Institutskolloqium WiSe 23/24

07.11.2023

Maximilian Kiener

(Technische Universität Hamburg)

Strict Moral Answerability

Abstract
Bernard Williams described the case of a lorry driver who runs over a child through no fault of his own. In this paper, I pursue two aims. First, I want to motivate a puzzle about Williams’s case, which I call the Lorry Driver Paradox and which consists of three individually plausible but jointly inconsistent claims. Second, I want to offer a solution to this paradox based on a novel approach to so-called strict moral answerability. I conclude by responding to the objection that strict answerability is a contradiction in terms. 

Marie Wuth

(Universität Hamburg)

Prisms of Power. Spinoza and the Question of the Political 

Talk CANCELLED

Abstract
Examining the political landscape, one discerns that rational arguments, or perhaps, arguments solely guided by reason, do not stand as the primary or exclusive impetus for steering the actions of political agents. Often, it is power interests and affects that are the driving forces for words and deeds, whether in support or rejection of political processes and governance. Based on this observation, I will develop an understanding of ‘the political’ from an affective and power-theoretical perspective using Spinoza's philosophy. My objective is to shed light upon the underlying dynamics that mold the contours of political existence, the orchestration of organizational structures, the facilitation of agency, and the dynamics of participation. This endeavor seeks to highlight the eminent role of affects in political existence and politics and to re-evaluate the conditions and possibilities of political participation, community formation, and governance. In this vein, I shall demonstrate how power can be expressed, consolidated, or undermined among individuals and in collectives, and the implications this holds for our understanding of the political sphere.

David Plunkett

(Dartmouth College)

Abstract
Much of contemporary epistemology aims to study such things as knowledge, justification, and understanding, rather than our thought and talk about those things. This reflects a widespread thought in contemporary philosophy (and, indeed, throughout much of the history of the field) that philosophical inquiry is concerned with object-level issues, rather than representational-level ones. How should epistemological inquiry with this aim connect to representational-level issues about our epistemic thought and talk? Much of the discussion on this topic has focused on descriptive issues about our thought and talk, such as what our words mean, or which concepts we employ. We here instead focus on normative issues in conceptual ethics, such as about which concepts we should employ, and what we should mean by our words. We argue that even if we embrace a fairly strong version of the idea that we should be inquiring into “reality itself”, there is still an important role for conceptual ethics within the methodology of epistemology. More specifically, we argue that if we take seriously what we call the “regulative role” of the epistemic, not only in telling us about what epistemic inquiry currently is, but also what it should be, then we should see inquiry into epistemic “things themselves” as at best a step in epistemic inquiry. Such inquiry is best combined with inquiry about the implications of the information about these things in themselves for the sorts of thought, talk, and practices that will best serve to regulate inquiry. And here, we claim, conceptual ethics inquiry is an indispensable part.

Leda Berio

(Ruhr-Universität Bochum)

How Our Norms Guide Our Actions: On the Relationship between Social Norms, Affordances, and Implicit Cognition (joint work with Kristina Musholt)

Ilaria Cozzaglio

(Universität Hamburg)

Trust and the Justifiability of Hope: The Case of Climate Activism (joint work with Lukas Sparenborg)

Abstract
While the literature on climate justice has associated climate activists’ practices with hope or despair, we argue that this picture is incomplete, as for hope to be justified in the case of climate activism, it must be supported by some form of trust. We then propose and assess several options activists have at their disposal to ground hopeful attitudes, including procedural and moral trust in institutions, and moral trust in fellow citizens or activists. Relatedly, we argue that activists need at least to trust their fellows to retain hope justifiably. As we believe that both trust and hope are relational attitudes when it comes to climate activism, we then look at the relationship between trust and hope from the institutions’ standpoint, as the main addressee of activists’ critique, and argue that institutions have both moral and instrumental reasons to be perceived as trustworthy by activists and provide them with the institutional basis for hope. We finally argue that mistrust represents a democratic equilibrium between the activists’ duty to exercise vigilance and critique towards institutions, and the need for institutions to be perceived as trustworthy by activists and citizens more broadly.

Mirjam Müller

(Humboldt Universität Berlin)

Justin Vlasits

(University of Illinois, Chicago)

A New Fragment of Aristotle’s On Ideas