AAP2010

   John H. McDowell
  
   Distinguished University Professory at the University of Pittsburgh

   Title of paper: "What is the content of an intention in action?"

Abstract: The content of an intention in action is given by what one would say in expressing it, and the proper form for such an expression is “I am doing such-and-such”. But it can seem that, as “merely” fact-stating, that form must be inadequate for expressing intentions, which would, on this contrasting view, need to include an evaluative or normative element. As an example of the contrasting view, I consider Davidson’s doctrine that an intention is an all-out judgment of desirability. Davidson’s doctrine is meant to make sense of intentions as conclusions of practical reasoning. That implies that it is under threat from Anscombe’s claim that reasoning to the truth of a proposition is not practical reasoning, even if the proposition is in some sense practical. My resistance to the view exemplified by Davidson belongs in the context of Anscombe’s conception of the distinctive self-knowledge that is characteristic of an agent.

Biography: John H. McDowell is a Distinguished University Professor of Philosophy at the University ofPittsburgh.  Before coming to Pittsburgh in 1986, he taught at UniversityCollege, Oxford.  He has held visiting appointments at HarvardUniversity, the University of Michigan, UCLA, and PrincetonUniversity.  He was the John Locke Lecturer at OxfordUniversity in 1991.  His major interests are Greek philosophy, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology, and ethics.  He is a fellow of the BritishAcademyand a fellow of the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences. 

   Annette Baier

   University of Otago 
   Formerly Professor of Philosophy at the   University of Pittsburgh

   Title of paper: "Lessons from Hume"       

Abstract: Hume’s distinction between impressions and ideas, and his “touchstone,” that any account of our cognitive abilities must also be applicable to animals who display, to some degree, the same abilities, will be brought to bear on contemporary debates about the “content” of sense perception, and the relation of that to our beliefs about the world. Conceptual content is usually thought to be confined to the mental states of those with language, but analog or “scenario” content does not presuppose any possession of the words needed to describe the scenes which are seen or envisaged, so animal mental states can be allowed to have such content. Even for those with language, what is seen may be too “fine-grained” to be exhausted by the verbal descriptions of it that we can give, so some see it to lack conceptual content, despite its acknowledged role in confirming beliefs with conceptual content, and possibly in originating them. Hume thought ideas derived from impressions, and resemble them in their “objects” or content. Only ideas can be abstract, and abstract ideas, for us, have verbal tags. Indeed Hume’s first example of ideas was the meanings of the words we read in his text. But he also thought animals have ideas, otherwise they would not have memory, nor learn from past experience. His views, I shall suggest, avoid the worst problems of some contemporary accounts.  

Biography: Annette Baier is currently Staff Associate at the University of Otago, New Zealand, after many years as Professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh. A former President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, she is world renowned as a moral philosopher and Hume scholar, and for her contributions to feminist philosophy and the philosophy of mind. Her publications include Postures of the Mind (University of Minnesota Press, 1985), A Progress of Sentiments: Reflections on Hume’s Treatise (Harvard University Press, 1991), Moral Prejudices: Essays on Ethics (Harvard, 1994), The Commons of the Mind(Carus Lectures, Open Court, 1997), Death and Character: Further Reflections on David Hume (Harvard, 2008), Reflections on How We Live (OUP, 2010), and The Cautious Jealous Virtue: Hume on Justice (Harvard, 2010). 

    Candace Vogler
    
    Professor at the University of Chicago

    Title of Paper: "You Owe it to Yourself"

Descriptive Paragraph: Do I have any duties to myself?  The claim that I do is perfectly familiar: I owe myself a vacation because I deserve a break.  My debt is also my due.  In advertising and intimate conversation the claim about my obligations to myself has a point - to inspire me to make a better life for myself.  But moral philosophy sometimes sounds a somber note in this otherwise uplifting chorus of voices urging me to be my own advocate.  Kantians argue that I have duties to myself, and that discharging these is (in some cases) prior to acknowledging obligations to anyone else.  I will argue against this tendency in contemporary moral theory, urge that it has a point in Kant's work, and suggest that the moral psychological ground for thoughts about what I owe myself is unstable, quite apart from the peculiar requirements of Kantian ethics.

Biography: Candace Vogler is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy and the College at the University of Chicago.  Her research interests are in practical philosophy (particulary the strand of work in moral philosophy indebted to Elizabeth Anscombe), practical reason, Kant's ethics, Marx, and neo-Aristotelian naturalism.  She has authored two books, John Stuart Mill's Deliberative Landscape: An essay in moral psychology (Routledge, 2001) and Reasonably Vicious (Harvard University Press, 2002) and essays in ethics, social and political philosophy, philosophy and literature, cinema, psychoanalysis, gender studies, sexuality studies, and other areas.