Cecelia Watson

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

Ph.D., Conceptual & Historical Studies of Science University of Chicago MA, Philosophy

Residence: September 1, 2011 - January 31, 2013

Profile

My research and publications are topically diverse, but have all explored two major themes: first, the exchange between the arts, sciences, and humanities; and second, the ways in which subjective experiences among historical actors are constitutive of historical events and necessary to the explanation of them. I am currently working on a monograph that engages these themes by arguing that William James’s influential work in psychology and philosophy was grounded in principles that he learned from the practice of visual art. That is, his experience in the arts was constitutive of his scientific and philosophical systems. James relied on artistic method to escort psychology and philosophy through the tangle of modernist anxieties about subjectivity and objectivity: How, asked the arts and sciences, were observers to uncover truth in the objects of their inquiry? Was there any “reality” to be found independent of the self? If so, could one circumvent the self and alight once again on securely objective epistemological foundations? Viewed in the broader context of nineteenth- and early twentieth- century anxieties over subjects and objects, the methods of visual art became the basis for James’s answer to the question, “What, and how, can we know?” The monograph particularly focuses on the intellectual exchange between William James, the artist John La Farge, and William's brother the novelist Henry James.