All talks will be held in person in South Ross 421. All talks will be on Fridays 3:30 – 5:30 p.m. All are welcome! For more information contact rarini@yorku.ca or mjobrien@yorku.ca.
Upcoming Events
Friday October 25, 2024
Zeyad El Nabolsy (York University)
Title: Edward Wilmot Blyden and Fichte’s Nationalist Philosophy of History
Abstract: Edward Wilmot Blyden’s contributions to Pan-Africanism have been widely recognized. Scholars have noted that Blyden’s conception of what he called the “African Personality” reflects the influence of his reading of Herder, Fichte, and Mazzini. However, there has hitherto been no attempt to identify the precise elements that he borrowed from the aforementioned thinkers. This article focuses on the influence of Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation on Blyden’s philosophy of history and his philosophy of education. I argue that while Blyden does not explicitly refer to Fichte (or to Herder or Mazzini, for that matter), his philosophy of history as presented in his Islam, Christianity, and the Negro Race, with its emphasis on the existence of racially specific laws of growth is indebted to Fichte’s philosophy of history. In particular, I show that Fichte’s idea that there is a Bildungsplan for humankind, which requires that each people or race [Geschlecht] should develop its particularity [Eigentümlichkeit] provided a suitable framework for Blyden’s defence of a special developmental path for peoples of African descent.
Friday November 22, 2024
Laura Soter (York University)
Title: What could a process model of belief look like?
There has been increasing cognitive scientific interest in belief in recent years, with debates arising about (among other things) whether belief should be understood as a unified or heterogeneous category, a representation of a particular kind vs. a set of functional dispositions, and so on. In this project, I’m exploring a new possible way to think about the nature of belief: what could it look like to try to model belief as a dynamic componential process? To motivate this, I appeal to other mental phenomena like emotions: although we loosely call emotions mental “states,” psychologists more precisely model them as psychological processes with characteristically coordinated components. Here, I will take a first pass at spelling out what a process model of belief could look like; the key commitment being that there are a cluster of components that characteristically occur together (in causal, recursive relationships) in the belief-process, but no one of which is itself “the belief.” My primary aim will not be to settle the specifics of this process model, however; instead, it will be to propose that if we could build a compelling version of such a model, this could have a variety of fruitful theoretical benefits that might help us cut through some existing debates about belief.
Friday December 6, 2024
Wayne Wu (Carnegie Mellon University)
Title: Attunement and Reason
Abstract: What is it to be virtuous? John McDowell claimed that virtuous agents exercise a special perceptual capacity that expresses their distinctive sensitivity to reason, and Julia Annas suggested that we understand virtue in relation to skill. This talk builds on these ideas through an empirical conception of attention. I argue that the relevant virtuous capacity is actually one of attention. Such attention is explained by a sensitivity, or attentional potential, I call “attunement.” I discuss empirical models of attunement such as models of spatial attunement embodied in priority maps (this is one example). These models explain subsequent attention. Notably, attunement is substantially shaped by (often implicit) learning. In particular, I focus on biasing attunement (and attention) by cognitive representations that scientists often categorize as expectations, and in particular, by representations of “structure” that the agent learns while engaging with the world. Pursuing Annas’ project, I discuss how such expectations contribute to skill, specifically visual search in radiology. I then argue that this illuminates what is distinctive about the virtuous agent. My hope is to show concretely how the cognitive neuroscience of attention can contribute substantially to the moral psychology of virtue.