Aspiration_The Agency of Becoming by Agnes Callard

Author:Agnes Callard [Callard, Agnes]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, Self Help
ISBN: 9780190639488
Amazon: 0190639482
Goodreads: 37702276
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2018-04-02T00:00:00+00:00

* * *

1. I’ve modified Frankfurt’s original example, in which the spiteful act is a speech act, and it is directed against a casual acquaintance. I cite the original example later in section VI.a.

2. In fact, Scheffler makes a somewhat more restricted claim: that we experience the emotional or affective response as appropriate. As my examples show, however, one can extend this condition to cover motivational and cognitive responses as well.

3. This example is inspired by the remarks of the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen about the 9/11 terrorist attacks. For a discussion, see Castle (2011).

4. For the purpose of analyzing this example, I adopt Kolodny’s (2003) construal of love as the valuation of a relationship. I should note that nothing in my argument hangs on this particular analysis of love.

5. I cannot offer a precise account of the relation between the nature of the attention split in desire-conflict cases, on the one hand, and that in dual-task cases. My thought here is only that looking to the latter can shed light on the more general phenomenon of qualified psychological compossibility. It may be that the desire-conflict case shares only some structural features of the dual-task cases, but deep differences render the use of the term “attention” for desire-conflict, if not homonymous, then at least metaphorical. Or, alternatively, it may be that there is one genus of attention of which both of these are species. The second point would have to be established in the light of a general analysis of the practical import of attention (on which, see Wu 2011). Since I cannot undertake such an analysis here, all of my references to ethical “attention” should be understood in the first, more cautious way.

6. I do not want to deny that practical reasoning may, at times, resolve the question of how to bring some proposed goal about in a thoroughly non-comparative way. (For an argument that Aristotelian bouleusis was primarily non-comparative, see Nielsen 2011.) We need not always, at every turn, insist on doing what we have ascertained to be better than all other available alternatives. I may, for instance, reason as follows: “How will I get to Paris? By taking a plane. Where do I get a ticket? Online.” I can, thereby, reason to the action of turning on my computer without, e.g., having considered and rejected the option of consulting a travel agent. Straightforward implementation of a preselected plan is, no doubt, one function of practical rationality. But it is not a function relevant to the topic of intrinsic or extrinsic conflict of desire. For that topic calls for a form of rationality that might guide agents torn between a multiplicity of available options. Hence my focus on comparative practical reasoning, for which I reserve the word “deliberation” here.

7. I follow conventional usage in treating “incommensurable” as a synonym for “incomparable,” where both are to be understood as having the meaning “cannot be compared.” This contrasts with Chang’s (1997) usage, since she restricts the term “incommensurable” to describing a species of incomparability.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.