Derek Baker — About

Associate Professor of Philosophy · Frankfurt School of Finance & Management

My research has been a series of attempts to make sense of the possibility of normative thought. I am still working on it. It has led to explorations of expressivism and quasirealism, and more recently, of radical normative pluralism. Earlier work deals with the nature of desire and self-knowledge.

I also have research interests in social and political epistemology, and I am working on papers exploring what classical ideas of virtue and personal well-being should look like once we realize that human rationality is bounded.

I find all of philosophy interesting, and so I like teaching on just about any topic that isn't too technical.

I am currently an Associate Professor in the Computational Science and Philosophy Department at Frankfurt School of Finance and Management; prior to that I lived in Hong Kong, where I taught for 13 years at Lingnan University.

This website was made by Claude with some instructions from me. I believe any part of our lives that involves processing information should now be ambitious and elaborate to a degree that would have been silly before. The website is intended as a tiny example of that.

Metaethics · Moral Psychology · Social Epistemology

Journal Articles & Book Chapters

1. Mandatory Retirement and Arbitrary Power
   In Is Mandatory Retirement Morally Defensible? Ethics, Economics, and Law in Ageing Societies, H.L. Li (ed.), Routledge (forthcoming)
   Penultimate Draft Publisher
2. Handling Rejection (with Jack Woods)
   Philosophical Studies 180 (2023): 159–90
   Penultimate Draft Published Version
3. Deflating the Many Attitudes Problem
   Philosophical Quarterly 72 (2022): 1–18
   Penultimate Draft Published Version
4. If You’re Quasi-Explaining, You’re Quasi-Losing
   Oxford Studies in Metaethics 16, R. Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford University Press (2022): 54–80
   Penultimate Draft Publisher
5. Quasirealism as Semantic Dispensability
   Philosophical Studies 178 (2021): 2313–33
   Penultimate Draft Published Version
6. Skepticism about Ought Simpliciter
   Oxford Studies in Metaethics 13, R. Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford University Press (2018): 230–52
   Penultimate Draft Published Version
7. Expression and Guidance in Schroeder’s Expressivist Semantics
   Erkenntnis 83 (2018): 829–52
   Penultimate Draft Published Version
8. The Varieties of Normativity
   In The Routledge Handbook of Metaethics, T. McPherson and D. Plunkett (eds.), Routledge (2017): 567–81
   Penultimate Draft Publisher
9. The Verdictive Organization of Desire
   Canadian Journal of Philosophy 47 (2017): 589–612
   Penultimate Draft Published Version
10. Deliberators Must Be Imperfect
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 93 (2016): 321–47
    Penultimate Draft Published Version
11. Intuitions about Disagreement Do Not Support the Normativity of Meaning
    dialectica 70 (2016): 65–84
    Penultimate Draft Published Version
12. On Rationally Valuing One’s Life
    Special issue of Asian Bioethics Review, B. Steinbock (ed.), 8 (2016): 1–16
    Published Version
13. Why Transparency Undermines Economy
    Synthese 192 (2015): 3037–50
    Penultimate Draft Published Version
14. Akrasia and the Problem of the Unity of Reason
    Ratio 28 (2015): 65–80
    Penultimate Draft Published Version
15. How Expressivists Can and Should Explain Inconsistency (with Jack Woods)
    Ethics 125 (2015): 391–424
    Penultimate Draft Published Version PEA Soup Discussion
    Topic of an online symposium at PEA Soup, with a critical précis by Mark Schroeder.
16. The Abductive Case for Humeanism over Quasi-Perceptual Theories of Desire
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 8 (2014): 1–29
    Penultimate Draft Published Version
17. Knowing Yourself—and Giving Up on Your Own Agency in the Process
    Australasian Journal of Philosophy 90 (2012): 641–56
    Penultimate Draft Published Version
18. Ambivalent Desires and the Problem with Reduction
    Philosophical Studies 150 (2010): 37–47
    Penultimate Draft Published Version

Discussion Notes

1. Comments on Victor Tadros’s “Treatment and Accountability”
   In Lanson Lectures in Bioethics (2016–2022): Assisted Suicide, Responsibility, and Pandemic Ethics, H.L. Li (ed.), Palgrave Macmillan (2024): 159–68
   Publisher

Book Reviews

1. Social Goodness: The Ontology of Social Norms, by Charlotte Witt
   Journal of Moral Philosophy 23 (2026): 535–38
2. Free Will and Action Explanation, by Scott Sehon
   Australasian Journal of Philosophy 96 (2018): 411–13
3. Motivational Internalism, eds. G. Björnsson, C. Strandberg, R. Francén Olinder, J. Eriksson, and F. Björklund
   Australasian Journal of Philosophy 94 (2016): 814–16
   Published Version

Management, Philosophy & Economics · Applied Data Science

My teaching is primarily within Frankfurt School’s Management, Philosophy and Economics programme. Below are some recent and upcoming courses:

I also teach in the Master in Applied Data Science programme:

DBake Squared · A Substack with Dave Baker

Outside of philosophy, I have a Substack with Dave Baker, DBake Squared. It was originally planned as a discussion of science fiction. Then real life became science fiction, so we (primarily I) began contributing to the Discourse. There is probably some lower level of Hell waiting for me as punishment.

For those who like good things, here’s the first part of my four-part essay on Dune (I don’t care if you think it is too long; filling Substack with two-thousand-word essays because those get more engagement is the slopification of our culture, not AI).

For another good thing, here’s Dave’s discussion of AI consciousness.

For weirdos who think that the world has been made better by thwarted intellectuals and autodidacts with an unusual talent for self-branding ranting about how the world is supposed to work, my personal Time Cube can be found here.

I plan to write something good again soon. I promise.

Get in Touch

The best way to reach me is by email.

Impressum · Legal Notice

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