Varieties of Empathy in Science, Art and Culture Workshop. UBC Oct 10-11 2009

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Date: 
Sa., Oct. 10, 2009 (Toute la journée) - Di., Oct. 11, 2009 (Toute la journée)

The recent discovery of mirror neurons, which fire in a macaque monkey when the monkey either observes or performs a given movement, has ushered in a resurgence of interest in the meanings and mechanisms of empathy. The purported role of these neurons in empathic responses in monkeys and humans has led to an array of neuroscientific studies of cognition and autism. Empathy also plays an important role in many other disciplines: in philosophy of mind, it functions as a critical component of social cognition; in trauma studies it is a controversial means for grasping another’s experience of suffering; in ethics it has functioned as a natural or evolutionary substrate for moral behavior; and in visual studies, empathy is defined as a projective and emotion-laden engagement with aesthetic objects. In all these domains, empathy has become an indispensable tool for conceptualizing the emotional and cognitive links between self and other, and between individual minds and social and aesthetic objects.

Principal Investigator: Robert Brain

More Information: http://www.empathy.pwias.ubc.ca/

Review of workshop by M. Cournoyea HERE