Practical Philosophy Workshop

Please join us for the first winter meeting of the Practical Philosophy Workshop on Monday, January 23rd!

Visiting scholar Kieran Setiya (MIT) will present his paper “Human Nature, History, and the Limits of Critique.” This is a read-ahead workshop! You can find Professor Setiya’s paper on our website under “downloads.”

As usual, we will meet from 6:00-8:00 in Cobb Hall, Room 202. A meal will be provided immediately following the workshop.

Please join us for the Practical Philosophy Workshop on Monday, November 14th.

Greg Brown (University of Chicago) will be presenting a paper titled: “Human Nature and Reasons for Action.”

We will meet from 6:00-8:00 in Cobb Hall, Room 202. The workshop is read-ahead, and the paper can be found under the “downloads” section on our website.

Please join us for the Practical Philosophy Workshop on Monday, October 17th.

Reginia Rini (York University) will be presenting a paper, Title TBD.

We will meet from 6:00-8:00 in Cobb Hall, Room 202. The workshop is read-ahead. The paper will be available shortly under “downloads.”

Please join us for our final meeting of the Practical Philosophy Workshop for the 2021-2022 school year on Monday, May 30th.

Laurenz Ramsauer (University of Chicago) will be presenting his paper Reflection in Moral Knowledge.

As usual, we will meet from 10:30-12:20 in the Social Sciences Research Building Room 401.  The workshop is read-ahead. The paper is available under ‘downloads’.

Please join us for the Practical Philosophy workshop on Monday, May 23rd.

David Haunschmid (University of Chicago) will be presenting his paper On the Paradox of the Law.

We will meet from 10:30-12:20 in the Social Sciences Research Building Room 401.  The workshop is read-ahead. The paper is available under ‘downloads’.

Please join us at the Practical Philosophy workshop on Monday, May 16th.

Chike Jeffers (Dalhousie University) will be presenting his paper Du Bois’ Darkwater and the Power of Religious Language and Imagery.

We will meet from 10:30-12:20 in the Social Sciences Research Building Room 401.  The workshop is read-ahead. The paper is available under ‘downloads’.

Please join us at the Practical Philosophy workshop on Monday, May 9th.

Sarah Buss (University of Michigan) will be presenting her paper “The Impossibility of Reconciling Constitutivist Accounts of Practical Reasons with the Unity of Human Agency”.

We will meet from 10:30-12:20 in the Social Sciences Research Building Room 401.  The workshop is read-ahead. The paper will be available soon under ‘downloads’.

Abstract:

We are capable of a sort of double consciousness:  we can regard something as appealing, worth doing, desirable, etc., even as we also occupy a point of view from which we call this appearance into question; we can experience our circumstances as calling for a certain response, even as we believe that we lack sufficient reason to respond this way.  I argue that constitutivist accounts of practical reason cannot do justice to this possibility.  On these accounts, the point of view we occupy insofar as we aim to determine what we have reason to do (the “deliberative point of view”) and the point of view we occupy insofar as we are the subject of pro- and con-attitudes are inaccessible to each other; what is at stake for us insofar as we are wondering what we have reason to do is not what is at stake for us insofar as we are wondering whether things are as they normatively seem, given our attitudes.  In the paper’s second half, I link this problem to skepticism about whether the capacity to reason is really a practical, end-setting, capacity.