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From Metaethicist to Bioethicist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 August 2002

ROBERT BAKER
Affiliation:
Robert Baker, Ph.D., is Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Center for Bioethics and Clinical Leadership at Union College (New York), Co-Director of the Albany Medical College–Union College Distance Learning Masters in Bioethics Program, and Visiting Fellow at the University of Pennsylvania Center for Bioethics

Extract

I was the graduate student that Albert Jonsen so aptly describes. Bronx born and educated at the City College of New York, I emigrated to the Midwest to study at the Minnesota Center for the Philosophy of Science, where May Brodbeck, Herbert Feigl and other “logical positivists” were engaging in an ongoing dialogue with postpositivists like Paul Feyerabend and Karl Popper. In this environment, I studied philosophy of science, epistemology, and metaethics—the epistemology and logic of ethical concepts and language. I even wrote my thesis on the ur-text of the metaethical turn, G. E. Moore's Principia Ethica. Then, like other epistemologists and metaethicists, “a public disaster, the American military involvement in Southeast Asia,” as well as the burgeoning civil rights movement, drew me into the sphere of public debate.

Type
SPECIAL SECTION: FIRST VOICES
Copyright
© 2002 Cambridge University Press

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