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Ineke Sluiter, Tuesday, May 29 CANCELLED
Abstract
Different disciplines have different methods to think about issues raised in cognition studies. A student of Classics has a unique resource to be mined for information: the text of the Greek tragedies. These texts have been handed down for over 2000 years. The vicissitudes of the main characters (Oedipus, Medea and others) have appealed to a wide variety of audiences within very different cultural-historical circumstances and conceptual frameworks.
I will go into some of the possibilities that a cognitive and psychological approach to the study of such tragic characters as ‘minds on stage’ has to offer. I will focus on one particular case: the disobedient hero Neoptolemus in Sophocles’ Philoctetes: a character in much the same circumstances as the subjects of the infamous ‘Obedience to Authority’ study by Stanley Milgram. A comparison between the experiment on stage and the experiment in the laboratory will prove revealing.
Location: MPI Conference Room 163
Time: 15.45-17.00
(drinks afterwards)