Love, Hate, and Reactive Attitudes

One day conference on love, hate, and reactive attitudes, with a focus on thinkers from the 18th/19th century. 

Funded by the Boston Area Consortium for Kant and Nineteenth-Century German Philosophy (https://bostonareaconsortium.org/).    

Held at Boston University and open to the public. 

Location: 745 Commonwealth Avenue, Room 325

Talks:

Stephen Darwall (Yale)

Title: TBD

Abstract: TBD

Patrick Hassan (Cardiff)

Title: Schopenhauer on Malice as the Externalisation of Suffering

  Abstract: In one of the few sustained accounts of malice in the history of Western ethics, Schopenhauer argues that the desire for the suffering of another for its own sake is best explained as the causal product of the agent's own inner-suffering. Via his metaphysics of the Will, Schopenhauer thus presents us with an idiosyncratic take on the ancient idea that vice and unhappiness are intimately connected. Yet Schopenhauer's elaboration of the causal claim which conceives of malice as a form of self-soothing does not obviously sit well with his repeated insistence that malice is a sui generis motive, distinct from egoism. This talk aims to elucidate this puzzle and offer a solution that avoids the exegetical costs of competing accounts. I close by suggesting that this conception of malice is not only of historical interest, but may also prove useful for understanding the contemporary phenomenon of incel misogyny.    

Amy Levine (Harvard)

Title: Finitude as Interpretive Dependence in Kierkegaard’s The Concept of Anxiety

Abstract: In The Concept of Anxiety, Kierkegaard offers a reading of the biblical story of the Fall which is aimed at explaining the possibility of original sin without presupposing “knowledge of good and evil.” I suggest Kierkegaard takes up this theological problem to address another: on a Kantian picture of agency, how can an agent determine herself to act under a principle for the first time? His solution identifies an overlooked dimension of our finitude: our dependence on language and shared cultural practice for the intelligibility of anything we might do. Anxiety is the self-awareness of this dependence. It has an affective dimension because it also involves dependence on other people. In childhood, while we do not know the meaning of what we might do, adults do; in adulthood, the significance of our actions remains vulnerable to others’ interpretation. This reading of anxiety as self-awareness of interpretative dependence illuminates the connection between anxiety and authenticity for Kierkegaard and later for Heidegger. 

Krista K. Thomason (Swarthmore College)

Title: Kant on Vices of Hatred

Abstract: Kant identifies the vices of hatred for human beings as envy, ingratitude, and malice. The vices manifest themselves in positive attitudes toward the misfortune of others. Kant calls these vices both “loathsome” (6:458) and “devilish” (27:439). Despite Kant’s disparaging remarks, he then claims that the source of all three vices is “a property of human nature native to man, which not only makes us intrinsically guiltless, but also determines us to an admirable purpose” (27:692). This purpose is “the inclination to work against the perfections of others, or to surpass them by ever-increasingly promoting our own cultivation, in agreement with the laws of morality” (27:692). These remarks are puzzling. The vices of hatred are somehow both loathsome and also aids to our moral self-cultivation. My aim in this paper is two-fold. First, I reconstruct Kant’s arguments to show how he can hold both claims at once. Second, I examine whether Kant’s arguments about the vices of hatred can shed light on contemporary views about negative emotions like envy, ingratitude, and malice.

Bas Tönissen (Princeton) 

Title: TBD

Abstract: TBD