Conférences passées

Kristina Musholt (Leipzig)

"Agency, Mindshaping and the Role of the Emotions"

October 11th

The talk will discuss the importance of affective-laden interactions with others for the development of our ability for autonomous agency in childhood and beyond. I will explore, first, how affective encounters with others enable reasons-responsive agency by introducing us into the space of reasons and by providing us with interpretive frameworks of perceiving the world relative to our aims, concerns, and values. However, as I will show in the second part of the talk, the very same mindshaping processes that enable agency in the sense of reasons-responsiveness also make us susceptible to agency-undermining social practices. Yet, as I will argue in the final part of the talk, the proper response to these threats to our agency should not be seen in a turn towards introspection and a retreat from sociality or the emotions. Rather, we should harness and foster our social and emotional abilities in the service of cultivating our skills of autonomy competence.

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Simona Chiodo (Milan)

"From Phoebus to witches to death clocks. Why we are taking predictive technologies to the extreme"

31 Mai 2024

Je me concentrerai sur les technologies émergentes qui tentent de plus en plus de prédire notre mort, c’est-à-dire quand nous mourrons et pour quelle cause. Plus précisément, je me concentrerai sur la réponse possible à la question philosophique suivante : pourquoi poussons-nous les technologies prédictives à l’extrême ? Tout d’abord, je réfléchirai aux résultats de recherches empiriques récentes. Deuxièmement, j’aborderai la question de pousser les technologies prédictives à l’extrême, c’est-à-dire de prédire la mort d’une personne, à travers des outils philosophiques, depuis des expériences de pensée jusqu’à une perspective philosophique sur la raison principale possible pour laquelle nous utilisons le pouvoir de prédiction sans précédent des technologies émergentes pour améliorer davantage. et plus notre connaissance du moment où nous mourrons et de quelle cause. La réponse philosophique que je propose est la suivante : même les horloges de la mort, ainsi que d’autres types de technologies émergentes qui acquièrent un pouvoir de prédiction sans précédent, peuvent d’une manière ou d’une autre nous sauver en réactivant notre production de sens chaque fois que notre vie est incertaine et exigeante au point que nous ne pouvons pas y faire face. notre avenir ouvert en planifiant et en agissant par nous-mêmes. S’il est vrai que le prix que nous payons, c’est-à-dire une sorte d’automatisation de notre propre avenir, est extrêmement élevé, il est également vrai que, à notre époque incertaine et exigeante sans précédent, la création de sens autonome semble nous effrayer encore plus.

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Elisabeth Schellekens (Uppsala)

"Thinking the Aesthetic : Towards a Noetic conception of Aesthetic Experience"

8 Mars 2024

My main aim in this paper is argue for a reconfiguration of the relation between aesthetic and cognitive value. It is my claim that aesthetic experience is best conceived as a kind of explorative thought process which allows us to engage in contemplations, observations and considerations which, although not directly aimed at acquiring knowledge, often lead to an enhanced understanding or improved epistemic grasp both of the object of appreciation itself and of the wider context in which it is lodged. I shall refer to this as the noetic conception of aesthetic experience in virtue of its emphasis on the intellect (as opposed to the sensory). On this conception, aesthetic value acts as an invitation to engage in a series of contemplative and reflective processes during which we rely not only on the perceptual, imaginative and affective abilities which have occupied such a central role in aesthetic theory, but also on our capacities for sense-making and theory-building. Aesthetic experience can, then, be understood as a way of rendering intelligible possible avenues of thought through the rich and complex interplay of all these abilities and skills

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Mathias Thaler (Edinburgh)

"Eco-Miserabilism and Radical Hope"

February 9th 2024

Eco-miserabilism—the thought that it is already too late to avert the collapse of human civilization—is gaining traction in contemporary environmentalism. This paper offers a “reparative” reading of this post-apocalyptic approach by defending it against those who associate it with defeatism and fatalism. My argument is that authors like Roy Scranton and the members of the Dark Mountain collective, while rejecting mainstream activism, remain invested in a specific kind of (radical) hope. Eco-miserabilists, hence, promote an affective politics for our climate-changed world that is both negative and iconoclastic. Without offering blueprints for a desirable future, they critically interrogate reality and disenchant the “cruel optimism” (Lauren Berlant) behind reformist plans for a “good Anthropocene.” The ultimate target of the eco-miserabilist position is the illusion that groundbreaking innovations, either in the realm of science and technology or of ordinary representative politics, could redeem us on an environmentally ravaged planet.

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Hilla Jacobson (Jerusalem)

"On the Very Idea of Valenced Perception"

15 Décembre 2023

Tradition contrasts ‘cold,’ motivationally-inert, ‘standard’ perception with ‘hot,’ motivationally-potent, emotion and affect. Against this backdrop, it has recently been argued that perceptual experiences have another fundamental phenomenal aspect, beyond their sensory aspects – perception in all sense-modalities is (at least often) Intrinsically valenced. Roughly, its phenomenal character is inherently pleasant or unpleasant, feeling good or bad to some degree. Yet, the revolutionary notion of Intrinsically Valenced Perception (IVP) requires elucidation and is fraught with theoretical difficulties. The paper aims to explicate and address some foundational questions regarding the very notion of IVP : What is required for perception to be intrinsically valenced ? Specifically, if perception itself is valenced, what should be the relations between its valenced aspects and sensory aspects ? The paper identifies the relevant notion of IVP by uncovering various principles that express constraints and desiderata that IVP must meet. It further offers a Determination-Dimension Model of the relations between sensory and valenced aspects that aims to resolve the previously identified theoretical difficulties.

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Erasmus Mayr (Erlangen/Nuernberg)

"Intentional Agency and Practical Knowledge"

10 Novembre 2023

In her ’Intention’, Elizabeth Anscombe famously claimed that agents, in acting intentionally, have non-observational, ’practical’ knowledge of their actions. Anscombe’s claim has found enthusiastic adherents, but many philosophers have remained skeptical. The situation between these groups has developed into something of a stalemate, since the positive arguments for Anscombe’s claim mostly come from a broadly Anscombean perspective on intentional agency, and are thus unlikely to persuade philosophers who are not already attracted to this perspective. By contrast, the question of whether the case for a necessary connection between intentional agency and non-observational, ’practical’ knowledge of the kind Anscombe envisages can be made on independent grounds is (with few exceptions) still relatively unexplored. In this talk, I will try to develop an qualified defense of Anscombe’s claim which aims to show that even philosophers attracted to a non-Anscombean ’standard’ picture of intentional agency have good reasons to accept her claim.

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Jonathan Mitchell (Cardiff)

"The Intentional Horizons of Visual Experience"

Vendredi 13 Octobre 2023 à 11h

How is it that we can visually experience complete three-dimensional objects despite the fact we are limited, in any given perceptual moment, to perceiving the sides facing us from a specific spatial perspective ? To make sense of this, such visual experiences must refer to occluded or presently unseen back-sides which (i) are not sense-perceptually given (which are strictly not visually experienced), and (ii) which cannot be sense-perceptually given while the subject is occupying the spatial perspective on the object that they currently are – I call this the horizonality of visual experience. Existing accounts of these horizonal references are unsatisfactory. In providing a satisfactory account, this paper argues that that the content and structure of the visual experience of complete three-dimensional objects is as follows : we are perceptually presented with the objects being perceptible from yet-to-be-determined different ego-centric locations. As part of the content of visual experience, this motivates non-propositional attitudes of anticipation. Explicating this proposal is the central positive aim of this paper.

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