Dear Colleagues,
You are warmly welcomed to attend the following talk; refreshments and sandwiches will be available.
Upcoming CCI Colloquium Series Talk:
Friday, March 11th, 12:40 G-160
Thomas Manganaro, Duke University, Department of English Literature
“Akrasia in the Age of Reason”:
This talk focuses on the condition of acting against better judgment, or failing to do what you know you ought to do — a condition classically called “akrasia” by the ancient Greeks. This phenomenon becomes particularly interesting in the philosophy and literature of the eighteenth century — the “age of reason.” As philosophy in this period increasingly depicts minds and bodies like systems or machines, it has difficulty describing akrasia — namely, how someone can want to do something and yet not be able to get themselves to do it. Because it is so difficult to explain, akrasia becomes a very rich topic for literary experimentation in this period; we see this in particular in narratives by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Laurence Sterne.