Colloquium Friday!
Friday, January 11, 2019
2:30 pm Clearihue A303
Dr. Zoey Lavallee, City University of New York (CUNY)
Title: Toward a Theory of Craving
Abstract:
I contend that craving is a necessary condition of addiction. Accordingly, investigating the nature of craving is a worthwhile endeavor that can bring to light important information about the nature of addiction generally. While craving is acknowledged as important by most contemporary theories in the philosophy of addiction, as it stands, the phenomenon of craving is undertheorized. I make the case that craving is best characterized by the following features: craving is a type of desire that is implicitly a two-place predicate, and its object is experience; craving has a heterogeneous phenomenology; cravings are necessarily occurrent desires, and they are necessarily felt; and, cravings are motivational states whose motivational force comes from both propositional content and felt-quality. It is precisely because cravings are this kind of desire with this kind of content that they are so pressing in addiction, and often extremely difficult to resist.
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