Education
Oddie was educated at the University of Otago, where he received a first class honors degree in philosophy, and at the London School of Economics, where he received a Doctor of Philosophy in logic and philosophy of science (1979).
(Value, Reality, and Desire is an extended argument for a ...)
Value, Reality, and Desire is an extended argument for a robust realism about value. The robust realist affirms the following distinctive theses. There are genuine claims about value which are true or false--there are facts about value. These value-facts are mind-independent - they are not reducible to desires or other mental states, or indeed to any non-mental facts of a non-evaluative kind. And these genuine, mind-independent, irreducible value-facts are causally efficacious. Values, quite literally, affect us. These are not particularly fashionable theses, and taken as a whole they go somewhat against the grain of quite a lot of recent work in the metaphysics of value. Further, against the received view, Oddie argues that we can have knowledge of values by experiential acquaintance, that there are experiences of value which can be both veridical and appropriately responsive to the values themselves. Finally, these value-experiences are not the products of some exotic and implausible faculty of "intuition." Rather, they are perfectly mundane and familiar mental states - namely, desires. This view explains how values can be "intrinsically motivating," without falling foul of the widely accepted "queerness" objection. There are, of course, other objections to each of the realist's claims. In showing how and why these objections fail, Oddie introduces a wealth of interesting and original insights about issues of wider interest--including the nature of properties, reduction, supervenience, and causation. The result is a novel and interesting account which illuminates what would otherwise be deeply puzzling features of value and desire and the connections between them.
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philosopher professor professor of philosophy
Oddie was educated at the University of Otago, where he received a first class honors degree in philosophy, and at the London School of Economics, where he received a Doctor of Philosophy in logic and philosophy of science (1979).
He has been Professor of Philosophy at the University of Colorado since 1994. Before moving to the United States he held positions at the University of Otago and Massey University (where he was Professor and Chair of Philosophy from 1988 to 1994). At the University of Colorado he was elected Chair of Philosophy in 1997, and appointed Associate Dean for Humanities and the Arts in 2002.
He is a past President of the Australasian Association of Philosophy, and has held visiting positions at the University of Helsinki, Tantur Institute Jerusalem, the University of London, the Australian National University, the University of Sydney, the University of Canterbury, and Oxford University.
Oddie is best known for his work in the theory of value—including the nature of value, the logic of value and our knowledge of value. He is also known for work on cognitive values (truth, truthlikeness and probability).
His books include Likeness to Truth (the first monograph on the notion of verisimilitude, or closeness to the truth), and Value, Reality, and Desire (an extended defense of the thesis that value is real and irreducible).
(Value, Reality, and Desire is an extended argument for a ...)
(Will be shipped from US. Brand new copy.)