The Scripps College Humanities Institute spring 2005 program, “Empathy” will bring a lecture, symposium and conference to the Scripps campus in March. For more information and a complete schedule of events, please call the Humanities Institute at (909) 621-8326 or visit scripps-staging.skybox0.com/dept/humanities/index.html . The March event dates and descriptions follow:
Conference on Empathy and Others: March 31, 4:15 – 9:00 p.m. and April 1, 9:30 a.m. – 12:45 p.m.
Various lectures will be presented at the Humanities Institute conference centered around the theme of “Empathy and Others.” Topics include the history of emotions, educating for prosocial behavior, the caring person, empathy and animals, and the ethics of the neighbor. Lecturers include William Reddy, Professor of History and Cultural Anthropology, Duke University; Jacqueline Stevens from the Law and Society Program at the University of California, Santa Barbara; Norma Feshbach [correct spelling], Professor of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles; Virginia Held, Distinguished Professor at City University of New York Graduate School and Hunter College; Colin Allen, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University; and Kenneth Reinhard, Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of California, Los Angeles. The conference begins at 4:15 p.m. on March 31 in the Old Music Building at Scripps College, and is free and open to the public.
The keynote address of the conference will be delivered on Thursday evening by George Lakoff, Professor of Linguistics at University of California, Berkeley and Senior Fellow of the Rockridge Institute. Known for his work on “Moral Politics,” he has examined the centrality of metaphor to human thinking and society. Lakoff has been one of the most influential thinkers in his field. He is also the founder of the progressive think tank , the Rockridge Institute. The title of his address will be “Empathy: From Neuroscience to Politics.”
According to Humanities Institute Director, Julia Liss, “The March events provide an opportunity to examine both the origin of the concept of empathy in aesthetics and its current application to social and political relationships. The topic of empathy is of considerable interest when we consider the structure of these relationships, ourselves, and others, justice and equality, reason, emotion, and values in politics and society.”
The “Empathy” program will pursue the intersections of various disciplines by bringing together scholars in such fields as neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, literary criticism, history, anthropology, art history, media studies, legal studies, and musicology. The program will explore how-and why-empathy is a shared focal point in these otherwise very different fields of study.
The “Empathy” program concludes in April. For a full schedule of events, please contact the Humanities Institute at (909) 621-8326 or check the website: scripps-staging.skybox0.com/dept/humanities/index.html .