What I Am Doing

The first session of the EPLab Permanent Seminar, entitled “What I Am Doing”, will be led by José M. Pereira. The session will take place on 14 October at 14:30 in room A209 of NOVA FCSH (Berna). The session will be held in English.

Abstract

This essay aims to canvas and systematize extant approaches to philosophy, with a greater emphasis on political philosophy. Its focus is not so much, to the extent a separation can be neatly made, on what constitutes good theorizing — questions of method — but on what should be the objects, domain, and goals of inquiry — questions of metaphilosophy (Bengson, Cuneo & Shafer-Landau 2022). I will discuss the ideal/non-ideal theory debate, disambiguating the many meanings of “ideal” (Rawls 1971, Mills 2005, Cappelen & Dever 2021). And I will cover recent approaches such as judgment-based political theory (Bagg 2022, Guess 2008), moral science (Schmidtz 2023), and activist philosophy (Plou, Castro & Torices 2022, Almagro & Guerra 2023).

This periple will serve to situate and flesh-out my own approach, which I will call philosophical probing. Philosophical probing is a form of engaged philosophy (Wolff 2018) that starts from the periphery of knowledge (Kitcher 2011) and recognizes the intellectual division of labour between philosophy and the sciences (Kitcher 2023), and emphasises philosophy’s public value (Guerrero 2023). It echoes recent work done in so-called applied philosophy of language (Cappelen 2023), applied epistemology (Almagro 2025), and applied metaphysics (Schulz 2025). I’ll present my research in the philosophy of work as an example centring moral normativity.

More information on the EPLab Permanent Seminar here.