by Steve Nadler

Last spring, Professor Russ Shafer-Landau was awarded one of the university’s prestigious WARF (Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation) Professorships. These are among the highest honors for UW-Madison faculty, and are awarded to advanced career faculty on the basis of significant research achievement. Russ’s area of specialization is metaethics—the area of moral philosophy that investigates the source of morality, its rational authority, and our ability to know right from wrong.

His first book, Moral Realism (Oxford University Press, 2003), resuscitated the traditional idea that the fundamental principles of morality are robustly objective. He has since written or co-authored five other books on moral philosophy. He also the founder of the journal Oxford Studies in Metaethics and is organizer of the annual Madison Metaethics Workshop, which brings more than 100 philosophers from around the world to the University of Wisconsin campus each fall.

In keeping with the terms of the award, which allows the awardee to name the professorship, Russ has named his after our recently retired, long-time and esteemed colleague Elliott Sober.  He says “I named it for Elliott because he was a fixture of the UW department for just shy of half a century and the world's preeminent philosopher of biology.” Aside from the fact that Elliott was President of the APA, the Philosophy of Science Association, a Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, “he always made time for his students and did far more than his share of service to the department, university, and profession. His cheery good nature, his conscientiousness, and his intellectual excellence did a great deal to set the tone for life in the department and created a legacy of the highest scholarly standards and collegiality.”

 

Congratulations to Russ, now the Elliott Sober Professor of Philosophy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.