Hegel on Transformative Experiences
Colloquium
Speaker: Andreja Novakovic, University of California at Berkeley
When: Oct 06, 2023 - 03:30pm
-
05:30pm
Where: Mitchell Hall 102
Description:
Transformative experiences have become a popular topic in philosophy because they seem to pose a special problem for rational decision making. In my talk, I focus on a species of transformative experiences – conversion experiences – which are not the product of a decision to become transformed, though they pose problems of another order. If we take aesthetic and religious conversions as our point of departure, we see that conversions do not appear to be rational not only in the moment, but also in retrospect. In this talk, I argue that Hegel thinks of the experiences of interest to him in the Phenomenology of Spirit as conversion-like, but that he also holds that these experiences can be retrospectively reconstructed as rational.