Penn Philosophical Perspectives - University of Pennsylvania

On the Philosophy of MetaphorsAn Interview with Dr. Elisabeth CampPenn Philosophical PerspectivesChristina MatthiasUniversity of Pennsylvaniacmatthia@sas.upenn.eduDr. Elisabeth Camp is a philosopher of language andmind, whose research focuses on thoughts and utter- this interview, she discusses her path to becoming aphilosopher, and about the philosophy of metaphors.The paper she discusses here can be found on her website:http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~campe/#papersDr. Camp received her PhD from UC Berkeley, andcompleted postdoctoral research at Harvard. She isnow an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at UPenn.-I wanted to do something else. So I took a philosophy classwhich I thought might be the next best thing. I was a doubleabout fully committing to philosophy; I really enjoyed it andI found it really hard. I always thought it was just somethingI enjoyed, so I worried it was self-indulgent. I then went andworked in Chicago in adult literacy for three years after college.During that time, among the various things I was doing wasworking with people in the Latino community who were learn-and this phrase not a good phrase, and how can we manage tocommunicate these complex things? So that started to get meto see that it can actually matter, and not just be a fun game.stuff enough to go to grad school, but even then, I thought Iso many more topics that I thought were really interesting, andnot just things that were taught in my classes. I started coming-can actually help other people learn how to think, by teachingphilosophy, so I started to be corrupted.Where did most of your experience with neuroscience andJanuary 2010There was this reading group in grad school, post-docs andfaculty. It brought together philosophers who were interestedin psychology, and psychologists and cognitive scientists whoabout concepts, about representation, some about the cognitivearchitecture, like how must thoughts and thinking be substan-much overlap there was, but also how much difference there all trying to talk about the same thing, but the psychologists areconcepts, how do they connect to substantiation, how is it thattionsof using this concept correctly and incorrectly, and wheremore concerned about reference. Philosophers are much moreconcerned with how a concept connects up to the world, andthe psychologists are much more concerned with just what isgoing on inside the head. It was really interesting to see, givenhow much we thought we were agreeing, where we would justdisagree.interested in metaphor, and in the difference between metaphorjorbecause I was interested in that area. From there, I feel likethat has branched into a lot of different things about the ways26