Emad H Atiq

eatiq[at]cornell[dot]edu

I am a Professor of Law & Philosophy at Cornell Law School and the Sage School of Philosophy in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell.

I received a PhD in philosophy from Princeton University, where my committee consisted of Gideon Rosen, Michael Smith, Sarah McGrath, and Philip Pettit. Before that, I was at Yale Law School, where I earned a JD, and prior to that I completed an Mphil in philosophy at the University of Cambridge. My BA, which was also at Princeton, was in economics and applied mathematics. You can view my CV here.

Research summary:

My work explores the nature of normative reasoning, and the connections between moral, legal, and epistemic norms.

In the philosophy of law, my published work defends the claim that legal facts are partly determined by moral facts; raises a new challenge for opposing views, based on the history of legal systems; and argues the persistent disagreement about the relationship between law and morality undermines claims of objectivity in recent legal theory. Apart from jurisprudence, I have published on the philosophy of contract law, on convention-dependent normative questions, on how judges should reason about moral questions under the law, and on the scope of judicial obligations to follow the law.

In ethics and epistemology, my published work includes papers on the ethical implications of broadly expressivist views of the nature of moral thought and talk; on how best to understand the supervenience of the normative on the non-normative; on ground-theoretic attempts to distinguish quasi-realism from full-blooded realism about normative truth; and on the nature and moral significance of knowledge by perceptual acquaintance. My work in this area is increasingly guided by the aim of developing a naturalistically acceptable account of the objectivity of moral demands, and, relatedly, an account of moral reasoning based on knowledge by acquaintance.

I co-organize (with Matt Duncan) the Cornell Workshop on Mind and Value.

Books:

Scholarly articles:

Reviews & essays:

Work in progress (titles suppressed for blind review):

Teaching: