Given as Free: A Gricean Account of Fichte’s Summons

In his famous deduction of intersubjectivity, Fichte argues that we could not become aware of ourselves as particular individual beings without the experience of being ‘summoned’ (‘aufgefordert’) to free activity through another person. In my talk I want to bring light to this idea by arguing for the following two claims.

1. Fichte’s account of summoning as a particular form of reciprocal rational causal influence bears a remarkable and hitherto unnoticed similarity to Grice’s theory of meaning.
2. Fichte is interested in the phenomenology of being causally influenced in this particular way because it provides the resources to combine two essential features of the empirical self that seem incompatible in a Kantian account of self-consciousness: freedom and givenness.

Tobias Rosefeldt
https://www.hu-berlin.de/en/people-detail-page/prof-dr-tobias-rosefeldt-1
Professor
Department of Philosophy
Humboldt University, Berlin

About the Speaker:

I hold a chair for Classical German Philosophy at Humboldt-University. My main area of specialization is Kant’s philosophy and contemporary philosophy of language and metaphysics, but I also have an increasing interest in Post-Kantian thinkers such as Fichte and Hegel. My project in the KFG will focus on Kant's concept of a cognitive faculty and its epistemological implications.

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This is a talk with audience Q&A presented by the University of Toronto's Centre for Ethics that is free to attend and open to the public. The talk will also be streamed online with live chat here [to be posted].

About the Centre for Ethics (http://ethics.utoronto.ca):

The Centre for Ethics is an interdisciplinary centre aimed at advancing research and teaching in the field of ethics, broadly defined. The Centre seeks to bring together the theoretical and practical knowledge of diverse scholars, students, public servants and social leaders in order to increase understanding of the ethical dimensions of individual, social, and political life.

In pursuit of its interdisciplinary mission, the Centre fosters lines of inquiry such as (1) foundations of ethics, which encompasses the history of ethics and core concepts in the philosophical study of ethics; (2) ethics in action, which relates theory to practice in key domains of social life, including bioethics, business ethics, and ethics in the public sphere; and (3) ethics in translation, which draws upon the rich multiculturalism of the City of Toronto and addresses the ethics of multicultural societies, ethical discourse across religious and cultural boundaries, and the ethics of international society.

The Ethics of A.I. Lab at the Centre For Ethics recently appeared on a list of 10 organizations leading the way in ethical A.I.: https://ocean.sagepub.com/blog/10-organizations-leading-the-way-in-ethical-ai