Please join us for Professor Vincent Descombes’s talk on March 31 from 3-5pm in Emerson Hall Room 305.
Lectures are one hour long and are followed by a question-and-answer session.
Colloquia lectures are free and open to the public.
A distinctive feature of human societies, says Emile Durkheim, is the presence of institutions “in the broad sense of the word”. Institution is the name he gives to pre-established common ways of acting and thinking that are imposed on individuals and are therefore external to each of them.
I will try to bring out the philosophical significance of defining human sociality in terms of institutions in this extended sense. What is at stake here is the nature of human sociality. There are two rival philosophies of social relations between human beings. These philosophies are actually opposite conceptions of institutions. According to the individualistic school, institutions are the result of interpersonal interactions between individual agents. According to the other approach, institutions are a precondition for an interaction being a social one. It’s only in an institutional context that interactions between people have a social meaning.
I will consider the implications of adopting one or the other of these views by addressing two questions, namely:
(1) Institutions defined as established ways of acting and thinking are a human creation, therefore our creation. They are established by us. Then how is it possible for these ways to be defined as pre-established?
(2) If our ways of acting and thinking are institutional, the question arises: is there room in an institutional approach to sociality for personal agency and for personal agency?
Vincent Descombes is Professor at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Paris.
LOCATION:Emerson 305 STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20230331T190000Z DTEND:20230331T210000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR