The Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal, the Centre de recherche en éthique, and the Research Group on Constitutional Studies are pleased to announce a day-long workshop on Arash Abizadeh’s book manuscript “Hobbes and the Two Dimensions of Normativity” to take place on Tuesday, December 15, at McGill University.
Since the manuscript partly considers Hobbes’s ethics in light of recent philosophical treatments of normativity, the workshop brings together both Hobbes scholars and contemporary moral philosophers. Confirmed commentators include out-of-town guests Stephen Darwall (Yale), Kinch Hoekstra (Berkeley), Susanne Sreedhar (Boston), and Laurens van Apeldoorn (Leiden), as well as Evan Fox-Decent (McGill), Mauro Rossi (UQAM), Travis Smith (Concordia), and Sarah Stroud (McGill).
Further details about the workshop and how to register will be available soon.
About the Manuscript:
The basic premise of the book manuscript is that, despite Hobbes’s materialism, he was committed to the existence of two irreducible and genuinely normative properties and types of claim, involving third-personal reasons for which one is responsible, and second-personal reasons for which one is accountable to others. As a result, despite widespread belief to the contrary, Hobbes cannot be fruitfully read as a substantive ethical naturalist for whom normative properties and claims are reducible to naturalistic, non-normative ones; nor was he is an expressivist or normative nihilist; nor was he a pure instrumentalist about practical reasons. Rational agents have genuine, irreducibly normative reasons to desire the preservation of a life worth living, and they have prudential reasons (independent of their desire to do so) to take the means that promote such an end; and rational agents who are also persons have genuine, irreducibly normative second-personal reasons to uphold their contracts, for which they are accountable to others. Moreover, Hobbes had neither a subjectivist (desire-fulfilment) theory of the good, nor a subjectivist theory of practical reasons. Reading Hobbes as an ethical naturalist, expressivist, or nihilist cannot properly account for his strongly cognitive account of reasoning, according to which reasoners infer conclusions by reasoning from premises that they take to furnish genuine, normative reasons; reading him as a pure instrumentalist about practical reasons fails to account for his commitment to prudential practical reasons (to care for one’s future self) and to a notion of obligation as a type of second-personal normative reason.
Le Groupe de recherche interuniversitaire en philosophie politique de Montréal, le Centre de recherche en éthique, et le Research Group on Constitutional Studies ont le plaisir d’annoncer un atelier d’une journée complète sur le manuscrit d’Arash Abizadeh, entitulé « Hobbes and the Two Dimensions of Normativity » qui aura lieu mardi, le 15 décembre à l’Université McGill.
Puisque le manuscrit considère l’éthique de Hobbes à la lumière des récents traitements philosophiques de normativité, l’atelier rassemble des chercheurs spécialistes de Hobbes aussi bien que de philosophie morale. Les commentateurs confirmés incluent, de l’extérieur, Stephen Darwall (Yale), Kinch Hoekstra (Berkeley), Susanne Sreedhar (Boston), et Laurens van Apeldoorn (Leiden), ainsi que Evan Fox-Decent (McGill), Mauro Rossi (l’UQAM ), Travis Smith (Concordia), et Sarah Stroud (McGill).
De plus amples détails sur l’atelier, y inclus comment s’inscrire, seront bientôt disponibles.