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Alexandra King

Associate Professor and Department Chair
Philosophy

Education

  • Ph.D. in Philosophy, Brown University 
  • B.A. in Philosophy with Honors, Minor in Mathematics, University of Chicago

Biography

My research is generally concerned with moral and aesthetic oughts, reasons, and normativity.

I have written extensively about the 'ought implies can' principle, according to which we (roughly) can do anything we are morally obligated to do. I have argued against this in a few articles and in my monograph, What We Ought and What We Can (Routledge, 2019).

Currently, I am thinking through what aesthetic normativity looks like: the shape it takes, its parallels and interactions with other varieties of normativity (like the moral and epistemic), and whether it can be said to exist at all.

Within aesthetics, I am also interested in an assortment of issues, including subtlety, high and low art, aesthetic/artistic agency, and applied arts.

I also own, run, and regularly write for the aesthetics and philosophy of art blog , which aims to make concepts and arguments in academic aesthetics accessible to a wide, public audience.

Publications

Below is a list of selected publications. For a full list, please see .

BOOK:

  • What We Ought and What We Can, Routledge, 2019

JOURNAL ARTICLES:

  • 鈥淢etaethics and Meta-aesthetics鈥 in the Oxford Handbook of Ethics and Art (ed. James Harold), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023
  • 鈥淯niversalism and the Problem of Aesthetic Diversity鈥, Journal of the American Philosophical Association, 2023
  • 鈥淩esponse-Dependence and Aesthetic Theory鈥 in Fittingness (eds. Chris Howard and R.A. Rowland), Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023
  • 鈥淩easons, Normativity, and Value in Aesthetics鈥, Philosophy Compass 17:1, 1-17, 2023

Courses

Future courses may be subject to change.