AG Heinzelmann, 09.05.2025 Agency, Mindshaping and the Role of the Emotions

Recording

The talk will discuss the importance of affective-laden interactions with others for the development of our ability for autonomous agency in childhood and beyond. I will explore, first, how affective encounters with others enable reasons-responsive agency by introducing us into the space of reasons and by providing us with interpretive frameworks of perceiving the world relative to our aims, concerns, and values. However, as I will show in the second part of the talk, the very same mindshaping processes that enable agency in the sense of reasons-responsiveness also make us susceptible to agency-undermining social practices. Yet, as I will argue in the final part of the talk, the proper response to these threats to our agency should not be seen in a turn towards introspection and a retreat from sociality or the emotions. Rather, we should harness and foster our social and emotional abilities in the service of cultivating our skills of autonomy competence.

Kristina Musholt specialises in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. She is currently Professor of Cognitive Anthropology at the University of Leipzig, where she also co-leads the Leipzig Research Center for Early Child Development and teaches across all philosophy programmes. She received her Ph.D. in Philosophy from Humboldt University Berlin in 2011, served as Junior Professor of Neurophilosophy at Magdeburg University, and was a Fellow at the London School of Economics and Politics. Her work on self-consciousness and social cognition has appeared in outlets such as Consciousness and Cognition, Grazer Philosophische Studien, MIT Press and Philosophical Studies.