This week we're going to be attending the Roy A Rappaport lecture at 3:00pm on "Ethics as an Empirical Problem" [see below for a full description]. After the lecture (around 4) we'll take you out for a bite to eat at Jerusalem Garden to discuss thoughts on the lecture, and then make our way to the natural history museum for the "Dance of the Neurons" exhibit. Feel free to join us for any part! Email cogscicmty@gmail.com if you'd like to meet up at a certain point and can't find us. “Ethics as an Empirical Problem”by Webb Keane
Friday, September 25th, 2015 at 3:00 p.m. Rackham Assembly Hall, 4th Floor Rackham This lecture introduces the central problems we will be grappling with over the semester. It starts with the basic premise that ethical impulses, judgments, and goals are features of everyday life in every known society, past and present. Ethics is an aspect of people’s ordinary activities as they are more or less unselfconsciously carried out. But it is also a recurrent topic of speculation, doctrine, debate, and purposeful self-cultivation. The empirical study of ethics thus poses special problems, since it straddles both the divisions between normative and empirical fields of scholarship, and those between human and social sciences. The latter division is of special interest for any anthropological approach to ethics, since in this light, the propensity for ethics would seem to be both a universal shared by all humans, and in any instance the historically changeable and highly variable creation of particular communities. This lecture lays the groundwork for an approach to the study of ethics that draws on psychology, sociolinguistics, micro-sociology, ethnography, and social history. It introduces the goal of the lectures, to show the dynamics among different dimensions of ethical life in a non-reductionist way. The approach taken here stems from the conviction that the more familiar ways of distinguishing between natural and social realities no longer serve us well, and that ethics, with sources in both biological mechanisms and social imaginaries, is a good place to start rethinking their relations.
Friday, September 25th, 2015 at 3:00 p.m. Rackham Assembly Hall, 4th Floor Rackham This lecture introduces the central problems we will be grappling with over the semester. It starts with the basic premise that ethical impulses, judgments, and goals are features of everyday life in every known society, past and present. Ethics is an aspect of people’s ordinary activities as they are more or less unselfconsciously carried out. But it is also a recurrent topic of speculation, doctrine, debate, and purposeful self-cultivation. The empirical study of ethics thus poses special problems, since it straddles both the divisions between normative and empirical fields of scholarship, and those between human and social sciences. The latter division is of special interest for any anthropological approach to ethics, since in this light, the propensity for ethics would seem to be both a universal shared by all humans, and in any instance the historically changeable and highly variable creation of particular communities. This lecture lays the groundwork for an approach to the study of ethics that draws on psychology, sociolinguistics, micro-sociology, ethnography, and social history. It introduces the goal of the lectures, to show the dynamics among different dimensions of ethical life in a non-reductionist way. The approach taken here stems from the conviction that the more familiar ways of distinguishing between natural and social realities no longer serve us well, and that ethics, with sources in both biological mechanisms and social imaginaries, is a good place to start rethinking their relations.
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