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The Ethics Institute is starting a new initiative — an Ethics Faculty Workshop — for faculty and postdocs with broadly ethics-related interests to constructively discuss works in progress over lunch. The plan is to meet once per term, around the second week, to discuss a pre-circulated paper. The format is pre-read, so participants are asked to read the paper in advance. The Ethics Institute will provide lunch.
12:15-1:45pm - Ethics Faculty Workshop - Luke Swaine (Government), "Spirit in Democratic Theory." Lunch provided. Pre-read. All welcome. Ethics Institute, Blunt Alumni Center, Suite 204.
Contemporary democratic theorists highlight spirit's importance for liberal democracy. They emphasize the significance of the spirit of compromise, the spirit of toleration, the spirit of cooperation, and public-spiritedness. However, existing scholarship provides little clarity on what spirit is or how it functions. I address this problem by distinguishing a sense of spirit that I call spirit as a motivational mindset. This understanding builds on research in psychology and deliberative democracy, and it is companionable with normative and empirical analysis. My account clarifies different uses of "spirit" in scholarly literature, it helps to differentiate spirit as a motivational mindset from cognate phenomena, and it facilitates analysis of key forms of spirit with which democratic theorists have been concerned. The account that I provide offers a tractable foundation for the study of inspiration, furthermore, giving groundwork for analyzing forms of inspiration that may animate and enliven democratic publics.