Keynote Speakers
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Professor Patrick Colm Hogan
University of Connecticut
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Biography
Patrick Colm HOGAN is a Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor at the University of Connecticut, where he is a member of the English Department, the Cognitive Science Program, the Program in Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, and the Connecticut Institute for the Brain and Cognitive Sciences. He is the author of over twenty books, including The Mind and Its Stories: Narrative Universals and Human Emotion (Cambridge University Press, 2003), hailed by Steven Pinker as “a landmark in modern intellectual life.” His most recent books are Sexual Identities: A Cognitive Literary Study (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Literature and Emotion (Routledge, 2018). Among his many international, academic presentations—including talks in Shanghai, Beijing, and (earlier) Hong Kong--he delivered a series of lectures on literature and cognitive science at the Nanjing University of Science and Technology in 2015. He has been joined by researchers in the United States, Europe, and China, to initiate “The Literary Universals Project,” a web-based outlet for research and dialogue on cross-cultural patterns in literature (https://literary-universals.uconn.edu ).
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The Complexity of Social Cognition:
Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs
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We may distinguish numerous targets, means, and functions of cognitive empathy. Dorothy Richardson’s novel points toward a number of possible qualifications of and extensions to our understanding of these topics. Most fundamentally, Richardson’s representation of her main character’s stream of consciousness suggests that our concerns with other people’s interiority may be neither as pervasive nor as deep as we are often inclined to imagine.
Richardson’s treatment of the means of achieving cognitive empathy are consistent with this limitation. Specifically, Richardson presents mechanical triggers as central to our simulative understanding of other people’s feelings. These triggers are largely innate, perceptual-expressive outcomes of emotion. In addition, Richardson stresses identity categories as a key factor in inference-based cognitive empathy. Among identity categories, she places special emphasis on nationality and sex.
Finally, Richardson’s novel has implications for our understanding of the functions of cognitive empathy. Its most obvious functions are focused on the target, even if they ultimately serve one’s own purposes in isolating threats and opportunities. Richardson’s presentation, however, indicates that the functions of cognitive empathy are more narrowly egocentric. Specifically, she suggests that they might principally concern self-understanding and self-evaluation.
In sum, Richardson’s novel partially challenges the ways in which we often understand cognitive empathy, suggesting some additions to or qualifications of current thought on the topic.
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Professor Derek Matravers
The Open University
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Biography
Derek Matravers is Professor of Philosophy at The Open University and a Senior Member of Darwin College, Cambridge. His recent work includes Introducing Philosophy of Art: Eight Case Studies (Routledge, 2013); Fiction and Narrative (OUP, 2014); and Empathy (Polity, 2017). He is the author of Art and Emotion (OUP, 1998), as well as numerous articles in aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophy of mind. His directs, with Helen Frowe, the AHRC-funded project, Heritage in War.
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Empathy and the Reader
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Contemporary thinking on empathy divides it into broadly two sorts. The first, 'low level empathy', is primarily a matter of sub-personal mechanisms - that is, those below the level of consciousness. The second, 'high level empathy', is primarily a matter of conscious attempts to take the perspective of others. This paper will argue that claims that reading involves empathy often confuse these levels. In sorting this out, we will be able to accept some claims, reject others, and assess the relation between those claims and the experience of the reader. Having put this framework in place, we will be in a better position to assess the claim that there is (or is not) some particular relation between readers' empathy and literary modernism.
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