Introduction: Normativity’s Present and Future

There has been a great deal written about normativity in recent years by philosophers, with a range of accounts developed and questions raised. Various normative notions (or seemingly normative notions) have all attracted a great deal of attention; notions such as reason, duty, ought, obligation, value, standard and norm, and the notion of fittingness. We find discussions of normativity, and perhaps the normative itself, in many domains of philosophical enquiry: ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, logic, and more. Similarly, many figures from the history of philosophy have their thoughts cast in a normative manner. There has been so much written recently about the very idea of normativity that we need to take stock of where we are and think about how present work might point to future thought. This Introduction summarizes various trends of thought, questions, and ideas that philosophers have recently discussed and uses these as a platform to speculate about what directions there might be for future work about normativity. The chapter ends by summarizing the chapters in this volume whilst tying them to the author’s previous thoughts.