Dear all, This Friday (today, as I type!), Piotr Szalek will be at the final HPS Philosophy Workshop of this year, presenting his work on ‘Representationalism and Pragmatism’, at 12 noon in Seminar Room 1.
If you would like a copy of the reading Piotr has made available for some last minute swotting, please email me! === ABSTRACT: One of the most striking readings of Berkeley’s philosophy is offered by two founders of the classical American Pragmatism. Both Charles Sanders Peirce and William James regarded Berkeley as a pragmatist. The paper seeks to explain the alleged proto-pragmatist elements in Berkeley’s philosophy in order to trace the historical relation between representationalism (resp. anti-representationalism) and pragmatism. The explanation will be offered in terms of the two famous Sellarsian categories of the ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific’ images of the world and human beings. The ‘manifest’ image is regarded as a refinement of the ordinary way of conceiving things, and the scientific image is seen as a theoretical picture of the world provided by science. The paper argues that the modern pragmatism could be seen as an effect of an attempt to synthesize the ‘manifest’ and ‘scientific’ images by creating one unified synoptic vision of the world after the modern scientific revolution (that caused a conflict between the images) and the failure of the representationalism of Descartes and Locke (as a part of a new conceptual framework within which these two images were supposed to be combined). === The HPS Philosophy Workshop, as I hope you all know, is a venue for junior members of the department to present drafts of their work-in-progress, and receive constructive criticism. Also there’s tea, coffee, and biscuits, as if you needed any more reason to join us. All the best, Toby Bryant _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
