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Colloquium: “Why Do Mantras Move Us?” – Elisabeth Camp, Rutgers University
Friday, May 15, 2026
4:00 – 6:00 PM
Dodd Hall 175
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Join us on Friday, May 15, 2026, for a colloquium with Elisabeth Camp, Rutgers University. The talk will take place from 4:00 – 6:00 PM in Dodd Hall 175 with a reception to follow.
Why Do Mantras Move Us?
Why do mantras like ‘Boys will be boys’, ‘Minds are computers’, and ‘It is what it is’ bear repeating? On their face, their ubiquitous role in our individual and collective lives is puzzling, since they so often flirt with vacuity: “syllables for the sake of syllables, a waste of cognition and breath,” as Frank Bruni puts it. And yet they can be powerful heuristics for handling situations that threaten to overwhelm us with informational complexity or emotional intensity. I propose that mantras like these function as frames: they encapsulate regulative principles for interpreting their topics by harnessing otherwise disparate thoughts, images and feelings into an integrated, intuitive perspective. More specifically, they exhort us to regulate our attention by focusing on what really matters, according to a presupposed perspective. Mantras’ schematic evocativeness makes them useful tools for scaffolding interpretive stability across fine-grained variations in assumptions, attitudes, and contexts. But they also leave those who don’t ‘get the gist’ out in the interpretive cold. Moreover, as they are re-deployed across contexts, mantras tend to lose their intuitive anchoring in rich implicit assumptions, becoming rigid and empty – just as their critics allege.
Elisabeth Camp is Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick. She is the author of over forty articles in philosophy of language, mind, and aesthetics, as well as the editor of a volume on philosophical implications of Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Her research focuses on thoughts and utterances that don’t fit a standard model of minds as rule-governed engines for compiling and transforming information and of language as a medium for expressing propositions to share information. Recent publications have addressed nicknames, social labels, and sociolinguistic style; stories, insinuation, and the heresy of paraphrase; and maps, concepts, and structural representations.
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