Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held *tomorrow *- Tuesday 22nd January. We are delighted to welcome Stacie Friend (Birkbeck), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Fiction and Emotion: The Normative Question'. Here is an abstract for her talk:
*In his 'How Can We Be Moved by the Fate of Anna Karenina?' (1975) and a series of subsequent replies to critics, Colin Radford argued that emotional responses to fictional characters are incoherent, inconsistent and irrational. Nearly everyone disagrees with this conclusion, but (I maintain) for the wrong reasons. Radford's challenge is this: In ordinary circumstances, it would be irrational for someone to persist in pitying a person if she knows that the person does not exist or has not suffered; but this is exactly our situation when we pity Anna Karenina. If we disagree with Radford, we must explain why emotions in the two scenarios elicit different normative judgements. In this paper I consider and reject some obvious explanations, and propose an alternative.* The meeting will be held from 2:30 until 4:15 in the Jane Harrison Room at Newnham College, and will be followed by tea and coffee. *If you would like to have dinner with the speaker in the evening following the talk, please email the secretaries of the club (mscsecretar...@gmail.com <mscsecretar...@gmail.com>) by 2pm today. *This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and it will take place at Thaikhun - those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the specific details by email closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Annie Bosse, Benjamin Marschall and Lucy McDonald Secretaries of the Moral Sciences Club Faculty of Philosophy University of Cambridge msc...@hermes.cam.ac.uk http://www.phil.cam.ac.uk/seminars-phil/seminars-msc _____________________________________________________ To unsubscribe from the CamPhilEvents mailing list, or change your membership options, please visit the list information page: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEvents List archive: http://bit.ly/CamPhilEventsArchive Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
