Thinking, if not yet doing, normativity

I’ve recently indulged – too often – in ending conference or seminar papers with earnest-yet-brief gestures towards the normative side of what I’m getting at. I think this is because the overall leaning of most of my work so far is fairly ontological, but I don’t really want it to be limited in that sort of way (and moreover seem to want let it be known!). The problem, however, with confining thinking on normativity to such brief endings is that it either is totally ignored, or worse, the audience or reader gets the impression you simply mean normative in the sense of stating ‘how things ought to be.’ In any event, I was really pleased to see that Thomas O’Shea has offered an excellent primer on the various (philosophical) approaches that orbit around normativity, which, for those interested in a more expansive and practice-based sense of normativity, should serve as a great starting point.

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