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.