Discussion with Dr. Elisabeth Camp

Speakers): Dr. Elizabeth Camp

The Philosophy + Literature Research Workshop is proud to host
 
 
A discussion with
 
with
 
Elisabeth Camp
Rutgers University
 
on
 

Transfigurative Metaphors and Transformative Fictions
 
  
March 19, Tuesday, 2019
Building 260, Room 216
4:30 to 6:30pm

Light refreshments will be provided.
 
 
Abstract: Metaphor and fiction work in importantly similar ways: both exploit a wide range of background assumptions in order to reimagine reality; both draw on and train us into open-ended interpretive perspectives; both are aesthetic objects, accessible for aptness and beauty; and both can be used to communicate substantive claims about the actual world.  Guided by these similarities, theorists like Ken Walton, David Hills, and Steve Yablo have fruitfully analyzed metaphor as a distinctive species of fiction.  But metaphor and fiction also differ importantly in their mechanisms and results. I trace out some of these similarities and differences, and argue that the two figures of imagination converge at their limits. 
 
Elisabeth Camp is a Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick.  She obtained her PhD from the University of California, Berkeley, did a post-doc at the Harvard Society of Fellows, and taught at the University of Pennsylvania before moving to Rutgers in 2013.  Her research focuses on thoughts and utterances that don’t fit within the standard philosophical model of the human mind as a propositional calculus.  In the realm of communication, this includes phenomena like metaphor, sarcasm, and slurs.  In the realm of minds, it encompasses maps, non-human animal cognition, imagination, and emotion.  Recent publications include “Perspectives in Imaginative Engagement with Fiction,” (Philosophical Perspectives 2017), “Why Metaphors Make Good Insults: Perspectives, Presupposition, and Pragmatics” (Philosophical Studies 2017), and “Conventions’ Revenge: Davidson, Derangement, and Dormativity” (Inquiry 2016).