Alexander Nehamas (Department of Philosophy, Humanities, and Comparative Literature, Princeton University), will give a lecture entitled “Nietzsche, Intention, and Action”
Beginning from Nietzsche’s thought that “in order to become what one is one must not have the faintest idea what one is,” Nehamas will try to articulate his understanding of intention and action.
From the abstract: “A large swath of human behavior cannot possibly be explained if we assume, as is common both in everyday talk and in philosophy today, that an intention is a mental state that precedes, causes, and rationalizes our actions. Most interesting behavior, beyond lifting an arm or turning on a light—behavior encapsulated in ”becoming what one is” and most clearly observable in the production and interpretation of works of art—requires that intention, whatever exactly it is, comes into being along with the actions with which it is connected. That has important consequences for the interpretation of both Nietzsche and human action more generally.”
Amelie Rorty (Harvard Medical School), Oedipus, Intentional Action, and Three Types of History
[see the linked poster on the department webpage where it says: View this semester’s departmental lecture series.]
Kant’s conception of action cannot be understood in purely causal terms. The internal structure of action can only be explained in terms of a two-level meaning structure involving both a priori and empirical components.
Short bio:
Alejandro G. Vigo (Buenos Aires, 1958) is Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Navarra. Prof. Vigo earned his undergraduate degree in Philosophy (1984) from the University of Buenos Aires and a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Heidelberg (1993). He has been a fellow of the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (CONICET, Argentina), of the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. Between 1993 and 2006 he taught at the Universidad de los Andes and the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. He has published over 120 articles in collective volumes and journals in Latin America, Europe and the United States, along with many books. In 2010 he won the Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel Prize (Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Bonn) and in 2017 the International Philosophy Award “Antonio Jannone” (Pontifical University of the Holy Cross, Rome).