Dear all, The next USyd philosophy postgraduate colloquium will be held on Monday June 2 @ 2pm in the Muniment room (Quadrangle building, University of Sydney). All very welcome!!
Talk details: Speaker: Millie Churcher Title: Transformative Imaginings: When Adam Met Sally Early modern sentimentalist philosopher Adam Smith argues for a conception of morality grounded in sentiment rather than in pure reason. Our ability to sympathise with others is what binds us together as moral agents and motivates us to act ethically. On Smith’s account sympathy refers to the psychological mechanism or capacity through which we understand, and identify with, what another person is feeling. This process relies heavily on our capacity for imaginative perspective-taking. In this paper I defend the value of sympathy – and by extension, Smith’s moral sentimentalism - against those who argue that our capacity to feel for devalued social *groups *is too limited for sympathy to have any real ethical and political import. I argue that the scope of our fellow-feeling can be dramatically enlarged in instances where sympathy with another disrupts and transforms one’s imaginary body. Drawing on Sally Haslanger’s reflections upon her lived experience of transracial parenting (2005) I conclude that sympathetic identification with an individual whose body is marked as ‘different’ within a society can be deeply transformative for the sympathiser, which sees feelings of good-will generated in intimate contexts of parenting, romantic partnerships or friendships extend out towards wider socio-political groups. All very welcome.
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