Mark Hopwood

speaker

1,269 appearances 31 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2009 last heard Sep 2014

Mark Hopwood’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Elucidations · Episode 56: Philip Pettit discusses corporate rights and responsibilities · 10 Feb 2014 podcast

Yeah, and and maybe it's worth saying, I mean, before we get onto that, just something a little bit more about what it is to be an agent at all.

I mean, that might might not be a term that's familiar to everyone.

So when we talk about agents, we don't mean like James Bond or CIA agents.

Right.

So w what what do we mean in general when we talk about an agent in philosophy?

So yeah, just to dwell briefly on what you said there, so you talked about systems with purposes and of course we might imagine, well, my iron at home is a system with a purpose, or you know, various kinds of machines are.

And it seems like the reason that you wanted to talk about representations is that my iron at home or my stove or whatever might do certain things.

But if I just leave it to itself, if I leave the iron to itself, it's just gonna burn a hole right through my sweater that I'm ironing.

It doesn't in any way represent its environment to itself, it doesn't respond.

Okay, so that's that's really interesting.

I mean you've drawn some interesting parallels there, but

someone might wanna come back and say, look, well maybe you can talk about corporations in a way that makes them sound like people so you can you can talk about corporate persons if you like.

But that's just a fiction.

We don't have real people there.

You've just found a way of talking about corporations like their people.

Um but all you've done is kind of invented these these fictional people.

I mean, is there any reason we should think that there's something that actually exists, an agent that actually exists in a corporation in the same way that we think there is with a human being?

So maybe one way of putting the point that you just made in terms of the example we were discussing earlier of the three of us as a committee is that we could be sitting in this room discussing this candidate and someone could come in and ask us, so is this person getting tenure, getting promoted?

And we could say something like, well, it depends whose views you're asking for.

You know, do you want Philip's views?

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