Colloquium - Manuel Vargas - UC, San Diego

Title: The Philosophy of Accidentality.

Abstract: In the mid-20th century, there was a brief flourishing in some philosophical circles of a peculiar quasi-nationalist existentialist project. That project focused on articulating the particulars of a national or cultural circumstance, and the possibility of self-understanding that was supposed to follow in its wake. This talk picks up some of the pieces of that project and argues for a rehabilitation of aspects of it—roughly, a kind of analytic existentialism about the accidental or contingent nature of agency.