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Sympathy: The Early Life of an Idea

Brooke Holmes, Department of Classics, Princeton University - In this talk, I outline a new strategy for approaching the early history of sympathy as a concept situated at the intersection of the history of science and the history of ideas. By exploring sympathy across a number of different disciplines, I argue that we can begin to get a sense of the crucial role it came to play from the fourth century BCE in the formation of non-mechanistic (and, importantly, non-atomist) philosophies of nature with a last influence in the West. I argue further that sympathy gives us a glimpse of early attempts to understand humans in a larger, non-human cosmos. That is, if our own notion of sympathy creates moral communities at the level of persons, the ancient notion of sympathy became an impetus to think about communities beyond the boundaries of the polis and beyond the boundaries of the human.