Contextuality in Practical Reason

A. W. Price takes on a genuine puzzle in moral philosophy: how the same action can seem obligatory in one context and wrong in another, and what that means for the logic of practical reasoning. His argument that ought-judgements carry implicit contextual parameters, and that teleology rather than formal logic governs practical inference, is carefully developed across 208 pages. The Oxford University Press imprint and a Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews notice confirm that this was received as a legitimate contribution to the discipline. The honest assessment for anyone outside academic philosophy, though, is that this is a specialist monograph in a technical tradition; it assumes fluency with analytic ethics that most readers won't have. Within its intended audience — graduate students and research scholars in practical reason — it holds up as a focused and rigorous piece of work.