Annette Baier

Annette C. Baier (née Stoop) (born 1929) is a well-known moral philosopher and Hume scholar, focusing in particular on Hume's moral psychology. For most of her career she taught in the philosophy department at the University of Pittsburgh, having moved there from Carnegie Mellon University. She retired to her native Dunedin, New Zealand, where she graduated from the University of Otago. She is also well known for her contributions to feminist philosophy and to the philosophy of mind, where she was strongly influenced by her former colleague, Wilfrid Sellars. Her husband is the philosopher Kurt Baier.

She is a former President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, an office reserved for the elite of her profession. Baier received an honorary Doctor of Literature from the University of Otago in 1999.

Philosophy

Baier's approach to ethics is that women and men make their decisions about right and wrong based on different value systems: men take their moral decisions according to an idea of justice, while women are motivated by a sense of trust or caring. The history of philosophy having been overwhelmingly compiled by men, she suggests, leads to a body of thought which apparently ignores the role of nurture and trust in human philosophy.^[1]

Bibliography

• Postures of the Mind: Essays on Mind and Morals (1985)
• A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume's Treatise (1991)
• Moral Prejudices (1995), including especially "What Do Women Want in an Ethical Theory?" and "The Need For More Than Justice".
• The Commons of the Mind (Paul Carus lectures) (1997)
• Death and Character: Further Reflections on Hume (Harvard University Press, 2008)
• Reflections on How We Live (Oxford University Press, 2009)

References