Has what Wollheim offers philosophers - an account that includes emotional life - been ignored or forgotten?


Regular attendees should note the earlier than usual start time and change of venue - enter St John's by the Kendrew Quad entrance. This seminar is joint with the Richard Wollheim Centenary Project -- see https://wollheimcentenary.org/programme-of-events/. Please register at wollheimcentenary@gmail.com confirming your status as academic (includes students), mental health practitioner, or other (please specify).

Philosophers need to understand not only cognitions, but meaning, emotions that can so often be experienced out of conscious mind, in images, emotions and the body. Richard Wollheim argued that without it, philosophy is thin. At the same time, in my view, in his explications he did not convey the rich complexity of analytic ideas in understanding our human selves. There is projection as evacuation, but not of it as a necessary part of our development and communication (with a receptive other); of our internal world, made up of so many experiences not only repressed, but dating from a time before we had words in which to “think”. Psychoanalysis has so much to say on what an artist is doing when he or she plays with images – and in such a way that it speaks to us, we feel an emotional resonance. Not that it offers the ultimate answer, but that it offers a rich structure; different layers, in which to make sense and think.