Michael Ridge

Professor

Philosophy
School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

Tel: 0131 650 3657
Email: M.Ridge@ed.ac.uk

Street: Room 13.15
City: 40 George Square, Edinburgh
Post code: EH8 9JX

Biography

Background

Michael Ridge joined the Philosophy Department at Edinburgh in October, 2001. He received a BA in philosophy from Wake Forest University in 1992. After spending a year as the head debate coach at the University of Louisville (1992/1993) he went on to receive an MA from Tufts University in 1995, an MA from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1997 and a PhD in philosophy from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1998. After completing his degree at Chapel Hill he spent two years as a postdoctoral fellow in the Philosophy Program at the Australian National University, Research School of Social Sciences. His doctoral dissertation was in moral theory and he continues to focus his research in moral and political philosophy, though he also has substantial research interests in action theory, the philosophy of mind and the history of philosophy.

Professor Ridge’s primary work is in meta-ethics. In a series of articles he has developed and defended a new form of meta-ethical expressivism ("Ecumenical Expressivism") which attempts to incorporate important cognitivist elements while preserving the main advantages of expressivism. He is currently writing a book-length defense of this view. Professor Ridge also had done considerable work on the debate over moral particularism and moral generalism, culminating in his co-authored (with Sean McKeever) book in that area, Principled Ethics: Generalism as a Regulative Ideal (OUP). He intends to do more work on this topic in the future. He has also done work on a number of side projects, ranging from duties of reparation for historical injustices to the development of new ways of understanding rule consequentialism. In future work he intends to work more on the intersection of meta-ethics and meta-epistemology, possibly leading to collaborative work with Dr Chrisman and Professor Pritchard.