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The Philosophy Sapientia Lecture Series presents Keren Gorodeisky, Auburn University
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
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.
Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.