Workshop: Sympathy, Simulation, and Survival in Hume and Smith
Friday 30th October, 2009, New Law School Seminar Room 344, University of Sydney How do we manage to understand other people? Why do I know that you feel angry, although I can only observe your expressions of anger but not the emotion itself? Some think that our ability to grasp what is going on in other persons' minds relates to our ability to simulate emotions. Others claim that we possess a theory about mental events and their relation to bodily expressions or situational contexts. In this workshop we will investigate David Hume's and Adam Smith's accounts of sympathy. Both thinkers provide a rich source of inspiration for everyone interested in inter-subjective processes of interpretation: they do not only show that mirroring can have various rebounds and leads to a perspective from which I can better understand and judge my own actions; they also challenge the dichotomy between simulation-driven and theory-informed processes of interpretation by pointing us to the structural similarities between inferences and processes of imagination. 10 - 11 "Humean Sympathy: A View from Cognitive Science", Dr. Mark Collier, University of Minnesota 11 - 12 "Smith, Sympathy and the Self", Dr. Dominic Murphy, University of Sydney Lunch 2 - 3 "The Mechanics of Character Change", Dr. Anik Waldow, University of Sydney All welcome, no registration. Dr. Anik Waldow Lecturer Department of Philosophy, SOPHI University of Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia Telephone: +61 2 91141245 Fax: +61 2 9351 3918 Email: [email protected]
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