Lecture by Elisabeth Camp

Elisabeth Camp argues that stories are “equipment for living” in two senses: retrospectively, they provide synoptic “configurational comprehension” of a temporal sequence of events; and prospectively, they offer principles for guiding action. Narrative conceptions of selfhood appear poised to explain these functional roles in terms of who an agent is. However, the “retrospective necessity” of narrative structure entails that the narrative conception holds selves hostage, epistemically, normatively and practically, to the ends of their lives. She offers some alternative species of frames that also provide configurational comprehension without shackling selves to their autobiography’s endings.

Elisabeth Camp is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers. Her specialties are philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and aesthetics. Her research concentrates on thoughts and utterances that do not fit standard propositional models. She is particularly interested in metaphor and other types of figurative speech; in slurs and other kinds of “loaded” language; in cognitive vantage points and emotions; and in non-sentential representational systems, including maps and diagrams. Camp has published numerous articles, among them “Just Saying, Just Kidding: Liability for Accountability-Avoiding Speech in Ordinary Conversation, Politics and Law”; “Perspectives in Imaginative Engagement with Fiction”; “Putting Thoughts to Work: Concepts, Systematicity, and Stimulus-Independence”; “Slurring Perspectives”; “Sarcasm, Pretense, and the Semantics/Pragmatics Distinction”; “Wordsworth’s Prelude, Poetic Autobiography, and Narrative Constructions of the Self”; and “Two Varieties of Literary Imagination: Metaphor, Fiction, and Thought Experiments.”