San Raffaele Spring School of Philosophy 2018 – SRSSP
The Faculty of Philosophy at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University in Milan is glad to announce the International Conference and Spring School:
Unpacking Political Agency
Equality, Vulnerability, Discrimination
San Raffaele Spring School of Philosophy 2018 (SRSSP 2018)
Milan, June 5-7, 2018
What does it mean to be a political agent? Is it a status that needs to be acknowledged to any member of a democratic polity or do people need to fulfil some requirements to be treated as agents?
In very general terms, an agent is a being with the capacity to act, and ‘agency’ denotes the exercise or manifestation of this capacity. While personal agency entails the capacities to form, realize, and revise temporally extended plans political agency involves the capacity to act in concert with others by exercising political power. On the one hand, this means that individual political agency is contingent on other people; as a consequence, if a person becomes ‘isolated’ from others or excluded by others, her political agency decreases. On the other hand, the relationship between power and political agency entails that the exercise of political agency deeply affects others because it can limit their freedom to pursue what they desire.
