Dear all, The next meeting of the Moral Sciences Club will be held tomorrow (Tuesday 22nd October). We are delighted to welcome Luvell Anderson (Syracuse), who will be giving a talk entitled 'Roasting Ethics'. The abstract is as follows:
"What are the rules of the comedic roast? Initially, there might seem to be a tension between ‘the comedic’ and ‘roasting’ or ‘insult.’ The comedic is concerned with *the funny*, light-hearted mirth or fun, while insults are mean-spirited in nature, tools of injury. So how can the two be combined to produce something fun? Obviously, the mixing of the two isn’t always successful. Just as adding too much salt to a dish can make it unpalatable, being heavy-handed with the insults can make an intended humorous utterance emotionally unbearable. There is a delicate balance that must be struck to ensure that insults within the roasting context are taken “in good fun.” In this talk I briefly entertain a few views that attempt a resolution of this apparent tension. I conclude with a proposal that suggests when they are succesful, roasts employ mechanisms that redirect attention from the joke’s content to its formal properties; it is when those mechanisms fail that roasting becomes disagreeable." 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) by midday today. This dinner is open to anyone who has attended the talk and those who sign up for dinner will be notified of the details closer to the time. Best wishes, -- Alex Horne, Roxane Noel and Zoe Walker 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: https://lists.cam.ac.uk/pipermail/phil-events/ Please note that CamPhilEvents doesn't accept email attachments. See the list information page for further details and suggested alternatives.
