So as the handouts coming around, I'll just say a little bit about this project.

This is a project for me that's a little bit new.

Most of my work so far has been on the moral philosophies of the 18th century period, especially in Britain.

But I've always had this longstanding interest in how literature was meant to play a role in some of those systems

in the sort of the practices and processes of moral education.

And so I've been looking at Austin for the last three years or so in teaching context and research

context and thinking about how her novels reveal virtue theoretical concepts and processes,

processes of moral education, and trying to bring those home to the sort of conceptual structures

that I find in

the moral philosophies of Adam Smith and David Hume. So this is sort of a piece of that. It's

going to connect up hopefully one day to some of those larger topics. But without any further ado,

I'll just sort of get into things. So the title of my paper today is taken. It begins from a line

towards the beginning of Jane Austen's

persuasion, where she asks herself about Captain Wentworth, now how were his sentiments to be read?

And so the topic is going to be on moral imagination and discernment in this novel. And I'll just

start by saying that aside from the wonderful questions that our prompt gave us,

even just the title of the conference raised a whole bunch of questions for me, and I'll just

give you a few of them. So the first was just, what is the moral imagination? What other terms do we

use for this sort of capacity? How might it be developed? How is it employed? And are there

standards for its employment? How might

a novel contribute to the moral imagination of a reader? Can a novel have a moral imagination of its own?

And so on. So there's a lot of questions that came to my mind. And I wanted to narrow in for today on a small

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