Event Details

History Departmental Research Seminar

In this talk, Dr Wragge-Morley uses the case of the blind Scottish scientific lecturer Henry Moyes (1749/50-1807) to reflect on the place of the senses in 18th-century ideas about intersubjectivity - the human capacity to enter into other people's feelings. It is now widely known that the 18th century witnessed a growing interest in the education of visually impaired people, as philosophers and pedagogues came to believe that specialized schooling could enable them to overcome sensory impairment. Yet this development took place when many of the same thinkers were increasingly convinced that differences in embodiment and sensory experience could lead to decisively different kinds of human. Dr Wragge-Morley suggests that habit – rarely the object of historical analysis until recently – enables us to understand not only how 18th-century commentators thought people like Moyes could participate in a predominantly visual society, but also how important embodied cognition was – despite many protestations to the contrary – to their ideas about what it meant to be human.

Dr Alexander Wragge-Morley is Lecturer in the History of Science and Medicine Department of History Lancaster University