21 March 2024, 17:30 (Zoom)
For the Zoom link, please contact Andrea Selleri (andrea.selleri@bilkent.edu.tr) or Atti Viragh (aviragh@bilkent.edu.tr)
Abstract: Comparatively speaking, philosophy has not been especially long-winded in attempting to answer questions about what is funny and why we should think so. There is the standard debate of many centuries’ standing between superiority and incongruity accounts of humor, which for the most part attempt to identify the intentional objects of our amusement. There is the more recent debate about humor and morality, about whether jokes themselves may be regarded as immoral or about whether it can in certain circumstances be wrong to laugh. It is this latter question which I will address today, having already taken sides on the first. That is, does humor invariably free us from moral responsibility? Are there circumstances in which our very amusement may convict us of harboring morally problematic attitudes? While everything ventured here applies to contexts ranging from literature to stand-up, I will focus on jokes in particular, these forming the smallest possible unit (humor monads!) of the subject under discussion. [I will include a trigger warning here, since some of these jokes appear to cross several lines, and we have to know what they are in order to discuss them]
Bio: Eva Dadlez is a professor of philosophy at the University of Central Oklahoma. She received her PhD from Syracuse University. She writes on issues at the intersection (some might say the collision) of aesthetics, ethics, and epistemology. She has written two books on the preceding: What’s Hecuba to Him? Fictional Events and Actual Emotions (Penn State Press) and Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume (Wiley Blackwell). She has most recently edited Jane Austen’s Emma: Philosophical Perspectives for Oxford University Press. Website: evadadlez.com