The Role of Art in the Making of Judgments

3min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

For the longest time, only way we were allowed to talk about first person experience and phenomenology was in the context of the question about consciousness. Is there some possibility for a new way of making judgments that is not either purely based on testimony or first person perspective? I'm really just babbling right now. But it's still the case that I did learn something. Sure. And so... Art can be kind of an empathy pump, right? It can sort of help us empathize with people in very different circumstances. That said, it's not enough. We need to understand when we can't understand and then change how we approach things.

It’s hard to make decisions that will change your life. It’s even harder to make a decision if you know that the outcome could change who you are. Our preferences are determined by who we are, and they might be quite different after a decision is made — and there’s no rational way of taking that into account. Philosopher L.A. Paul has been investigating these transformative experiences — from getting married, to having a child, to going to graduate school — with an eye to deciding how to live in the face of such choices. Of course we can ask people who have made such a choice what they think, but that doesn’t tell us whether the choice is a good one from the standpoint of our current selves, those who haven’t taken the plunge. We talk about what this philosophical conundrum means for real-world decisions, attitudes towards religious faith, and the tricky issue of what it means to be authentic to yourself when your “self” keeps changing over time.

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

L.A. (Laurie) Paul received her Ph.D. in philosophy from Princeton University. She is currently professor of philosophy and cognitive science at Yale University. She has worked extensively on causation, the philosophy of time, mereology, and transformative experience. She has won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Humanities Center, and the Australian National University. Among her books are the monograph Transformative Experience; she is currently working on a popular-level book on this theme.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.