NUS Philosophy Podcast #2 – “Ways of World-Breaking & Ethical Escapism”, by John Holbo

This is installment two in our podcast series. “Ways of World-Breaking & Ethical Escapism”, delivered as a talk in the department by Assoc. Prof. John Holbo, on March 30, 2010. Here is the abstract:

Tamar Gendler takes ‘the puzzle of imaginative resistance’ to be that of ‘explaining comparative difficulty imagining fictional worlds we take to be morally deviant.’ Gendler follows Kendall Walton, who prefers to focus on difficulties ‘making true’. This paper seeks to dissolve any such puzzle, largely by considering the workings of genre: relationship between absurdities and absurdism; reflections on narrators and authors; then, a major class of counter-examples: most genre fiction is ‘morally deviant’. Superman lives in a world in which behavior that would be morally appalling in the real world is sane and admirable. In effect, these fictions are perfectionist fantasies about impossible compossibilities of virtues, but not explicitly so. So the world contains many metaethically fantastic fictions, while containing few fictions about metaethics, per se.

NUS Philosophy Podcast #1 – Asst. Prof. Neil Sinhababu, “Desire And Intention”

I’ve been meaning to get this podcast series started for a while now. And here we go. Our first is a talk given by the department’s own Asst. Prof. Neil Sinhababu, “Desire and Intention”. The talk was delivered in the department on March 2, 2010. Here is the abstract:

I will argue that intentions are reducible to combinations of desires and beliefs.  Kieran Setiya presents two criticisms of such views of intention in “Reasons Without Rationalism.”  First, he charges that they can’t explain why intentional action is accompanied by knowledge of what we are doing.  Second, he charges that they can’t explain how we can choose our reasons for action.  I will first describe some general advantages of the desire-belief view over competing views.  Then I will show how the nature of desire explains the things that Setiya thinks the desire-belief view can’t explain.