Scholar Spotlight: Mojca Kuplen
“I explore various ways that art engages our minds and, thereby, fosters self-understanding and empathy for others.”
Mojca Kuplen
Teaching Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy
My research reflects overlapping interests in the philosophy of art, contemporary aesthetics, epistemology, and the philosophy of mind.
I am interested in how and why we come to appreciate artistic (and aesthetic) objects, and in particular our fascination with objects and artworks that we find displeasing, dreadful, ugly, and which evoke in us intense feelings of repulsion. This is the problem known in philosophical aesthetics as “the paradox of ugliness,” namely, how we can like, attend to, and value something that we prima facie do not like, find positively displeasing or even repellent?
My first book Beauty, Ugliness and the Free Play of Imagination, was an attempt to solve this problem, and my second focused on the cognitive value of works of art.
My classes engage students in the process of doing philosophy, rather than just studying philosophy. For this reason, I primarily focus on building students’ practical skills that are relevant and necessary for success in their majors, their future careers, and life in general.
My students gain critical-thinking and problem-solving skills, communication and interpersonal skills that foster empathy and social awareness, and ethical-decision making skills that prepare them to make sound moral and ethical choices in their future professional roles.
Why I Do What I Do
My interest in philosophy was first piqued by a personal desire for self-understanding and leading a more self-aware life.
Focusing on the philosophy of art was a natural development of this desire, given that works of art, being highly structured and unified visions of human relationships, give us an opportunity to attend to and understand our own emotional histories and personal narratives.
Currently Working On
I am finishing a book that examines the effect narrative artworks have on cultivating therapeutic self-knowledge, namely the kind self-knowledge that leads to self-development and self-change. A work of art presents simulations of real-life experiences in a compacted format, offers an interpretation of these experiences, and helps us to attain an unbiased perspective on our own experiences.