Dr Susanne Mathies, who recently passed her PhD viva at the Open University, has published “The Simulated Self – Fiction Reading and Narrative Identity” in Philosophia. The article develops a new model of fiction reading, built on two assumptions: that human beings are entangled in stories, and that emotions are complex and have a narrative structure.
The article is open access, and can be read here.
Susanne was supervised by Dr Carolyn Price and Professor Derek Matravers.
The Aesthetic Mind: Second Conference
Fiction and Cognition
Derek Matravers and seven others will be giving talks. Derek’s paper is called ‘Fiction, internal inconsistency, and belief’. Click on the link above or the image for information.
John Shand, a long-standing OU Tutor and Associate Lecture, has edited A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, which has just been published as part of the prestigious (not to say incredibly useful) Blackwell’s Companions series.
Contents below. Follow the link to the publisher’s site for more information.
Early Bird registration is still available (until May 15th) for the first Heritage in War conference, which is on the theme of:
Cultural Heritage and the Ethics of War
The aim of the conference is to begin to develop a robust account of the status of heritage in war by exploring philosophical work on such matters as incommensurability and incomparability, the nature and status of cultural heritage, risk imposition, and the reconstruction and replacement of damaged or destroyed heritage.
For more information about the conference, including registration and the latest news on the wider project, visit the project website.
Alex Barber gave a talk on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as part of the Belfast Imagine festival on March 28th. In it, he talked about the surprising presence within Mary Shelley’s famous and much-loved novel of her mother and father – the philosophers Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.
Wollstonecraft, who was called ‘a hyena in petticoats’ and a ‘philosophizing serpent’ (and worse) by male critics, is best known today for her revolutionary manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, one of the earliest works of feminist philosophy. She died ten days after giving birth to Mary Shelley but, as Alex explained in his talk, her ideas live on in the words of her daughter’s extraordinary novel.
The 7th biennial conference of the Music and Philosophy Study Group with take place in King’s College, London. The OU’s Derek Matravers is on the programme committee. The keynote speakers are:
Professor Jenefer Robinson (University of Cincinnati)
Professor Alexander García Düttmann (Universität der Künste, Berlin)
Professor Julian Johnson (Royal Holloway, University of London)
A full draft programme, and registration details, are available via the conference site.
Former doctoral student Jon Phelan has accepted an offer to publish a research monograph based on his PhD thesis, under the working title ‘Reading Between the Lines: Investigating the Cognitive Value of Literary Fiction’, with Routledge in their Literature and Education series.
Jon argues, following his PhD thesis with the Open University, that one gains cognitively through an engagement with the literary work’s literary devices (metaphor, irony, ambiguity). This is often missed in the debate, which tends to focus on the fictional status of literary fiction. The reviews of the book proposal said that ‘the book is original’ and ‘promises to reinvigorate a central debate’…’it has significant interdisciplinary appeal’. Jon notes that he is indebted to Professor Derek Matravers and Professor Sophie Grace Chappell for their continued encouragement with the project, to the commissioning editor Ms. Emilie Coin, and to the series editors Dr. David Aldridge and Dr. Andrew Green from Brunel University, London.
3am magazine is a free-to-access site with a constant stream of excellent essays on culture, particularly written culture, including philosophy. It also has an interview with Sophie Grace Chappell called Glory, beauty, epiphany, imagination: how to do moral philosophy. As well as finding out more about her many highly distinctive takes on philosophy…
‘The phenomenon that I call glory is, roughly speaking, what you get when someone scores a brilliant goal in front of a packed stadium. When I wrote “Glory as an ethical idea” it was because I was struck by the centrality of glory in this sense to our society. But though it is sociologically so central for us, it’s not even on the map for us philosophically.’
…you can learn how she ended up at the Open University and why she values it as an institution.
Read what happens when two philosophers disagree on something, set out their stalls, and talk to each other. Sophie Grace Chappell (Open University) exchanged thoughts with Holly Lawford-Smith (University of Melbourne) on transgender women, transgender activism, and gender-critical feminism.
The resulting dialogue is on Aeon.
Congratulations go to our doctoral candidate Sarah Pawlett-Jackson (supervised by Sophie-Grace Chappell and Manuel Dries), who has published her article “Gestalt structures in multi-person intersubjectivity” in Synthese.
In the article, Sarah argues that there are gestalt principles underlying intersubjective interactions. Framed from the first-person perspective: I am able to recognise intersubjective interactions between multiple others who are not me. Sarah goes on to explore the consequences of these claims for the second-person standpoint.
