Allie Gould ’20 could hardly imagine becoming passionate about philosophy when she started at Claremont McKenna College as a neuroscience major. Four years later, however, a paper that she submitted to a philosophy conference in Denver has won the best paper award and will soon be published in an international undergraduate philosophy journal, Stance.
The paper, “Not So Skeptical: A Cow’s Eye View on Optimism for Empathy,” grew out of an Advanced Seminar on Imagination taught last semester by Professor Amy Kind, the Russell K. Pitzer Professor of Philosophy. Gould was scheduled to present her paper as the student keynote speaker at The Fifth Annual Undergraduate Women’s Philosophy Conference this month. The event, which would have seen CMC Assistant Professor of Philosophy Rima Basu deliver the general keynote address, has been postponed indefinitely due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Gould hopes that the conference at Metropolitan State University of Denver will take place later this year and still plans to attend. With her undergraduate experience in the classroom cut short, she is especially looking forward to the opportunity for an in-person philosophical discussion.
“There’s nothing quite like it,” she said.
While she has taken a job as an analyst for an economic consulting firm in Boston starting this fall, the paper’s recognition outside of CMC and its publication in an undergraduate journal have led to her considering applying to philosophy PhD programs in the future. “It boosts my confidence that I might be capable of doing philosophy at a higher level,” she said.
In her award-winning paper, Gould explores our ability to imagine what it is like to be someone else; which strategies can be useful for empathizing and what the implications for policymaking might be. Building on writings of authors with skeptical views on empathy and on the work of Temple Grandin, an animal scientist with autism at Colorado State University, she provides an optimistic account of empathy. She demonstrates that policymakers will be able to imagine what it is like to be someone very different from themselves if they put in effort.
A conference on imagination and social change held September 26-28, 2019, at the Gould Center for Humanistic Studies at CMC inspired the paper’s grounding in a more practical call to action, Gould said, adding, “I had never been super interested in public policy before I came to CMC but being around a lot of people who are passionate about it has been really cool for me.”
Gould fell in love with philosophy as a freshman when she took a humanities seminar with Professor James Kreines. Her experience with the philosophy department has been positive throughout. “The program is outstanding,” she said, “and my professors have been the most supportive. I would never have applied for the conference in Colorado if Professor Kind hadn’t sent me an email about it.”
Kind praised Gould’s final paper for her class last semester. “It was really terrific – philosophically sophisticated, interesting, and important,” she said. “I was delighted when she decided to submit it to the undergraduate conference, and of course even more delighted when they recognized it with their best student paper prize.”
- Christina Schweighofer