Peter Vanderschraaf
Associate Professor
School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts
Office Phone:
Email: pvanderschraaf@ucmerced.edu
My research focuses on the analysis of social conventions and investigating their proper role in moral and political philosophy. I am particularly interested in exploring the relationship between conventions and justice. While philosophers since Plato have discussed conventions, most of these philosophers have tended to dismiss conventionalist accounts of justice and moral systems. But convention remains a relatively poorly understood notion. I believe that if one adopts a sufficiently rich analysis of convention, the case for conventionalist justice and conventionalist morality becomes much more promising. My work is driven by my ongoing attempts to answer such fundamental questions as: (1) What are the conditions that characterize conventions? (2) How do conventions originate? (3) Why do conventions sometimes change? (4) Given an adequate analysis of conventions, can justice be understood as merely a system of conventions? (5) Can a conventionalist analysis of moral systems be descriptively adequate, in that such an analysis coheres with our considered judgments regarding morality?
School of Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts
Office Phone:
Email: pvanderschraaf@ucmerced.edu
Research Interests:
My research focuses on the analysis of social conventions and investigating their proper role in moral and political philosophy. I am particularly interested in exploring the relationship between conventions and justice. While philosophers since Plato have discussed conventions, most of these philosophers have tended to dismiss conventionalist accounts of justice and moral systems. But convention remains a relatively poorly understood notion. I believe that if one adopts a sufficiently rich analysis of convention, the case for conventionalist justice and conventionalist morality becomes much more promising. My work is driven by my ongoing attempts to answer such fundamental questions as: (1) What are the conditions that characterize conventions? (2) How do conventions originate? (3) Why do conventions sometimes change? (4) Given an adequate analysis of conventions, can justice be understood as merely a system of conventions? (5) Can a conventionalist analysis of moral systems be descriptively adequate, in that such an analysis coheres with our considered judgments regarding morality?