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The publication of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690 rejuvenated the relationship between thought and senses by rejecting the concept of innate ideas and establishing sense experience as the basis of knowledge. While the senses were no longer seen as the cause of errors or illusions, this new empiricism was difficult to reconcile with long privileged themes such as the nature of the soul and of the real essence of things. Voltaire and others would make use of those tensions in their critiques of orthodox theology. The work of writers such as Condillac would prolong the effect of Locke’s empiricism throughout the eighteenth century.
Given the influence of this epistemological revolution in Europe across philosophy, science, literature and the arts, this symposium aims at examining the notion of sensualism in the Enlightenment through the lens of various disciplines in order to map out the similarities and the differences in the reception and application of sensualism in the Enlightenment world.
Program
8:15-8:45 am Coffee/tea
8:45 am Opening Remarks, Dean of Arts
Session 1 9:00-10:30 am
Diana Paterson (MRU): The Enlightenment Hand: The Bickhams, Writing Masters of Empire
Jeffrey M. Suderman (MRU/UofC):Wise unto Salvation? David Hume and the Sense of the Eternal
Devika Vijayan (UofC): Travelers tales: the use of senses to authenticate anecdotes in French travel literature to India
10:30-10-45 am Coffee break
Session 2 10:45-12:15 pm
Anthony Wall (UofC): The Happy Marriage of Sight and Touch in Eighteenth-Century French Painting
Andrea Bell (Parsons, The New School for Design): Between Practice and Precedent: Neoclassical Plein AirDrawing in Rome
Karim Dharamsi (MRU): From Rational Self-Enclosure to the Possibility of the Other
12:15-1:15 pm Lunch break
Session 3 1:15-2:45 pm
Miao Li (MRU): Diderot’s dualistic discourse on women in The Nun
Lori Williams (MRU): Paths to Knowledge: Locke and Rousseau
Matthew Pryce (MRU): The English Enlightenment and Free Will: Sober Thoughts on Public Intoxication
2:45-3:00 pm Coffee break
Session 4: 3:00-4:30 pm
Antoine Eche (MRU/ICD Tours): “How many senses do you have?”
Aida Patient (MRU): Observing Ugliness in the Context of Childbirth and Early Modern Midwifery
Neil Cockburn (MRU): “Il n’y a ni mesure ni mélodie dans la musique française.”
5:00 pm
Organ Recital by Neil Cockburn, Head of Organ Studies, Mount Royal University Conservatory
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