Cecelia Watson

Postdoctoral Research Fellow

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

Residence: September 1, 2011 - August 31, 2012

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I do research in the history and philosophy of science, and I am especially interested in the history of the human sciences; the history of Pragmatism; the rhetoric and poetics of science; and the connections between the arts, sciences, and humanities.

I am currently working on transforming my dissertation into a book. The dissertation, which I defended in September 2011, considers the influence of the painter John La Farge on William James’s psychology and philosophy. James and La Farge studied painting together as young men, and these lessons fed James’s understanding of evolved intelligence and the relationship between subject and object; it inflected his descriptions of perception and his definition of truth; it showed through in his vivid personal and literary style; and it fueled his pragmatic, pluralistic philosophy and his religious speculations.

This project considers James’s work in the context of the larger intellectual landscape of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and it suggests alternative ways to conceptualize the current relationship between science and art. 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, La Farge’s method became the basis for James’s answer to the question, “What, and how, can we know?” 

The dissertation draws on literature focused on a variety of topics and centered in a variety of disciplines, including art history; critical studies of pragmatism; biographies of James and exegeses of his scientific and philosophical work; literary studies of Henry James; histories of American psychology; and the history of biology.