Classes start on Monday, so I am getting my ducks in a row for the new school year, but I am also looking forward to the public presentation that I am giving as the first event of Colby-Sawyer’s Fall Faculty Colloquium Series on Thursday, September 25th at 4:00 p.m. in Wheeler Hall.
During the presentation, I’m going to talk about a paper that I presented at philosophy conferences in Washington, DC and Lisbon, Portugal earlier this year. Since the paper is rather long and technical for a general audience, during the presentation, I will just focus on one argument for the claim that jealousy can help people protect the personal relationships that they value, and thus protect the basis of their self-respect.
I am hoping to have a diverse audience for the talk, since I think the paper is a good way for students and community members to get a little taste of a growing philosophical sub-discipline, called moral psychology, which focuses on the ethical significance of our beliefs, desires, emotions, and character traits. Because these are things that we all have personal experience with, philosophical research on these topics is generally more interesting and accessible to a broader audience than some of the more abstract work that philosophers do. I’m certainly going to try to keep it light with some examples that are likely to be familiar to everybody in the audience! I’m also planning to give a bit of historical background about this kind of research and why I personally find it so exciting.