Ann-Sophie Barwich Lecture

A lecture organized by the Center for Philosophy and History of Science and the Department of Anthropology with guest speaker, Ann-Sophie Barwich (Indiana/Harvard). Barwich is a philosopher and cognitive neuroscientist in the department of history and philosophy of science at medicine, and in the cognitive science program, at Indiana University Bloomington. This year, she is a Radcliffe fellow at Harvard. A description of her research from her website: "What makes our perception of the world real if our individual experience of it so often differs? This question drives my research both in theory and at the laboratory bench, and I explore this question through philosophical and empirical methods. These methods combine conceptual with historical analysis and phenomenology, as well as electroencephalography (EEG), olfactometry, and laboratory ethnography with interviews." _________________________ Abstract: "In 1953, we discovered the structure of DNA. By 1957, we launched Sputnik. This talk begins with a juxtaposition: one discovery binding us to our organic nature, the other symbolizing our longing to escape it. From this perspective, the central question posed by emerging technologies, from genetic engineering to artificial intelligence, is less technical but existential. Drawing on Arendt’s concept of the human condition, I argue that the ideal of modern science as a view from nowhere, which severs knowledge from situated human experience, is connected to a desire to flee the constraints of embodied, earthbound existence. I pair Arendt’s insight with Damasio’s neuroscientific findings, which show that reason without embodiment and emotion produces not clarity but paralysis. Together, they reveal a shared diagnosis: what gets excised from scientific inquiry as contamination (feeling, perspective, situatedness) turns out to be the very condition of its proper function. The recovery I propose draws on Arendt’s amor mundi (love of the world) and Haraway’s concept of response-ability to reorient scientific practice toward sustained relation and a willingness to be affected by what one studies. Science thus reconceived is science that understands its own purpose and the cognitive conditions of its own production."