Action and Agency, Aristotle and Anscombe
Tid og sted: Sep 27, 2008 10:00 AM - Sep 29, 2008 01:15 PM, Uppsala, Sweden
Konferansen er fulltegnet / The conference is fully subscribed.
The conference is co-hosted by the Uppsala University Philosophy
Department and the Centre for the Study of Mind in Nature (CSMN)
University of Oslo. It will bring together the five year program,
centered in Uppsala, on the theme “Understanding Agency” and the
work of the rational agency section of CSMN.
The Uppsala program is oriented to the history of philosophy,
while CSMN’s work on rational agency is oriented to recent work. We
have decided to have early on in our programs a conference focused
on contemporary work on action and agency that is connected to the
work of historical figures like Aristotle and Aquinas, and which
can help make the history of philosophy useful for contemporary
work and vice versa. Our hope is for papers that both historians of
philosophy and persons doing contemporary work can make use of in
their own scholarship.
Our particular interest is in a philosophy of action that counters
and goes beyond the so-called “standard story” that has dominated
philosophy of action for over forty years. This story construes
intentional action as movements of the body that are caused and
rationalized by mental events that occur in the agent’s mind (or
brain). The product of a Cartesian understanding of the mental and
the physical, it has roots in the 17th and 18th centuries. It was
temporarily undermined by criticism from philosophers influenced by
Wittgenstein, but work by Donald Davidson in the 1960s revived it,
and it came to be the standard view. Its status as such was further
enforced by its becoming embedded in the physicalism that currently
dominates many parts of the philosophical world.
A reaction to the view has been developing as philosophers have wanted a conception of action that rejects both Cartesian dualism and its modern physicalist versions. This has led a number of philosophers to the work of Aristotle, and to others much influenced by Aristotle, for example, Aquinas in medieval philosophy and Elizabeth Anscombe more recently. This reaction rejects Aristotelian physics but contends that we should not, therefore, reject his philosophy of action, or, indeed, his conception of biology, which sees important connections between explanations of diverse living creatures and insists that human beings are not mechanisms but animals, even if rational animals. The papers in the conference will be concerned in one way or another with a broadly Aristotelian account of the metaphysics and epistemology of action.
There will be ten papers in two-hour long sessions, by the following speakers.
- David Charles (Oriel College, Oxford)
- Ursula Coope (Corpus Christi College, Oxford)
- Anton Ford (Chicago)
- John McDowell (Pittsburgh)
- Anselm Mueller (Trier)
- Thomas Pink (King’s College, London)
- Rowland Stout (University College, Dublin)
- Michael Thompson (Pittsburgh)
- Gary Watson (California at Riverside)
The Uppsala program is funded by The Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation; CSMN is funded by the Norwegian Research Council.
Organizing committee: in Uppsala: Lilli Alanen, Tomas Eckenberg, Martin Gustafsson, Frans Svensson, Martin Gustafsson; in Oslo: Olav Gjelsvik, Jennifer Hornsby.
Tentative Schedule (as of July 1)
Saturday, September 27
- 09:00 - 09:15 - Registration and welcome
- 09:15 - 11:00 - Session 1: Ursula Coope: “Aristotle on Desire”
- 11:00 - 11:30 - Coffee
- 11:30 - 13:15 - Session 2: David Charles: TBA
- 13:15 - 14:45 - Lunch
- 14:45 - 16:30 - Session 3: Anton Ford: “We do not add anything to an action at the time it is done by describing it as intentional”
- 16:30 - 17:00 - Coffee
- 17:00 - 18:45 - Session 4: John McDowell: “Acting can be drawing a conclusion from practical reasoning”
Sunday, September 28
- 09:15 - 11:00 - Session 5: Rowland Stout: “What are you causing in Acting?”
- 11:00 - 11:30 - Coffee
- 11:30 - 13:15 - Session 6: Gary Watson: “Valuing Agency”
- 13:15 - 14:45 - Lunch
- 14:45 - 16:30 - Session 7: Tom Pink: “Reason, Voluntariness, and Moral Responsibility”
- 16:30 - 17:00 - Coffee
- 17:00 - 18:45 - Session 8: Anselm Mueller: “Good Reasons, Good Motives”
- 20:00 – Conference dinner in Linné Garden
Monday, September 29
- 09:15 - 11:00 - Session 9: Martin Stone: “Anscombe on Expression of Intention”
- 11:00 - 11:30 - Coffee
- 11:30 - 13:15 - Session 10: Michael Thompson: TBA
- 13:15 - Lunch
