Episode 100: Agnes Callard discusses aspiration
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What is aspiration and how does it involve changing one's values?
Hey, Matt Teichman here from Elucidations. Before we get going, I just thought I'd put in a quick plug for PIPA. We've been doing our hosting with them since 2016. It's been a fantastic experience. So if you have a podcast, you might check them out. They have great analytics, the service is free, and they make it easy to migrate. So if you're curious, visit their website at pippa.io. All right, thanks. Hello and welcome to Elucidations, a philosophy podcast recorded at the University of Chicago. I'm Matt Teichman.
And I'm Ben Coward.
With us today is Agnes Callard, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Chicago, and she's here to discuss aspiration. Agnes Callard, welcome back to Elucidations.
Thank you.
So you've encouraged us to think about aspiration as something like the desire to behave according to a different set of values or to live according to a different set of values than the one you're currently living according to. So like one, I think pretty straightforward example of this is, you know, I've never been able to get into opera, but I see all my friends around me are really into it and I want to like see what I'm missing. I want to learn to appreciate opera. What are some other examples of being in this state of aspiration besides that case?
Yeah, so the first thing I would say is that maybe the target of aspiration is living in accordance with a different set of values. The aspiration itself is the process of getting you there. So it's the work that you do to acquire those values. Now, I think that people do that sort of work... towards a huge variety of targets. So for a lot of us, becoming parents is something that we aspire to. Being someone's parent isn't just a biological fact. It's an ethical fact about how you relate to them, your love for them. We learn how to love and care for our children. And in fact, in that particular case, the target is a bit of a moving target. So it's a long learning process. But other examples might be You know, when someone first goes to college, there's an aspirational process there in which they are going to learn to have the values of a student and generally of a student in some particular area, like the values of a philosopher, say, if you're a philosophy major.
Let me try to think of a different kind of example. I think, you know, becoming an athlete of a certain sort or even just getting into sports as a hobby. That could also be an aspirational activity. And then careers of maybe most kinds of careers have an aspirational component to them as well.
So this is a really wide variety of different things you might aspire towards, I think. Yeah. Now about some of those examples, I wonder whether they really are examples of wanting to have a different set of values. Like, I don't know. So let's say I aspire to become a parent. I'm not a parent currently, but I can imagine that when I do have a baby, I'm going to want the baby to be happy and well-fed and etc. So I can already see what the value in those things would be right now, even though I don't have a child. Likewise, maybe if I aspire to become a football player, well, you know, even though I'm not a football player, I can already tell right now in my current set of values that it's good to be good at catching passes and it's good to win games and etc., etc.,
So in what sense do these examples involve like changing to a new set of values?
Yeah. So in the parent case, I think it's certainly true that even someone who's not a parent can say things like, well, I'm going to want my child to be happy and I'm going to value my child's happiness once the child exists. But that's a kind of a placeholder thought, right?
What everyday examples illustrate the process of aspiration?
It's not as though you can really see what that is. Like, what is it for a newborn baby to be happy? What is it for a three-year-old to be happy? What is it for your particular three-year-old who has a particular set of traits to be happy? That's something you can't really know in advance. And so... I mean, I think the case of parenthood is actually especially radical in that way, in that we have especially little knowledge of what we will be like, because that way that we're going to be is centered around a being who doesn't yet exist.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is aspiration and how does it involve changing one's values?
0:00–4:19
2
What everyday examples illustrate the process of aspiration?
4:19–10:51
3
How does aspiring to parenthood reveal the shift to new values?
10:51–18:26
4
What are proleptic reasons and how do they function in aspirational projects?
18:26–30:10
5
Why does the book argue that aspiration is a rational activity?
30:10–41:52
6
How do normative priority and grounding explain the direction of aspiration?
41:52–45:03
7
What is the role of teleology in understanding aspirational actions?
45:03–48:19
8
How does the concept of self‑creation relate to personal identity in aspiration?
48:19–48:58
Speakers
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