GU-Q workshop explores how collective reasoning can address pressing challenges

DOHA: Georgetown University in Qatar (GU Q) hosted Collective Intentionality, Normativity, and the Space of Reasons, a workshop exploring the work of...

DOHA: Georgetown University in Qatar (GU-Q) hosted Collective Intentionality, Normativity, and the Space of Reasons, a workshop exploring the work of philosopher Wilfrid Sellars.

It was organised by GU-Q Professor Jeremy Koons (pictured) , whose research on Sellars’s practical philosophy has been essential in reviving interest in this field. For Professor Koons, the workshop was an opportunity to explore how collective reasoning can address today’s most pressing challenges.

Professor Koons’s philosophical journey began with an introductory philosophy class in college. “I was hooked,” he recalls. Initially drawn to the concept of free will, his focus later shifted to ethics and the study of what humans accept as truth. It was in this area that he encountered Sellars’s groundbreaking philosophy, which challenged the notion that knowledge rests on self-evident moral truths—known as foundationalism. Instead, Sellars proposed that knowledge emerges through encounters with others.

“Sellars launched a devastating critique of foundationalism,” Professor Koons explains. “Many of my publications elaborate on and defend his view.” At the workshop, Sellars’s concept of we-intentions took centre stage. “For Sellars, to think morally is to think cooperatively,” Professor Koons notes. He emphasises that this framework offers essential guidance for tackling systemic challenges—such as climate change and inequality—that require collective action.

Building on this idea of cooperative thinking, another key theme was Sellars’s warning about tribocentricity—the inclination to limit moral concern to one’s own group.