3rd Meeting, 11th April, 2017: "Bodily expressivity and social perception: McDowell and Husserl on the problem of other-minds"

Organizer: Department of Philosophy (Zhuhai)，Sun Yat-sen University

Topic: Bodily expressivity and social perception: McDowell and Husserl on the problem of other-minds

Speaker: Zhida LUO (Research Fellow, Department of Philosophy (Zhuhai), Sun Yat-Sen University)

Time: April 11th, 2017

Venue: Rm 114, No. 16 Building at Haibin Honglou

In this paper, I contend that McDowell’s conception of other-minds problem not only has its own particularity but also points to a conception of the other that stays fundamentally close to Husserl. That is, McDowell wishes to restore a supposedly primitive conception of the other that takes the other as a “human being,” “a seamless whole of whose unity we ought not to have allowed ourselves to lose sight in the first place” (McDowell, 1998b, p.384), which can easily find alliance with Husserl’s conception of the other’s body as an “expressive unity of body and soul.” It is in this regard that I want to substantiate McDowell’s account of the other’s mind and develop his key insights in conjunction with Husserl’s phenomenology of bodily expressivity. I argue that social perception is not a mere taking-in of the other’s behavioral appearance but reaches that which appears therein. Accordingly, I argue that the other’s mind is not separated from and juxtaposed with his body, but fused with the latter in a unitary way. In this light, I further elucidate the phenomenology of social perception with an emphasis of its sophisticated phenomenal feature.