Perception Under Threat - Frédérique de Vignemont

Wittgenstein claimed, “The world of a happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man”. Here I shall explore the world of a man in danger. Nervousness, trepidation, anxiety, dread, desperation, panic, horror, terror, there are many ways to describe the emotional turmoil that accompanies the sense of danger. This has been extensively discussed in psychology, philosophy and even more in fiction, but what is often neglected is the simple fact that the world no longer looks the same. Because of its evolutionary primacy and the emergency attached to it, danger radically alters our visual perception. As a result, seeing snakes is not like seeing any other object and this is true not only of primal threats but also of all the things that we have learnt to mistrust. In this lecture, I shall argue that what we classically believe about perception no longer works when we are under threat. The boundary between perception, anticipation, action and affect then suddenly crumbles. About the Speaker: Frédérique de Vignemont is a CNRS research director, deputy director of the Jean Nicod Institute in Paris. Her research is at the intersection of philosophy of mind and cognitive science. She has published numerous articles in leading philosophy journals on bodily awareness, self-consciousness, peripersonal space, and more recently, on danger perception. She is the author of Mind the body: A philosophical exploration of bodily self-awareness (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Affective bodily awareness (Cambridge University Press, 2023).