Past Event: SEMPY: Justin Steinberg (CUNY)

Speaker: Justin Steinberg (CUNY)
Title: "That Intelligible Object of Desire: Spinoza on Motivation."
Date/Time: 4:00 PM on Monday, April 15.
Location: 451 College Street, Room B-04 (the seminar room in the basement of the philosophy department)

The talk is not pre-read. Here's the abstract:

While desire is evidently closely related to hedonic experiences and evaluative judgments, the precise nature of these relations and the roles that these states play in guiding and explaining action remains contested. Many prominent attempts to work out the relations between pleasure, motivation, and evaluation fail to provide a fully intelligible account of desire and its role in action. In this presentation, I offer an interpretation of Spinoza’s theory of desire that reveals how he overcomes many of the intelligibility problems that plague rival accounts. In the process, I challenge the widely held view that Spinoza is a psychological egoist, presenting him instead as a motivational pluralist whose account of desire incorporates cognitivist and non-cognitivist, hedonist and non-hedonist elements. The result is a theory of desire, its objects, and its role in action that is not only intelligible, but also maybe, just maybe, somewhat plausible.

Sponsored by The Edward J. and Dorothy Clarke Kempf Fund at Yale University.