PHI 350 - Seminar: Agency and Self-Determination

Spring 2014

It is sometimes said that as human agents we have the power of self-determination.  This raises a number of interesting issues and questions to explore. What is this power of self-determination? Is it a power to create who we are through our own choices and actions? Or, alternatively, is it a power to express our true selves?  Either way, self-determination is regarded as a full-blooded and robust sort of agency. How ought we to characterize the essential features of this kind of agency? For example, how should we understand the relationships amongst the agent and her various mental states in these cases (e.g., desires, beliefs, values, attitudes, the will, and so on)? Similarly, how should we understand failures to act in a self-determining manner? Sometimes such failures are put in terms of alienation—I fail to act in a self-determining way when, for example, I feel alienated from the desire that moved me to act. What does it mean to be alienated from one’s own desires or other mental states? Is it possible to understand my agency and self-determination in a reductive way (i.e., entirely in terms of certain mental states)? Or do reductive accounts fail to account for full-blooded agency of the self-determining kind? In exploring these questions we will read a number of articles by different philosophers, mostly from the 20th and 21st centuries. There are no prerequisites but one prior course in philosophy is recommended.

Prerequisites & Notes
This course can be repeated for credit given sufficiently distinct topics: check with the department chair. (Fall, Spring)