In the middle of this month, I organized a workshop on desire and normativity in Tartu. Here’s a short recap.
The first speaker was Ashley Shaw who is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Leeds. In his talk, titled “Urges”, he asked how we know about our urges. In the course of answering this question, he presented his account of urges as having a distinctive phenomenology which allows us to distinguish them from other attitudes and involving motor imagery that enables identifying the content of the urge. The next in line was Patrick Butlin, Research Fellow at the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford who talked about individual evaluative perspective and their putative moral significance. His starting point was the issue of how reinforcement learning agents could have such perspectives. After presenting the conditions under which this is possible, he explored the questions of whether having such a perspective is sufficient for moral standing and whether it makes a difference to moral status. After lunch, our very own Francesco Orsi delved into Anscombe’s conception of the Guise of the Good and addressed a variety of interpretive questions, including for instance the issue of whether Anscombe’s conception was attitudinal or content-oriented, what exactly her argument for the Guise of the Good was, and why she distinguished between explanations in terms of mental causes and in terms of reasons. The final speaker of the day was Alex Gregory who is an Associate Professor at Southampton whose talk was about the candidate rational requirements for desire. In particular, he considered the instrumental requirement that one ought to desire means to the ends that one desires, and fended off objections to the feasibility of that requirement. In the course of defending its feasibility, he argued against skepticism about the existence of instrumental desires and against the claim that instrumental requirement overgenerates instrumental desires. Sadly, Elizabet Ventham, who was supposed to be the first speaker on the second day, had to cancel due to illness. The second speaker of that day, Neil Sinhababu, on the other hand, could present, but only online because his flight to Estonia was cancelled. In his wide-ranging presentation, he defended the moral sense theory, according to which our moral cognition is based on pleasure, and argued that pleasure can represent (moral) goodness which is itself a a kind of pleasure because accurate pleasures are qualitatively identical to what they represent.
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Hokkaido-Tartu philosophy workshop took place online in June 20-21. The aim was to bring together Japanese and Estonian philosophers to introduce their research to one another and to establish a foundation for possible future collaborations. The topic of the workshop was philosophy of mind, very broadly conceived, but the talks covered also other areas, such as philosophy of language, phenomenology, and philosophy of religion.
The workshop started with a presentation “Misunderstanding about behaviorism in philosophy: The case of Gallagher's enactivism” by Kohei Yanagawa and Hiroshi Matsui (Hokkaido) who argued that Shaun Gallagher’s rejection of the claim that enactivism is a kind of behaviorism overlooks Skinner’s version of radical behaviorism which can make sense of intentional behavior. The second presenter, María Jimena Clavel Vázquez (Tartu), gave a talk entitled “Dynamicism and mechanism: models of explanation for an embodied mind”. Vázquez argued that the concern that dynamical models are only predictive and not genuinely explanatory has not yet received a fully satisfactory response. In his talk, “Epistemic theodicy and doxastic voluntarism,” Kengo Miyazono (Hokkaido) considered the evidential problem of evil in the context of Descartes’ Meditations and argued that we can make sense of Descartes’s solution to the problem in terms of gatekeeper voluntarism according to which the role of epistemic agency is to resist assent. The first day was concluded by Alex Davies (Tartu) who’s talk “Sharing content on social media: Context-sensitive language online” asked if the fact that the people’s posts on social media are affected by bystander information (e.g., likes, shares, etc.) undermines the pipeline model according to which social media transmits content without changing it in the process. The second day was kicked off by Litman Huang (Tartu) and his talk “The communication problem of de se beliefs” discussed the content-sharing view of communicative success and the challenge that de se beliefs pose to that view. As a response to the challenge, he defended a metalinguistic view of communicative success. This was followed by Katsunori Miyahara’s (Hokkaido) talk “Habit and narrative selfhood”. Miyahara asked what the relation between minimal embodied self and narrative self is and argued that embodiment is relevant also for the narrative self because the diachronic identity is grounded in embodied habits. The third talk of the day was by Riin Kõiv (Tartu), entitled “The concept of innateness: explicate or eliminate?”, which focused on the issue of whether concept of innateness should be eliminated or reformed. While Edouard Machery has argued for eliminativism, Kõiv argued that it does not have an advantage over the reformist option. The workshop ended with Ken-ichi Hara’s (Hokkaido) talk “Bergson and remembering as action” in which he argued that, according to Bergson, recollection is not an act of creation or construction, but a form of interaction between the reception of stored memory and the bodily act of inhibition. |
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