ETHU member Emiliano Acosta co-organizes the PhD course 'Human Action between Satisfaction and Obligation' at Ghent University.
Action is a key dimension of the human being. Situated beyond the mere adaptive or instinctive behavior characteristic of most animals, human action is crucially mediated by language. In this regard, the question on action can be formulated as follows: are the main reasons that lead people to act imaginary, symbolic, or grounded in the “real” world? Can we talk about conditions of possibility for human actions as such? To what extent are duty, social responsibility, pleasure and enjoyment constitutive to human action? What does it mean to say that the surrounding world mobilizes us for acting? In order to give an answer to these questions a multi- and interdisciplinary approach is needed. This course offers PhD students the possibility of acquiring knowledge and methodologic strategies from different disciplines in order to grasp the complexity of human action.
There is also a public lecture by Peter Goodrich on "Retinal Justice: Rats, Maps, and Masks" on Monday June 10: https://research.flw.ugent.be/nl/hico.