Philosophy Department's Kleiner Lecture Series: Adam Cureton

The department of philosophy presents a lecture by Adam Cureton of the University of Tennessee, "The Social Nature of Reason."

The event is part of the Scott & Heather Kleiner Lecture Series

Personal relationships of various kinds are, from the perspective of reflective commonsense, part of a fully reason-governed life.  A theory of reason must somehow capture and explain our reflective commonsense judgments that certain relationships accord with reason, generate requirements of reason, play a significant role in a life of reason, and are worthy of promotion, protection, and respect by rational and reasonable people.  A longstanding criticism of Kantian theories of reason is that they apparently deny, downplay, or misrepresent the nature and value of friendship, community, and other loving relationships.  Most personal bonds we have are emotional, contingent, and particular, whereas reason is apparently intellectual, necessary, and universal.  In a forthcoming book called Sovereign Reason, I develop a new and unorthodox way for Kantian theories to incorporate and justify the value of many kinds of personal relationships and other aspects of reflective commonsense.  The power of reason in human beings itself, I suggest, includes substantive final interests in forming, maintaining, perfecting, respecting, and promoting relationships of solidarity.  Part of being a rational and reasonable person is to be concerned with relationships of this sort apart from any natural desires and feelings we might have.  These interests of reason provide grounds for legislating presumptive laws of reason that rational and reasonable people could or would rationally endorse.  My aim in this talk is to describe what I call the Sovereignty Conception of Reason and to explain how it can be interpreted and applied in ways that capture and explain a wide variety of judgments in reflective commonsense about loving relationships.  I also describe a fully general and universal social ideal that arises out of the Sovereignty Conception of Reason and reveals the deeply social nature of our power of reason.  This ideal is a world of fully self-governing people who are bound together in solidarity by their shared commitments to the laws of reason themselves and to their shared interests of reason that underlie those standards.