Harvard Room 1, Centenary Building, Sandy Bay Campus
Summary:Gwen Nettlefold Memorial Lecture
Presenter(s):
- Professor Anik Waldow, University of Sydney
This is a hybrid event with online and onsite attendance modes. For online attendance please register here.
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Each year University will invite the preceding year’s winner of the Australasian Association of Philosophy AAP Annette Baier Prize to deliver a lecture in Hobart annually. The Annette Baier Prize is awarded for an outstanding philosophical paper or book chapter published by an Australasian woman during the previous calendar year.
Dr Gwen Nettlefold was born in Hobart, Tasmania, in 1961 and educated at Waimea Heights Primary School and Fahan School. She trained as a nurse and as a naturopath. Dr Nettlefold completed a Bachelor of Communications before embarking on her doctorate in Philosophy at the University of Tasmania. Her ability as a philosopher rapidly became apparent and she made a significant contribution to the University as a member of staff, a colleague and undergraduate tutor. Her doctoral thesis was virtually complete when a brain aneurysm tragically ended her life in November 2001.This lecture is made possible as a result of gifts from the family, friends and colleagues of the late Gwen Nettlefold.
The speaker for this event is Professor Anik Waldow, University of Sydney
Anik Waldow is Professor in the Philosophy Department at the University of Sydney. She mainly works in early modern philosophy and has published articles on the moral and cognitive function of sympathy, theories of personal identity, the role of affect in the formation of the self, scepticism and associationist theories of thought and language. She received a Leverhulm research grant (2014-2016) for the interdisciplinary project “Sympathy and its Reflections in History”, and has an ARC Discovery Project on the Experimental Self (2017-19) which focuses on the role of experience, sensibility and embodiment in the construction of selves and their place in social, political and natural spheres. She was an Associate Investigator of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions (2013-2017) and has more recently started to investigate the role of empathy in linguistic and non-linguistic communications. She is the author of the monographs Experience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of the Human Place in Nature (OUP 2020) and Hume and the Problem of Other Minds (Continuum 2009), the editor of Sensibility in the Early Modern Era: From Living Machines to Affective Morality (Routledge 2016), and co-edited Philosophical Perspectives on Empathy (Routledge 2019) and Herder: Philosophy and Anthropology (OUP 2017). Since 2018 she has been the director of the Sydney Intellectual History Network.
Monstrous Minds and the Construction of the Natural and Normal: Reflections on Montaigne’s Essays
Abstract: In this talk, I critically reflect on conceptions of the natural and normal and the conditions in which humans are identified as abnormal or monstrous for the opinions, beliefs, and attitudes they have. By engaging with Montaigne’s thoughts on witchcraft, cannibalism, and “madness,” I differentiate between two senses of naturalness: the first derives from habit; the second arises gradually when responding to what Montaigne calls the “wisdom of nature.” Based on the second, I develop a functional account of normality that approaches individuals and groups as part of complex wholes. The advantage of this account is, I argue, that it is more flexible and less exclusionary than those based on essentialist conceptions of human nature.
