Professor
Ph.D., Brown University, 1968
Appointed at UMass: 1969

Prior teaching appointments:

University of Illinois at Chicago Circle
University of Michigan (visiting)
Yale University (visiting)
Amherst College (visiting)
SUNY Albany (visiting)

Areas of interest:

Normative ethics, metaethics,
philosophical problems about death, metaphysics.

Current research:

Fred’s new book Pleasure and the Good Life: Concerning the Nature, Varieties and Plausibility of Hedonism came out in spring, 2004. You can see the table of contents here. Philosophical Studies has invited papers for a book symposium on Fred’s book. Over the summer, Fred presented a talk on “Actual Utility, the Objection from Impracticality, and the Move to Expected Utility” at the Bellingham Summer Philosophy Conference. He has been invited to present papers at Stockholm , Lund , and other places in Sweden in November. He has also been invited to present the R. M. Hare Memorial Lecture at the University of Florida in November. The topic there will be “The Open Question Argument: What It Is, and What It Isn’t”. Fred’s critical study of Stephen Darwall's "Welfare and Rational Care" is scheduled for publication in Philosophical Studies soon. Recently, Fred has been especially puzzled by a question about the relation between theory and practice in ethics. “What should a person do when he wants to do the right thing, but does not know what it is?” This may provide the topic for Fred’s graduate seminar in the spring of 2005. Fred's CV can be found here.

Drafts of Fred's current papers, as well as some of his other works of art, can be found here.

Selected publications:

Doing the Best We Can (Reidel, 1986)
Confrontations with the Reaper (Oxford, 1992)
Utilitarianism, Hedonism, and Desert (Cambridge, 1997)
Pleasure and the Good Life: On the Nature, Varieties, and Plausibility of Hedonism (Oxford, 2004)

Links:

Philosophy 160 Web Page: http://www-unix.oit.umass.edu/~philos/phil160