Epistemology | Ethics | Social-Political Philosophy

Ph.D. University of Arizona

Matthew Bedke is a professor of philosophy at the University of British Columbia. He is interested in normativity, including ethics and epistemology.

Office Hours - 2020W1:

• Tuesdays, 10:00 - 11:00 AM
• Also available by appointment (matt.bedke@ubc.ca)

Matt Bedke specializes in normativity. He look at first-order inquiries in ethics, prudence, rationality, epistemology, political philosophy etc., and he gravitates toward the second-order semantic, meta-semantic, metaphysical, epistemic, psychological and logical questions that arise. Sometimes he sticks to the first-order inquires to weigh in on what matters and what reasons we have.

Selected Recent:

• (forthcoming). “A Dilemma for Non-Naturalists: Irrationality or Immorality?” Philosophical Studies.
• (2019). “Practical Oomph: A Case for Subjectivism.” Philosophical Quarterly 277: 657–77.
• (2018). “Non-Descriptive Relativism.” Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 13 (R. Shafer-Landau, ed.), Oxford University Press.

Selected Recent:

• “Naturalism and Normative Cognition”, Wuhan, China, February 2019.
• “Are Non-Naturalists Irrational or Immoral?” Keynote speaker, SFU conference on “Ways of Knowing in Ethics”, June 2018.
• “Cosmic Coincidence”, UC Davis ethics group, April 2018.