Vědecký tým Niklase Forsberga

• Ground-bound methodology to tackle concrete and urgent problems
• Acknowledgment of Context, Horizon and Background: „the reasons for our beliefs are not reasons“
• Language, communication and linguistic changes
• Emotions and morality, ethical attention

Moral Universe; Ground-Up Philosophy; Moral Context; Philosophy Of Language; Emotions; Attention

• Doc. Niklas Forsberg
• Doc. Laura Candiotto
• Dr. Antony Fredriksson
• Diana Kalášková
• İrem Güven
• Olena Kushyna
• Philip Strammer

The central focus of this research team’s activities builds on the insights previously developed, and the central theoretical issues that we are now working on concerns how our belief systems slowly and gradually undergo change. Most philosophy focuses on how rational and deliberate actions and calculations change our ways of thinking, but the work performed at the Centre for Ethics, suggests that the formation of our moral universes (this is, of course a metaphor) take shape in more uncontrolled, almost unintentional, ways than philosophers in general are prone to assume. Beliefs and opinions are always formed from within a horizon or against a background. But what gives the horizons or backgrounds the form and structure they have? These are the central theoretical issues that we need to deal with in order to further our inquiries into the ethical difficulties of our time. To put the problem in a more dramatic form, one could say that the reasons for our beliefs are not reasons (as philosophers tend to understand them).

Here, questions about small and hardly perceptible changes in language and other forms of communication; about what we (in our time) tend to think of as given limits to morality; the ways in which our perception of the world alters in light of linguistic changes; how uncontrolled emotions take part in forming ideas of the limits of the moral; ways in which ethical attention can, and perhaps also sometimes must, be involuntary and uncontrolled are placed at the forefront. That is, we seek ways for a philosophy of language that stays close to the practices of everyday discourse and that is historically, contextually, socially and “anthropologically” sensitive; a philosophy of emotions that does not shy away from studying negative emotions and negative side-effects of “positive emotions”; and a way to think about ethical attention that goes beyond intentional and directed reasoning and perception, or is anchored more solidly in our practices.