Philosophy Philosophy Workshop Series 2021-2022

Philosophy Workshop Series 2021-2022

The format of the workshop is pre-read. Interested participants should contact Desy Williams for the paper, which will be made available 7-10 days in advance of the seminar date.  It is expected that everyone in attendance will have read the paper.  Accordingly, the speaker will give only a brief overview of their essential arguments before discussion begins. Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP. 

Please mark your calendars for these speakers!

Francey Russell - Assistant Professor of Philosophy (Barnard College, Columbia University)
"Self-Opacity and the Mind's Reality"
Abstract: In an essay on the relevance of psychoanalysis for philosophy, Stanley Cavell makes a strange claim. He writes: “Psychoanalysis is the place, perhaps the last, in which the human psyche as such, the idea that there is a life of the mind receives its proof. It receives its proof of its existence in the only form in which that psyche can believe it, namely as essentially unknown to itself, say unconscious.” But what does this mean? Why should the mind’s unknowingness to itself constitute a “proof” of its “existence”? In this paper I canvass two broad traditions in philosophy, the self-consciousness tradition (with roots in Descartes and Kant) and the unconscious tradition (with roots in Nietzsche and Freud). In contemporary philosophy of agency and moral psychology, the latter tradition has been characterized as providing a conception of mind that is “third-personal,” “scientific” or “psychiatric,” where the suggestion is that this conception advocates a kind of staunch psychological realism that alienates us from our ordinary practical self-understanding. Against this I show resources in the unconscious tradition for articulating a non-alienating, value-rich, practical conception of the mind’s unknowingness to itself, and argue that a failure to appreciate this about the mind—that is, about ourselves—constitutes its own kind of alienation.

Gabriel Citron - Assistant Professor of Religion (Princeton University)
"Theapathy & Theaffectivity: On (Not) Caring About God"
Abstract: Some people believe there’s a God. Others believe there is not. Still other don’t know what to believe. And each of these groups has a dedicated word to pick it out: ‘theist’, ‘atheist’, and ‘agnostic’. We even have a further range of special words for distinguishing different believers by the nature of the God they believe in: ‘deist’, ‘pantheist’, ‘panentheist’, and more. Clearly we aren’t lacking when it comes to tools for categorizing people by their doxastic relations – or lack thereof – to the divine. And this is all very helpful. But it’s also strangely narrow. For the doxastic is hardly the only axis of potential relation to God, and it’s not even clear that it’s the most important. What about, for example, affective relations? People love God, they hate God, they fear God, and some are totally and utterly indifferent. In this paper I argue that thinking about people in terms of their various affective relations to God – or lack thereof – is often far more illuminating than thinking of them doxastically. (After all, for most people mattering matters a great deal more than belief does). To help us begin to get to grips with this I coin two terms: ‘theaffectivity’ and ‘theapathy’ – respectively, the states of caring, or not caring, about God. By the end of my paper I hope to have persuaded you that it would be good if these two were only the beginning of a large, new, terminological famil

Lindsay Crawford – Assistant Professor of Philosophy (Connecticut College)
"What Is It for Beliefs to Wrong?"
Abstract: Our beliefs can give rise to wrongful actions, but can beliefs themselves wrong others? According to prominent recent accounts of doxastic wronging, beliefs that wrong others do so in virtue of their content. On these accounts, beliefs that stand to wrong others are beliefs that regard others in certain negative or diminishing ways; these beliefs fail to register others as persons, in some morally relevant sense. This paper offers an alternative account of doxastic wronging, on which beliefs that wrong others are beliefs that could not be justified to agents who have sufficiently weighty reasons to reject the broader inferential principles that would license those beliefs. This account would allow us to maintain that beliefs themselves can wrong others, but not in virtue of those beliefs having some distinctive person-regarding content.