Thursday June 13, 2–4pm: Chapter 7: Love and Morality

Seminars will take place in R3.25. All colleagues, including undergraduate and postgraduate students, are very welcome.

“Love often seems uncontrollable and irrational, but we just as frequently appear to have reasons for loving the people we do. In Love’s Vision, Troy Jollimore offers a new way of understanding love that accommodates both of these facts, arguing that love is guided by reason even as it resists and sometimes eludes rationality. At the same time, he reconsiders love’s moral status, acknowledging its moral dangers while arguing that it is, at heart, a moral phenomenon—an emotion that demands empathy and calls us away from excessive self-concern. Love is revealed as neither wholly moral nor deeply immoral, neither purely rational nor profoundly irrational. Rather, as Diotima says in Plato’s Symposium, love is “something in between.””

WiP Week 8 - 'An inheritance to come: Derrida on history, the undecidable future, and the metaphysics of presence' - Efan Owen

The next postgraduate Work in Progress (WiP) seminar is taking place this Thursday 13th June from 5-6:15 PM in S2.77 and on Teams. Efan Owen will present 'An inheritance to come: Derrida on history, the undecidable future, and the metaphysics of presence'. Everyone welcome!

Abstract:

In this presentation I will explore the conclusions I came to in a recent essay and the questions they pose for my dissertation. I will give an overview of Derrida’s understanding of the relationship between that which is already past and that which is yet to come. I will examine here Derrida’s engagement with Heidegger’s rejection of a “metaphysics of presence,” as well as the specific implications of his own notion of différance, in the construction of meaning. Derrida holds meaning to be ultimately non-present and always referring to a presence beyond itself, and at the same time grounded in the material trace which signifies it.

In this sense, a future which is truly futural can only be comprehended as an anticipation of that which will never arrive. It is nevertheless determined by its origin, or past, in the trace signifier. I will argue that this leads Derrida to an understanding of the future as taking the form of an inheritance of things passed.

Finally, I will suggest that this approach allows Derrida to think of our relationship both to history and to the future in a manner which refutes the rationalism and calculability which characterise Kant and Husserl’s philosophies of history. In anticipation of my dissertation, I will also suggest that the decidability of inheritance nevertheless leaves it bearing resemblance to the regulative Idea as employed by Kant and Husserl. I will try to examine avenues I might take in exploring these similarities.

Teams link:

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/meetup-join/19%3aa49e6af9675349fda02fee164134326a%40thread.tacv2/1718009669263?context=%7b%22Tid%22%3a%2209bacfbd-47ef-4465-9265-3546f2eaf6bc%22%2c%22Oid%22%3a%22fdb1bbe9-d582-4ba3-8da8-3fb0a6c42dc8%22%7d