Hume on Is and Ought [Hardcover]

It 'seems altogether inconceivable', says Hume, that this 'new relation' ought 'can be a deduction' from others 'which are entirely different from it' The idea that you can't derive an ought from an is, moral conclusions from non-moral premises, has proved enormously influential. But what did Hume mean by this famous dictum? Was he correct? How does it fit in with the rest of his philosophy? And what does this suggest about the nature of moral judgements? This collection, the first on this topic for forty years, assembles a distinguished cast of international scholars to discuss these questions. The book combines historical scholarship, meta-ethics and cutting–edge research in philosophical logic. It includes three distinct attempts to reformulate and prove No-Ought-From-Is in the face of Prior's famous counterexamples. 
 

This is a path-breaking collection of essays show-casing recent work on Hume and the Is/Ought question

CHARLES PIGDEN is Senior Lecturer, Department of Philosophy, University of Otago, New Zealand. He has published on a wide range of topics from conspiracy theories to the reality of numbers. He is a meta-ethicist with special interests in Russell, Moore and Hume. He is the editor of Hume on Motivation and Virtue in the Palgrave Macmillan Series Philosophers in Depth.