Agnes Callard

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832 appearances 3 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2009 last heard Jun 2020

Agnes Callard’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Elucidations · Episode 100: Agnes Callard discusses aspiration · 22 Sep 2017 podcast

And the arguments take the form of a dilemma.

And you have just given one horn of the dilemma.

So one horn is, look, there is a process that's very much like the process that you described, but it's really a passive one where the person undergoes it.

And my interlocutor, who's trying to be open-minded, says, look, I'm not going to say that that's all there is.

There's another kind of process that also sounds a lot like what you're talking about.

And it's a process that I would call self-cultivation.

So let me give an example.

Suppose that all of my friends are into a certain kind of music.

And I feel really left out.

They're always doing things that relate to this music and getting together on the basis of it.

I might want to come to like the music in order to join in on their activities.

In that sort of case, I know in advance exactly what I would be getting out of acquiring a taste for that sort of music.

So I'm going to call that self-cultivation.

It's different from aspiration because aspiration is open-ended in the way that I've described.

The person doesn't take themselves to know or to grasp the value of what they're doing.

So what my interlocutor in the book keeps saying to me is, look, if you're describing some kind of activity, either it's rational and it's a case of self-cultivation where you actually do know what the goal is and you can see in advance that it would be good for you to have certain desires or values or whatever.

Or on the other hand, it's actually a more passive process where you're sort of shaped by environmental factors and you end up with a certain value.

Why think there's anything in the middle?

And the book as a whole is an attempt to argue my way out of that dilemma.

Now, in a way, your question is, well, why would you want to argue out of the dilemma?

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