Dartmouth Events

Friday, November 15, 2024

Keren Gorodeisky, Auburn University

Talk title: Understanding Each Other
Description: "How can we understand people—ourselves and others? Are there reasons to  think that this is a special form of understanding, distinct from  understanding non-human phenomena? In this paper, I develop a  Beauvoirian-inspired proposal for answering these questions. This  proposed account lends some support to a long tradition according to  which we don’t understand people in the same way in which we understand  non-human natural phenomena, given that properly understanding people  requires empathy, imaginative simulation, or narrative interpretation.  Yet, the Beauvoirian view instructively complicates and challenges this  tradition by bringing out the fundamental intersubjectivity of the self  and the irreducibly second-personal, embodied, and ethical nature of  understanding people. In emphasizing these, the Beauvoirian account  offers a welcome alternative to empathic and simulationist views of  understanding people, contributes to the literature on the second-person  nexus, and proposes a refreshing way of thinking about the ethical  dimensions of epistemology."

3:30pm
103 Thornton

Keren Gorodeisky is a Professor of Philosophy at Auburn University. Her main focus is on questions concerning aesthetic value, aesthetic and emotional rationality, aesthetic and emotional agency, and the nature of feelings, but she also works on Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic theory, Romanticism, and, more recently, on Simone de Beauvoir and on understanding people. These days, she is completing a book titled The Authority of Pleasure: Aesthetic Value, Rationality, and Agency.

Funded by the Mark J. Byrne 1985 Fund in Philosophy, which is an endowment established in 1996 to help support the study of philosophy at Dartmouth College. For more information on Philosophy's Sapientia Lecture Series, please visit this link.