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History of Philosophy Research Group Talk (Anik Waldow, Sydney)
Thursday October 24, 2024, 3:00 pm - 5:00 pm
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The History of Modern Philosophy Group is pleased to welcome as its guest speaker Anik Waldow, a professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney. She mainly works in early modern philosophy and has published articles on the moral and cognitive function of sympathy, theories of personal identity, the role of affect in the formation of the self, skepticism, and associationist theories of thought and language. She received a Leverhulm research grant (2014-2016) for the interdisciplinary project “Sympathy and its Reflections in History” and has an ARC Discovery Project on the Experimental Self (2017-19), which focuses on the role of experience, sensibility, and embodiment in the construction of selves and their place in social, political, and natural spheres. Dr. Waldow was an Associate Investigator of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (2013-2017) and has more recently started to investigate the role of empathy in linguistic and non-linguistic communications. She is the author of the monographs Experience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of the Human Place in Nature (OUP, 2020) and Hume and the Problem of Other Minds (Continuum, 2009), the editor of Sensibility in the Early Modern Era: From Living Machines to Affective Morality (Routledge, 2016). She also co-edited Philosophical Perspectives on Empathy (Routledge. 2019) and Herder: Philosophy and Anthropology (OUP, 2017). Since 2018 she has served as the director of the Sydney Intellectual History Network.
Talk Title
How to Trust Oneself? Epistemic Injustice, Friendship and Doubt: Reflections on Montaigne’s Essays
Talk Abstract
Thinking of selves relationally means accepting that self-conceptions depend in complex ways on social and institutional influences that can enhance, but also obstruct the self’s capacity for reflective thought. This talk explores a specific aspect arising from this intermingling of selves, individuals, groups, and institutions. How can the self that no longer trusts the norms inculcated by socially established customs and habits preserve its own mental sanity and self-trust? The threat ensuing here is that of ‘madness’ conceived as the loss of rationality triggered through the self’s retreat to its own inner realms. A way out of this predicament, I argue, requires what Montaigne describes as the melting away of the self’s original ‘form’ in its engagement with a trusted other. I propose that his process is best understood as an exploratory second-personal enactment of thought. Engaging in this enactment is essential to salvaging command of one’s own rationality and cultivating resources when experiencing situations of epistemic injustice.
One of six departmental Research Interest Groups, the History of Philosophy Group explores topics in ancient and/or medieval philosophy, the period from Descartes to Kant, and Jewish philosophy from the medieval period to the 20th century.
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