|
Menu
 |
Events
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, are pleased to announce Colloquium on the Modalities of the Good 5th
- 7th August 2009
Programme WEDNESDAY, 5th
August
In
Pursuit of Goodness I Lunch 14:00
- 15:30 Marina Barabas (Still) In Pursuit of Goodness II Coffee break 16:00
- 17:30 David Levy Moral
Suffering 18:00 Reception Philosophy,
Morality and the Self: Against Thinness Lunch 14:00
– 15:30 Kamila Pacovská Banker
Bulstrode: a Study of Permeating Evil Coffee break 16:00
- 17:30 Christopher Cowley "I can put
myself in his shoes, but I can't put on his smelly feet". Ethics and the limits of the imagination Reading session (invited participants) Organisers: Marina Barabas, Kamila Pacovská Venue: Institute of Philosophy, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic
(Conference Room, n. 123a), Jilská 1, Prague 1, Czech Republic Colloquium language: English Attendance is free of charge. If you are planning to
attend please e-mail Kamila Pacovská (kamila.pacovska@gmail.com) ‘Good’,
used as a substantive, signifies value as such, and so ranges all the way from
objects of want—from merest whim to deepest personal desire— to the impersonal
object which calls or claims one. To explore the varieties of good means thus
to explore its modalities, since what we value is bound up with how
we value. While
ethics originated in the conception of the good as impersonal call of the
transcendental, most of its history consists in opposition to that conception.
Starting with Aristotle and his definition of ‘good’ as final cause—as end of
action—naturalist ethics centres on good as object of want and on action as its
realisation. Ethics thus becomes a sub-branch of the practical understood in
terms of agency, or pursuit of (in principle) attainable projects.
Characteristic of this conception of the practical is the view of desire as
origin of action, of perception as gathering of information, and of thinking as
deliberation; the ethical enters partly through the ‘good’ sought—from one’s
own virtue or perfection to some desirable state of affairs—, partly through
the underlying ideals of freedom, activity and self-creation. By
contrast, the so-called ‘Platonic’ tradition points to that good which is
‘known’ not by desire but by responsiveness to a call and which appears not as
an end of action but as that in the light of which we act and
feel, perceive and think. Good so understood is not something to attain but
something to do justice to. And since we do, or fail to do, justice in
perception and thought no less than in emotion and action, this conception
emphasizes the organic and historical individual and concern with the soul,
rather than the agent defined by specific wants and the success of their
realisation. The central role of lucid and just perception and thought shifts
emphasis from informed deliberation to attention, from desire to love, from
will as decision to will as consent, and from action as ‘first cause’ to action
as response. The
underlying view of reality as a claim challenges the distinction between the
theoretical and practical as well as the clarity of the distinction between the
active and the passive. For emphasis on attentive and just response questions
the ideals of freedom and action embodied in autonomous and virtuous agent with
those of purity and fidelity manifested in goodness. This ‘practical’ character
of reality raises also the question of the role of beauty in our lives and with
it of the world as object of love and source of joy. In
organizing the first Colloquium on the Modalities of the Good we seek to
open a new space for this ‘Platonic’ discourse with the help of the
contributions made to it by modern thinkers such as Simone Weil, Roy Holland,
Iris Murdoch, Rai Gaita and Cora Diamond. We hope that the discussion began
this year in |
