My philosophical interests are divided over two broad areas. One is in the overlap of (meta-) ethics and social/political philosophy; the other is in the intersection of philosophy of language, metaphysics, and epistemology. Much (but not all) of my work is most closely affiliated with the analytic tradition both in style and content, and much of it is heavily influenced by the philosophies of Donald Davidson and W.V.O. Quine, but I am also interested in (parts of) Indian, Chinese, and continental philosophy.

Before I became a “philosopher” I was an economic geographer. I gradually moved from one discipline to the other, but I remain interested in geography, heterodox economics, and in the other social sciences as well.

For further information about my research themes, see my personal homepage.


Most of my research and publications belong to one of two themes or projects.

theme 1 — philosophy of cross-cultural interpretation and communication
(Wherein “cross-cultural” refers to any kind of comunication and intepretation over boundaries of time, (philosophical) tradition, language, belief system, or other aspect of culture.)
sub-theme 1a: Philosophical implications of (the possibility of) cross-cultural communication. This sub-theme is focused on metaphysics, epistemology, and the philosophy of language (and where those intersect) and builds on the ideas of Quine and (especially) Davidson. [Keywords: triangulation, conceptual schemes, intersubjectivity, coherentism, positing, (anti-) essentialism, (anti-) realism, (anti-) relativism, perspectivism, concept formation, etcetera.]
sub-theme 1b: This sub-theme focuses on methodological and practical issues: on how to interpret across borders of culture, time, and so forth; and on what can go wrong in cross-cultural communication (and why). [Keywords: misinterpretation, conceptual schemes, othering, the principle of charity, philosophy of anthropology (and other social sciences) methodology of comparative philosophy, etcetera.]

theme 2 — ethics of suffering and compassion
(Wherein “ethics” is to be understood broadly and includes social philosophy.)
sub-theme 2a: Meta-ethics and normative ethics. Building on (and extending) sub-theme 1a (see above), sub-theme 2a focuses on questions of moral epistemology and moral metaphysics mainly. [Keywords: justification of moral beliefs, the metaphysics of acts and rules, the metaphysics and epistemology of consequences, etcetera.]
sub-theme 2b: What does an ethics (including social philosophy) focused on suffering look like? [Keywords: suffering, death, fear of death (as a kind of suffering), compassion, care and empathy, callousness and cultural psychopathy, othering and dehumanization, philosophy of economics, etcetera.]

Lajos Brons

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