Catherine Robb
Fellow, Tilburg University
Talent, skill, ethics, self-development
My research focuses on the nature and value of talent: what talents are, why we ought to develop them, and the ways in which they contribute to (and potentially disrupt) social and educational systems. In my publication 'Talent Dispositionalism' I suggest a dispositionalist account of the nature of talent, and I claim that individual talents are iterated dispositional abilities that describe the way in which we acquire, develop and maintain a skill. During my time as a fellow of the Human Abilities Centre, I will be analysing the nature of collective talent, that is, the way in which groups or teams can be said to be talented. The literature on groups has thus far focussed on group beliefs, intentions and agency more generally. I hope to extend this discussion to an exploration of group abilities and talents. Groups are considered to be constituted either as an aggregate of individual members, or an organic unity that transcends the nature of individual members. I hope to develop an account of collective talent that explains why groups are often thought of as talented, even though their individual members might not be.