Dear All
This Wed 13 May, Anik Waldow (USYD) will talk to us about:
Abstract: Mirroring Minds: Hume on Sympathy
Hume’s account of sympathy has often been taken to describe something
that comes close to what the discovery of so-called mirror neurons
suggests, that is, that we are able to understand one another’s
emotions and beliefs by having an experience that exactly resembles
the experience of the observed person. I will argue that this
interpretation is wrong, because on Hume’s standard account sympathy
needs to be understood as a mechanism which provides us with ideas and
beliefs that are prior to the emergence of shared feelings. The
purpose of emphasising these aspects of Humean sympathy is to show
that the opposition between experience-based and inference-based
accounts of mind reading is simplistic. According to Hume, sympathy is
a structural analogue to causal reasoning and at the same time a
mechanical procedure that instantly leads the perceiver from certain
sensory inputs to the experience of beliefs about other persons’
mental states. Hume’s account thereby shows that it is conceivable
that the perception of another person’s action causes our mirror
neurons to fire and that we experience this as the formation of a
belief about another’s experience rather than the original experience
itself.
Talk at 3.30 in the Refectory; Pre-talk at 2PM in the Philosophy
common room.
All welcome!
And apologies for no notice last week to those of you who are not on
the departmental notice list; SydPhil was down for about five days
(the first time in my experience) and I didn't realize this, since it
didn't bounce my message. When the list-meister informed me, I was
able to send out a message to the department, but not, obviously, to
SydPhil! Fortunately there was no talk anyway!
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