Category Archives: philosophy

Colloquium on 9/25

philosophy

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.

EPSSE in Lisbon

philosophy, travel

Last night, I returned to the US after nearly two months of writing and traveling in Portugal and Spain. How did I manage to pull off that trip, you might ask? A paper of mine, called “Jealousy and Self-Respect,” was accepted for presentation at the first annual conference of the European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions (EPSSE), which took place in Lisbon, Portugal, and I was fortunate to receive some faculty development funds to pay for my plane ticket and conference registration fees. Thank you, Colby-Sawyer College!

In my presentation, I explained an argument that some people have used to defend the claim that the emotion jealousy can help maintain or enhance morally valuable relationships, which can in turn ground people’s morally valuable self-respect, and thus that some jealousy is morally praiseworthy. I then discussed multiple objections to that argument, and concluded that the argument should be rejected. I got lots of productive feedback during the lively Q&A, and I look forward to presenting some similar material in a faculty colloquium at CSC in the coming academic year.

The whole conference was a truly wonderful experience. Philosophy of emotion is has grown a lot in recent years, but it is still very unusual to have an entire conference devoted to it, so spending three long days with other philosophers of emotion is a rare treat. During the conference, I saw 32 presentations by people from 6 continents about a huge range of philosophical issues! I learned an immense amount, met dozens of lovely and stimulating people, reconnected with some folks I already knew, and came away with pages of notes and ideas relating to both teaching and research that I look forward to drawing from well into the future.

Georgetown University Philosophy Conference

philosophy

This past week, I enjoyed myself at the conference on Emotions and Emotionality at Georgetown University. It was a real treat to engage with a bunch of philosophers who have similar interests; as some of us noted, specialist conferences about philosophy of emotion are rather few and far between! Now I am all fired up to push forward on some related research projects over the summer.

WOGAP

philosophy

Since moving to New London, I have been very fortunate to be able to attend multiple meetings of the Workshop on Gender and Philosophy (WOGAP), which are hosted by MIT in Boston. It is a really welcoming group; every time we meet, I learn something cool and get to chat with smart, kind people. This past week, we discussed a fascinating article by Miranda Fricker!