By Bence Nanay (Antwerp/ Cambridge)
Date: Thursday 24th October
Time: 1740-1900
Place: FFB-06
Abstract: You are bored during this talk, do you check your phone or not? Resist the temptation or yield? Social psychology shows that both are bad options. Yielding establishes bad habits and resisting often leads to cognitive dissonance (when you want to hide from yourself that you had the urge to check your phone). The best thing to do with temptation is to avoid them – leave that phone at home, for example. If we want to understand self-control, we should focus on avoiding, not on resisting temptations. And we have some evidence that the ability to avoid temptations directly correlates to the extent to which our mind is fragmented.
About the speaker: Bence Nanay is Professor of Philosophy and BOF Research Professor at the University of Antwerp, where he is also co-director of the Centre for Philosophical Psychology and Senior Research Associate at Peterhouse, Cambridge University. He is the author of ‘Between Perception and Action’ (OUP, 2013) and the editor of ‘Perceiving the World’ (OUP, 2010), ‘Aesthetics as Philosophy of Perception’ (OUP, 2016) and of ‘Current Controversies in Philosophy of Perception’ (Routledge, 2016). He has published more than 90 articles on various topics mainly in philosophy of mind and in aesthetics. He used to work as a film critic and served on the jury of various major international film festivals.
All are warmly invited to attend. The talk is aimed at a general audience. This talk precedes “Exploring the Mind’s Eye – An Interdisciplinary Conference on Imagination” (October 25-26), where Prof. Nanay will also be presenting (for details go to www.phil.bilkent.edu.tr).
Event organized by the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Research Group at Bilkent University