5 and 6 July 2018
Mumbai
The seminar will
be held at Jnanapravaha-Mumbai and is co-sponsored by
Princeton University and University College London.

Sympathy was a 'problem' for the ancient Greeks. It receives its own
chapter, for example, in the book of Problemata,
whose author (the work is attributed to Aristotle) wonders why bodily action of one kind prompts a similar action or
gesture in another animal, human or non-human. Why do people
yawn when they see someone else yawning? Why does the experience of
seeing someone tortured on the rack cause us to feel pain "in our mind"?
This last instance bears similarities to how we imagine sympathy
today, as an interpersonal phenomenon. But the Aristotelian discussion
also points to the differences between ancient Greco-Roman and
contemporary ideas about sympathy. Do we feel the pain of the one
tortured because of our "common nature?" the author asks. Or are there
emanations that travel from the person in pain to the one watching.
Sympathy in antiquity is a phenomenon not only physiological but
physical, embedded in the relations between all kinds of being in the
natural world-rocks, stars, plants, animals. Ancient Greek sympathy is
both strange and familiar; it can defamiliarize our sense of the concept
and its possibilities through the navigation of sameness and difference.
While Aristotle and the ancient Greeks remain a point of departure for many, our workshop hopes to offer an in-depth exploration of sympathy from a historical and cross-cultural perspective. Participants come from ancient Greco-Roman studies and from other backgrounds. We refer to Aristotle but not only to Aristotle and not only to Greek culture but rather to a wide array of texts, ideas, and materials. Drawing on practitioners from a variety of disciplines, we seek a discussion of sympathy that considers the concept in affective and non-affective terms; as a means of exploring relationships between animals, plants, inanimate objects, and human beings; and as a cultural, social, and political phenomenon.
Participants
Merrick Anderson (Princeton)
Joshua Billings (Princeton)
Chiara Cappelletto (Milan)
Neha Choksi (artist)
Siby George (IIT Mumbai)
Rohit Goel (Jnanapravaha)
Brooke Holmes (Princeton)
Andrew Hui (Yale-NUS Singapore)
Ben Kafka (New York University)
Kanchana Mahadevan (University of Mumbai)
Supriya Rai (K. J. Somaiya Centre for Buddhist Studies, Mumbai)
Aaskash Singh Rathore (JNU, New Delhi)
Wintor Scott (Princeton)
Phiroze Vasunia (UCL)
For more information, please contact Phiroze Vasunia at p.vasunia@ucl.ac.uk.
The seminar will
be held at Jnanapravaha-Mumbai and is co-sponsored by
Princeton University (the Postclassicisms
initiative) and University College London (with the help of Global
Engagement Funds and funds provided by the A. G. Leventis Trust).
Image courtesy: Stefania Strouza, "Anaximander's Mind" (2017).