance of humans and other animals....She proposes what I would call a post-Romantic perspective that takes our possibilities for moral response to be equally affective and rational. Crary encourages us to take more seriously the moral thought of those engaged with the most vulnerable humans and animals. This seems to me of the highest importance and part of an expansive program for moral thought that demands further philosophical exploration.
Crary is a member of a number of international research groups devoted to subjects such as feminist philosophy and ordinary language philosophy.
Graduate students and teaching
Crary currently directs eleven PhD theses in the Department of Philosophy at The New School for Social Research. In July 2016, she served on the faculty of the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies at the 25th anniversary NSSR Europe Democracy and Diversity Institute in Wroclow, Poland.
Popular writing
Her commentary, with W. Stephen Wilson, on the faulty logic behind the K-12 education "Math Wars" appeared in The New York Times philosophy blog, The Stone.