Job Market Candidates

Susan Bencomo

Research Areas: Ancient Greek philosophy (esp. Plato), ethics, moral psychology

Dissertation Title:  Desire and the Birth of the Self: What Plato’s Theory of Eros Can Tell Us About Value

Desire is perplexing due to its vexing marriage of our activity and passivity.  Further, desires exert an attractive pressure on us— what I call imperatival force— which we take to figure in desire’s role in the explanation of our action.  Some have thought Plato was the first to hold that desires are appearances of goodness, thereby explaining both our passivity and their imperatival force.  This Perceptual Model remains attractive to many today.  My dissertation argues that the Perceptual Model fails as a model of desire, and that Plato’s view differs importantly from it.  In the Symposium, Plato explains imperatival force in terms of the attractiveness of the self we recognize in a desired object.  When we value, we identify ourselves with another object.  This makes sense of desire’s role in our practical identities.  I argue Plato offers a cognitive theory of desire for the good (Erōs), explicated as correct belief (orthē doxa), but also that cognitive states are ultimately explicated as evaluative acts.  Plato offers a theory of valuing that informs his understanding of cognition.  I find this view reaffirmed in the Republic.  While his view that conation and cognition are the same principle is not viable by modern lights, Plato’s theory of the structure of valuing attitudes provides insight into how valuing differs from perception and belief.  Desires stem from valuing attitudes: sui generis, reflexive attitudes in which we do something to ourselves, namely create our selves.  On this account we are both active and passive. 

Dissertation Advisors:  Richard Kraut and Kyla Ebels-Duggan 

Email:  susanbencomo2011@u.northwestern.edu 

Website: www.susanbencomo.com 

Kasey Hettig-Rolfe 

Research Areas: Kant; 19th-Century Philosophy

Dissertation: "The Transcendental Deduction: A Methodological Reading" 

The Transcendental Deduction is the heart of Kant’s critical epistemology. It is commonly believed to show that certain concepts of ours (viz., the categories) meet up with objects and thus have ‘objective reality.’ But there remains considerable disagreement about how this important argument works. In this dissertation, I argue in favor of a radical reframing of the Deduction. It does not prove that the categories have objective reality, but only that there is only one ground fit for such a proof. This methodological re-reading of the Deduction has two key upshots. First, it makes available new solutions to resilient puzzles about the Critique of Pure Reason; e.g., what is the relationship of the Deduction’s two parts? How do the stages of the Analytic hang together? Second, it vindicates the common intuition that the argument from apperception is unfit to support the kind of conclusions Kant seeks. Finally, it does so while shifting the justificatory burdens typically assigned to the Deduction to the sturdier ground of the System of Principles. 

Dissertation Advisor: Rachel Zuckert  

Email: kaseyhettig-rolfe2023@u.northwestern.edu 

Website: kaseyhettigrolfe.com 

CARRY Osborne

Research Areas: Epistemology, Social Epistemology, Ethics (Normativity and Responsibility)

Dissertation: "A Social Approach to Doxastic Responsibility"

We often hold one another responsible for our beliefs, even though they do not seem to be within our voluntary control. Rather than being a matter of control, I argue that this responsibility stems from the fact that agents are answerable to a demand for reasons for their beliefs. Responsibility for belief is therefore rooted in the social relations by which we depend on one another in our capacity as believers and the expectations we have of one another given those relations. This approach does better than other contemporary accounts in that it reveals the crucially social and interpersonal dimensions of responsibility for belief, and so allows us to do justice to how this responsibility is connected to our lives as social animals.