The Moral Sciences Club's next meeting will be held on Tuesday 28th February. We are delighted to welcome Prof Carla Bagnoli (Modena/Oslo), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Hard Times: A non-standard constructivist account of perplexity and change in view'. Here is the abstract:
Many cases in which agents are perplexed and have hard time making decisions are time-sensitive. This paper offers an analysis of the philosophical implications of this feature. Perplexity is a subjective (emotional and cognitive) state marked by lack of resolution, generally open to the future, and always rooted in past commitments. In short, perplexity is a phenomenon characteristic of agents deliberating and acting in time. Most accounts of perplexity emphasize that the opportunities for action and the significance of choice are severely limited by temporal constraints. On those accounts, temporal constraints are part of the circumstances that determine the context of choice. Call this the narrow view. This paper argues for three claims. First, the narrow view misconstrues the role and significance of time in action, by representing the temporal dimension of rational agency under the guise of circumstantial, hence external constraints. Second, agents are not completely passive in respect to the so-called “circumstances of action”. Typically, they reflectively and emotionally engage with temporal constraints, hence somehow altering the circumstances of action. Third, this sort of engagement is the core of rational deliberation. Rational agents do not address a fixed and pre-determined context of choice, but construe it while deliberating about action. The paper sketches a non-standard constructivist account of practical reasoning as aiming to a reasoned change in view. The meeting will be held at 2:30 until 4:15, in the Barbara White Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. There are still places left for dinner -- email us by 6pm today if you'd like to come. For those who have not yet paid, there is a yearly membership fee of £7.50 for students and £15 for others, or a one-off fee of £3 (£2 for students). These can be purchased online at: http://onlinesales.admin. cam.ac.uk/browse/extra_info.asp?compid=1&modid=1&catid=75&prodvarid=87 -- Matt Dougherty, James Hutton, and Li Li Tan Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc -- Matt Dougherty, James Hutton, and Li Li Tan Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge [email protected] http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ 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.
