Conference to Examine One’s Ability to Understand Other Minds and to be Moral Agents

A conference under the aegis of the Center for Religion, Ethics and Culture at the College of the Holy Cross titled “Understanding Other Minds and Moral Agency” will be held from April 19 to 21 in the Rehm Library (Smith Hall) at the College. The events are free and open to the public.

The conference will bring together prominent researchers from a variety of disciplines and distinct research traditions to discuss how one should conceive of the ability to know other minds, how it affects the capacity for moral judgment, and how one gains an ethical perspective toward other persons. It will reflect the explosive growth in research and the intense debate in neuroscience, psychology and philosophy about our capacity to understand the mind of others. Such everyday mind-reading abilities constitute the foundation for humans to be social animals and to become full members of society. Without such knowledge human beings are very limited in forming social bonds or in being initiated into basic social practices such as speaking a common language. In addition, the conference will link the discussion about the psychological processes involved in interpreting the minds of others with the ongoing philosophical and psychological examination of one’s ability to relate to others in an altruistic and ethical manner. The conference will thus unite two distinct domains of research that have been traditionally independent of each other.

Subjects covered during the three-day conference include: empathy; social cognition and folk psychological explanations; morality in humans and other animals; the ubiquity of imitation and mimicry; ethics and the nature of folk psychology; moral agency; and emotions and the moral sense.

The conference is organized by Karsten R. Stueber, associate professor and incoming chair of the philosophy department at Holy Cross, who has widely published in the area of philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and the philosophy of the social sciences. In the last few years his writings and research interest have been primarily concerned with providing an account of one’s ability to understand other agents. These interests are reflected in his recent book Rediscovering Empathy: Agency, Folk Psychology, and the Human Sciences (MIT Press, 2006), where he argues that empathy is epistemically central for folk psychological understanding of other agents — that it is something people cannot do without in order to gain understanding of other minds.

The schedule of events is available on the Center’s site.