The event will focus on Andrei Marmor’s newly published OUP book, Foundations of Institutional Reality – Julie Dickson (Oxford) and Frank Hindriks (Groningen) commenting. The event is in-person only and since space is limited requires pre-registration.

Summary of Foundations of Institutional Reality

“In Foundations of Institutional Reality, Andrei Marmor provides a novel account of the ontological foundations of institutional facts, and argues that there are important epistemic and methodological implications that follow from this ontology. Marmor offers a grounding-reductive account of collective attitudes that comports with methodological individualism. He argues for a functional explanation of the constitutive relations between rules and practices, challenging Searle’s influential distinction between constitutive and regulative rules.”

About the Speaker:

Andrei Marmor is the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Philosophy and Law. Prior to joining Cornell in 2015, he was Professor of Philosophy and Maurice Jones Jr Professor of Law at the University of Southern California. Having obtained his first law and philosophy degrees at the Tel Aviv University in Israel, and a D.Phil at Oxford University, UK, he returned to Tel Aviv University, where he taught as professor of law for ten years, before moving to the US.

His research interests span philosophy of law, moral, social and political philosophy, and philosophy of language. Marmor published dozens of articles, six book monographs and a number of edited volumes. His most recent books include Social Conventions: from language to law (Princeton, 2009), Philosophy of Law (Princeton, 2011) and The Language of Law (Oxford, 2014). His books and articles also appeared in numerous translations, including in Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Hebrew, and Italian.

Marmor is the founding editor of the Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy, and the editor of several important volumes in legal philosophy, including, most recently, The Philosophical Foundations of Language in the Law (with Scott Soames, Oxford 2011), and The Routlege Companion to Philosophy of Law.

Optional reading from Prof Marmor’s book will be circulated close to the seminar date.