What Is Aboutness? What Is Agency? What Are Persons?

Hosted by the Humanities Center and featuring Visiting Fellow, Josh Berson. Josh will be in conversation with the Center's co-director, Carla Nappi. A gull alights on the beach and you find yourself adjusting your posture to match theirs. Your body has made itself about the gull, but in one sense you had nothing to do with it. But one evening you squat down and sketch the gull’s likeness in the sand. Now you’ve added something reflexive. We tend to view the two responses as phenomena of different orders. What if we viewed them as regions on a continuum? What if we viewed agency, the felt capacity to act in the world, as a continuation of taxis, the motor responsiveness common to all life? For this event, Josh Berson and Humanities Center co-director Carla Nappi consider this and neighboring possibilities, building on Berson’s recent work on the contextual quality of such things as meanings and selves. At the root of their conversation stands this premise: experiential qualities like agency or first-personhood are historical phenomena. We should expect them to vary depending on when and where we look. And we might even hope to ask: how are they changing now? This event will be hybrid, so you can attend it either in person in 602 CL or via Zoom as you prefer. Precirculated material for this colloquium will be available here about two prior to the event. Josh Berson will also visit on October 29 for an event called Borrowed Places.