[SydPhil] USyd Postgrad Colloquium September 1: NEW TIME (3pm), Gabriel Watts: 'Hume's Copernican Revolution in Morals'

[Elena Walsh]

>
> Dear all,
>
> The next USyd philosophy postgraduate colloquium will be held on Monday
> September 1 @
> ​*3​*
> *pm* in the Muniment room (Quadrangle building, University of Sydney).
>  We will have an afternoon tea straight after the talk.  All very welcome!!
>
> Talk details:
>
> Speaker:  Gabriel Watts
>
> Title:  Hume’s Copernican Revolution in Morals
> When setting out his account of the passions of pride and humility in the
> Treatise David Hume compares his discoveries to a Copernican revolution in
> morals. Yet while this lets us know that Hume thought his account of pride
> and humility was radically new, its precise Copernican nature remains
> opaque. Here I argue that Hume’s theory is a Copernican shift in moral
> philosophy insofar as pride and humility are analysed as ‘indirect
> passions’. Hume cryptically describes ‘indirect passions’ as those passions
> that “proceed from the same principles” as the ‘direct passions’ (i.e.
> desires), but require “the conjunction of other qualities” as well. Here I
> put this understanding of the indirect passions in the context of Hume’s
> account of causation and show how it enables him to dissociate the causal
> explanation of pride and humility from the attribution of these passions to
> rational agents.
>
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