PHI6850 - Desires Of One's Own

Link to Course's Website

Lecturer:

Yonatan Shemmer

Outline:

A drug addict has a strong desire for her drugs. She also wants other things, many of which conflict with her desire to take the drug, but the desire to take the drug is stronger and indeed she does take it. Is her decision to take the drug free? Is the desire really hers, does it represent who she is, or is it a foreign implant, an external force that coerces her to act against her own will? Many of us think that the decision was not free. But what account can we give of that claim? What makes the decision less free than any other decision that is based on a strong, overriding desire? Is it the fact that the drug addict has the desire for the drug as a result of her previous drug consumption? Is it because so many of her other desires conflict with it? Is it because she thinks it is a bad desire? Or maybe because she does not want to have that desire?
Many of our decisions are motivated by our desires; maybe even all of them. Some philosophers think that desires function as reasons in our deliberation. So in various ways our decisions are grounded in our desires. Whether these decisions are free, whether they can count as our decisions, and whether they can give us reasons for action, will therefore partly depend on whether the desires that ground them can be said to be ours in some significant sense. If all of our desires are external to us – maybe because they have been determined by forces that are beyond our control – then it is not clear that our actions autonomous or that our reasons (to the extent that they depend on our desires) are real reasons.
The course will explore the contemporary debate about the conditions that make a desire our own and will then move to consider the relation between desires and reasons for action.
We will read texts by Frankfurt, Watson, Bratman, Velleman, Fischer, Korsgaard and Parfit.

Preparatory Reading:

A detailed reading list available at the beginning of the semester will refer to a range of works in the Main Library. Students may want to look at the following articles to get an idea of the texts we will be looking at:
Frankfurt, H., "Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person," The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Frankfurt, H., "Identification and Wholeheartedness," in The Importance of What We Care About (Cambridge University Press, 1988). Bratman, M., "Identification, Decision, and Treating as a Reason" in Faces of Intention (Cambridge University Press, 1999): 185-206. Watson, G., "Free Agency," Journal of Philosophy 72 (1975): 205-220.
Students are also invited to email the instructor at y.shemmer@sheffield.ac.uk for more information on the course or on additional reading.

Assessment:

The module is assessed on the basis of one long essay between 4000 and 6000 words in length (for RMA or TMA candidates) or two short essays between 2000 and 3000 words in length (for TMA candidates only). Essay topics should be chosen in consultation with the course teacher concerned. The essays should be thought of as mini research-papers, whose content can be related more or less loosely to the material covered in the course. Students should meet with the lecturer, or other appropriate member of staff to discuss the topic and to discuss a draft of the essay.

Lectures and Seminars:

The module is also available to undergraduates, and further details of the module are available through the link on the right-hand side of this page.

If there are three or more postgraduates taking the module, a separate seminar will be scheduled for postgraduates only.