丁香园AV

by Neha Nandakumar

Lauren Kopajtic, Associate Professor at Fordham University, graduated from 丁香园AV鈥檚 Philosophy MA program in 2011. She then went on to complete her PhD at Harvard, followed by a postdoctoral fellowship at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University before joining Fordham. She is the Editor of the , Director of the Center for the Study of Scottish Philosophy, and co-organizes the annual . We had the delight of speaking with her about her research and academic trajectory, gaining insights on her work on 18th century philosophy and her journey as a philosopher.

Research

Lauren specializes in 18th century philosophy, and works on thinkers like David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jane Austen. Her research reveals a fascinating portrait of the kind of philosophical work they were engaged in. For one, a lot of the people we think of as philosophers didn鈥檛 only write philosophical treatises. They wrote other kinds of essays, sometimes incorporating fictional elements in their writing. Also, these thinkers were part of a vibrant intellectual community that was reading and speaking with each other. Lauren鈥檚 research traces the connections between these thinkers and the broader contexts and communities they were part of, asking questions like: Why did Hume like this play or Smith subscribe to this novel? Was it because they happened to know this person, or were they interested in this work? Who were Jane Austen and Mary Wollstonecraft reading and responding to?

One of the main topics Lauren works on is moral sentimentalism, the theoretical view that morality is based on sentiments, or emotions. She mentions that, in the 18th century, there was a resurgence of positive interest in the nature of our affective lives, especially on the topic of controlling one鈥檚 emotions. People were thinking about the virtues related to emotional control, and how those get shaped. They also thought of art as a place to train one鈥檚 emotions鈥� both to feel them, and to feel better ones.

At the same time, there was a high value placed on the experience of strong positive emotions, which, today, we might find melodramatic or over the top. For instance, Hume complimented a friend of his by saying that he melted the hearts of the audience, causing them to weep unfeigned tears. The ability to make one鈥檚 audience swoon and blush and cry was a kind of cultural currency. By the end of the 18th century, however, such displays of emotion came to be satirized and seen as mawkish. With the advent of literary romanticism, such extremities of feeling also began to be seen as part of literature rather than philosophy, creating further specializations of the disciplines.

Lauren thus points out that a study of emotions brings one in contact with many related topics like aesthetics, morality, character, and education, presenting a vivid portrayal of the cultural and intellectual life of the times.

Academic Trajectory

Lauren completed an undergraduate degree in English at the University of Connecticut, after which she did an MA in Liberal Arts at St. John鈥檚 College. She recalls that the choice between pursuing English and Philosophy was quite arbitrary, but she found herself swayed by her favorite classes at St. Johns, which were on philosophical figures. After a briefly working as a paralegal, she joined 丁香园AV鈥檚 philosophy program.

She comments that her supervisor, Lisa Shapiro, was indispensable to her development as a philosopher. Her supervisor identified her ability to interpret texts as a philosophically important skill, especially for the history of philosophy, but also for comprehending contemporary texts. She also helped Lauren meet other early modernists by connecting her to a conference in New York. There, Lauren met Alison Simmons, who later became her advisor at Harvard. She says that getting this kind of support was invaluable because it made it easier for her, as a graduate student, to speak with experienced scholars in her field.

Though her interests were squarely in the historical side of philosophy, some of her favorite classes were those that stretched her abilities. She recalls a class with Holly Andersen on temporal consciousness, and one with Martin Hahn on perception, saying that these classes offered her the chance to find more recent thinkers she loved, like William James, and discover questions that she could then chart out historically. She refers to the MA program as a bootcamp that helped her get up to speed with the discipline, learn what makes an argument valid, and what other philosophers are talking about: 鈥淚t was really good for breaking me into into being a professional philosopher鈥�

She then reworked an essay from a class on Spinoza into a writing sample, and went on to pursue a PhD at Harvard. There, her interests developed further through a variety of experiences. She joined a reading group where they read Smith鈥檚 Theory of Moral Sentiments, she worked on a capstone project related to the topic of self-control, and was thinking about the feminist reception of Smith, which led her towards Jane Austen. She mentions that this openness to different things helped her navigate her way to her dissertation: a study of the conceptions of self-control in Hume, Smith, and Austen. After her PhD at Harvard, she completed a postdoctoral fellowship at the Society of Fellows at Columbia University, prior to joining Fordham University, where she is currently an Associate Professor.

On Philosophy

However, figuring out one鈥檚 place within the philosophical tradition is not without challenges. She mentions feeling disoriented upon her first introduction to masters-level philosophy, recalling with amusement, 鈥淚 was like鈥� what鈥檚 a neo-Kantian?鈥�

鈥淚 never really felt like an insider. I still feel a little bit like an outsider. I think that's probably a more common experience for people than we realize,鈥� she says, 鈥淗istorians tend to be a little bit outside the way other people do philosophy.鈥�

History, however, is as integral part of reckoning with philosophical ideas, and enriches how we think of the lives of philosophers鈥� intellectual and otherwise. In her own words:

鈥淧hilosophers don't just sit in armchairs in darkened rooms and have thoughts. They have correspondences with other people. They write drafts of things that they crumple up and throw away. They write entire drafts of things that they tell their literary executors鈥� 鈥楤urn it when I die.鈥� And I think it's really important to sort of get a sense for what they were reading, who they were talking to, what they were doing, you know? Did they go to the theater every weekend? Does that make a difference? And I think that stuff's really interesting to just think about, [of] ideas as not kind of springing full form from the head, but developed through a person's life in a community and culture鈥�