BiblioVault - Books about Other minds (Theory of knowledge)

Hospitality, Volume I

Jacques Derrida

University of Chicago Press, 2023

Jacques Derrida explores the ramifications of what we owe to others.

Hospitality reproduces a two-year seminar series delivered by Jacques Derrida at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris between 1995 and 1997. In these lectures, Derrida asks a series of related questions about responsibility and “the foreigner”: How do we welcome or turn away the foreigner? What does the idea of the foreigner reveal about kinship and the state, particularly in relation to friendship, citizenship, migration, asylum, assimilation, and xenophobia? Derrida approaches these questions through readings of several classical texts as well as modern texts by Heidegger, Arendt, Camus, and others. Central to his project is a rigorous distinction between conventional, finite hospitality, with its many conditions, and the aspirational idea of hospitality as something offered unconditionally to the stranger. This volume collects the first year of the seminar.

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How Infants Know Minds

Vasudevi Reddy

Harvard University Press, 2008

Most psychologists claim that we begin to develop a “theory of mind”—some basic ideas about other people’s minds—at age two or three, by inference, deduction, and logical reasoning.

But does this mean that small babies are unaware of minds? That they see other people simply as another (rather dynamic and noisy) kind of object? This is a common view in developmental psychology. Yet, as this book explains, there is compelling evidence that babies in the first year of life can tease, pretend, feel self-conscious, and joke with people. Using observations from infants’ everyday interactions with their families, Vasudevi Reddy argues that such early emotional engagements show infants’ growing awareness of other people’s attention, expectations, and intentions.

Reddy deals with the persistent problem of “other minds” by proposing a “second-person” solution: we know other minds if we can respond to them. And we respond most richly in engagement with them. She challenges psychology’s traditional “detached” stance toward understanding people, arguing that the most fundamental way of knowing minds—both for babies and for adults—is through engagement with them. According to this argument the starting point for understanding other minds is not isolation and ignorance but emotional relation.

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Imagining Minds

The Neuro-Aesthetics of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy

Kay Young

The Ohio State University Press, 2010

Jane Austen, George Eliot, and Thomas Hardy—three great masters of the English novel—are three remarkable imagining minds. As readers of their novels, we feel ourselves to be in contact with their authorial minds and conjure the minds they create spread across the pages of their narrative worlds. In the way that we believe in and hold in mind the idea that other human beings have minds of their own do we as readers of the novel believe we are in the presence of these other minds. But how?

Imagining Minds explores how the novels of Austen, Eliot, and Hardy create the felt-quality of their authoring minds and of the minds they author by bringing their writing in relation to cognitive neuroscience accounts of the mind-brain, especially of William James and Antonio Damasio. It is in that relational space between the novels and theories of mind-brain that Kay Young works through her fundamental claim: the novel writes about the nature of mind, narrates it at work, and stimulates us to know deepened experiences of consciousness in its touching of our reading minds.

While, in addition to James and Damasio, Young draws on a range of theories of mind-brain generated by current research in philosophy, neuroscience, cognitive science, psychology, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis to help her understand the novel’s imagining of mind, her claim is that those disciplines cannot themselves perform the more fully integrated because embodied and emotionally stimulating mind work of thenovel—mind work that prompts us as their readers to better know our own minds.

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Savages, Romans, and Despots

Thinking about Others from Montaigne to Herder

Robert Launay

University of Chicago Press, 2018

From the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries, Europeans struggled to understand their identity in the same way we do as individuals: by comparing themselves to others. In Savages, Romans, and Despots, Robert Launay takes us on a fascinating tour of early modern and modern history in an attempt to untangle how various depictions of “foreign” cultures and civilizations saturated debates about religion, morality, politics, and art.

Beginning with Mandeville and Montaigne, and working through Montesquieu, Diderot, Gibbon, Herder, and others, Launay traces how Europeans both admired and disdained unfamiliar societies in their attempts to work through the inner conflicts of their own social worlds. Some of these writers drew caricatures of “savages,” “Oriental despots,” and “ancient” Greeks and Romans. Others earnestly attempted to understand them. But, throughout this history, comparative thinking opened a space for critical reflection. At its worst, such space could give rise to a sense of European superiority. At its best, however, it could prompt awareness of the value of other ways of being in the world. Launay’s masterful survey of some of the Western tradition’s finest minds offers a keen exploration of the genesis of the notion of “civilization,” as well as an engaging portrait of the promises and perils of cross-cultural comparison.

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