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Fakultät Humanwissenschaften und Theologie

Lesekreis Theoretische Philosophie

Am Dienstag (23.11.) ist Lucy Campbell (Warwick) im Lesekreis Theoretische Philosophie zu Gast. Wir diskutieren über ihr gemeinsam mit Alexander Greenberg (UCL) erarbeitetes Manuskript zum Thema "Mental

Agency: a Red Herring?".

Am Dienstag (23.11.) ist Lucy Campbell (Warwick) im Lesekreis Theoretische Philosophie zu Gast. Wir diskutieren über ihr gemeinsam mit Alexander Greenberg (UCL) erarbeitetes Manuskript zum Thema "Mental Agency: a Red Herring?" (Abstract s. unten). Der Lesekreis startet um
12:00 Uhr (s.t.) und findet online statt.

Um Anmeldung an paul.klurtu-dortmundde wird gebeten. Das Manuskript
erhalten Sie daraufhin per Mail.

Abstract:
Philosophy has recently witnessed an ‘Agential Turn’, characterised by the thought
that understanding our broadly normative relationships to our own mental phenomena requires conceiving them as acts, and of subjects as their agents.
Focussing on three central explanatory appeals to agency – agentialism about doxastic responsibility, agentialism about doxastic self-knowledge, and the agentialist explanation of ‘thought insertion’ – we identify three fundamental problems which recur both within and between these three agentialist literatures. The persistence of these problems suggests that the Agential Turn over-states the explanatory potential of mental agency. Yet we accept the fundamental
critique motivating the Agential Turn, its rejection of a purely passive and spectatorial conception of the human mind. We close by sketching a way of respecting this antipassivist critique, whilst resisting over-inflating the category of mental agency. They key is to recognise a form of rational subjectivity which is not helpfully thought of as either active or passive.