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SPA Student Speaker Series: Joe Gordon, Daniel Mangandi-Escobar
February 19 @ 5:00 pm - 6:30 pm
Come check out the second of two Student Speaker Series (SSS) events this SP26 semester, hosted by the Student Philosophy Association. This next iteration will occur on Thursday February 19th from 5:00–6:30pm in room LA1–312. Snacks will be provided.
5:00pm–5:45pm: Graduate Student Research Presentations
Joe Gordon (Cal State Long Beach)
‘Sublimely above oneself? On Nietzsche’s sea metaphor in Dawn §423′
‘Sublimely above oneself? On Nietzsche’s sea metaphor in Dawn §423′
- Abstract: Pitton (2024) argues that the sea metaphor in Book V of Nietzsche’s 1881 work, Dawn, enjoys a neo-Kantian interpretation; specifically, she equates Nietzsche’s ‘sea’ metaphor with Kant’s ‘sublime’. I disagree. This is an apples-to-oranges comparison; better instead to consider the sea metaphor in its own right, independent of a neo-Kantian interpretation. Rather than creating a hard distinction between the human world of the city and the subliminal world of the sea, Nietzsche seems to have been working to collapse the Kantian distinction of the phenomenal (world of the city) and noumenal (subliminal world of the sea) realms—or in Nietzsche’s terms, the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’. Neither the real nor the imaginary realms exist separately from each other, which is why both worlds appear together in the narrator. This talk gives a line-by-line exegesis of aphorism §423 to substantiate my conclusion. Although limited to analyzing §423, the sea metaphor recurs in Book V of Dawn and regularly appears throughout Nietzsche’s corpus. If my argument holds for §423, it can be used as a frame of reference for further analysis of the sea metaphor found elsewhere in Nietzsche’s corpus.
5:45pm–6:30pm: Graduate Student Research Presentation + Q&A
Daniel Mangandi-Escobar (Cal State Long Beach)
‘Blaming through abolition: the strength/weakness dilemma of non-reactive attitudes’
- Abstract: Among the skeptics about moral responsibility, abolitionists argue that if no one is morally responsible for their actions, then reactive attitudes (e.g., resentment, guilt, or indignation) are unjustified. Abolitionists such as Per-Erik Milam have argued that we can replace reactive attitudes with non-reactive attitudes (e.g., disappointment, regret, or moral sadness) because they can perform the same functions (e.g., maintaining relationships, expressing wrongdoing, or motivating behavior) without attributing blame. I argue that non-reactive attitudes are an unstable alternative to reactive attitudes, and so present a dilemma. If non-reactive attitudes are strong enough to replace reactive attitudes, they smuggle in moral responsibility and become blame-like. Or, if non-reactive attitudes are truly non-blaming, they are too weak to sustain moral life. Through Milam’s framework and empirical work in moral psychology, I argue that non-reactive attitudes cannot play the same roles as reactive attitudes. This poses a problem for abolitionists: either they concede that non-reactive attitudes reintroduce moral responsibility, or they must explain how non-reactive attitudes perform the same roles as reactive attitudes without collapsing into blame or being ineffective. Abolitionism, while appealing, does not give us sufficient reason to change our current practices of blame.
