KJuris: John Hyman, UCL

KJuris seminar with John Hyman (UCL)

Abstract

Elizabeth Anscombe’s 1957 book Intention is probably the most important essay in the philosophy of action in the twentieth century, even if it is not (as Donald Davidson generously declared) the most important since Aristotle.  The principal idea expounded in the book is that we can define intentional action by means of the concept of a reason, instead of defining it in terms of volition or the will.  I shall discuss the relationship between acting intentionally and acting for a reason, and Anscombe’s conception of this relationship in Intention.

 Speaker bio

Between 1988 and 2018, John taught philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he was Professor of Aesthetics and a Fellow of The Queen’s College, where he was also Senior Tutor for a few years.  During the period when he worked mainly in philosophy of art, he held Fellowships at the Getty Research Insititute, Los Angeles and at the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin in 2002 -03, and edited the British Journal of Aesthetics.  During the last ten years, John has worked mainly in epistemology and philosophy of action.  During this period he has held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellow, and Visiting Professorships or Fellowships at the Sorbonne, at the Univ. Carlos III de Madrid, PKU in Beijing, and at the University of Tel-Aviv.  John joined the philosophy department at UCL in 2018, where he is Grote Professor of Logic and the Philosophy of Mind, and began the five-year ERC project Roots of Responsibility at the same time.  John's principal work in the philosophy of action, Action, Knowledge, and Will was published by OUP in 2015.

This is an online event and will take place via Zoom.