Professor Saul Smilansky

Saul Smilansky is a Professor at the department of philosophy, University of Haifa, Israel. He is spending his sabbatical at Oxford until the end of July 2024. He works on normative and applied ethics, the free will problem, and meaning in life. His main project for the year is trying to complete a book on the idea of "Crazy Ethics", a view of morality where frequently matters seem to be true (or at least plausible) yet are also absurd. With few exceptions (primarily in population ethics, following the work of Parfit) this aspect of life has been neglected within analytic philosophy. He is the author of Free Will and Illusion (Oxford University Press 2000), 10 Moral Paradoxes (Blackwell 2007), and over one hundred papers in philosophical journals and edited collections. 

Some recent papers -  

"A Hostage Situation", Journal of Philosophy 116 (2019): 447-466.

"Should We Sacrifice the Utilitarians First?", Philosophical Quarterly 70 (2020): 850-867.

"The Idea of Moral Duties to History", Philosophy 96 (2021): 155-179.

"A Puzzle About Self-Sacrificing Altruism", Journal of Controversial Ideas doi: https://journalofcontroversialideas.org/article/1/1/135

"Contribution, Replaceability and the Meaning of Our Lives", Theoria 87 (2021): 1481-1496. 

"Illusionism", in Derk Pereboom and Dana Nelkin, eds., Oxford Handbook of Moral Responsibility. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 

"Paradoxes and Meaning in Life", in Iddo Landau, ed., Oxford Handbook for Meaning in Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022. 

"Reversing Pascal: Skepticism about Religious Belief and Its Value", Religious Studies doi:10.1017/S0034412522000592

"Normative Pluralism and Autonomous Vehicles", in Ryan Jenkins, Tomáš Hříbek and David Černý, eds., AV Ethics: Beyond the Trolley Problem. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. 

"God as an Asset and Some Paradoxical Implications", Religious Studies https://doi.org/10.1017/S0034412523000082