BSP Podcast: Recent Episodes
British Society for Phenomenology
This podcast is for the British Society for Phenomenology and showcases papers at our conferences and events, interviews and discussions on the topic of phenomenology.
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Mariia Galkina, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris.
Mariia Galkina 'Towards a phenomenology of environmental shame'
Abstract: This contribution aims to study the phenomenon of environmental shame and its role in awakening of ecological consciousness. It starts with the problem of asymmetry of human power that marks the current ecological transition. On the one hand, the growing ecological footprint testifies to excess of human power over the environment which leads to the sixth mass extinction and endangers planetary balance. On the other, facing ecological crisis, human, paradoxically, finds himself more powerless than ever. Powerless to slow down and to challenge his daily production and consumption practices by refusing to take their consequences into account. In a word, powerless to suspend his own power. One should ask then how to catalyze this suspension. My argument is to consider shame as such a feeling that turns an excess of human power over the environment into “potential-not-to”. Making use of this ontological concept developed by Agamben in order to think the negativity of human power that shame activates, the paper elaborates a phenomenology of “environmental shame”. Since suspending power requires to challenge its ethical justification by measuring the extent of its destructive consequences for other species, it is nothing but shame where freedom becomes aware of its murderous character that answers the need of self-limitation of human power over the environment. My concept of “environmental shame” develops Levinasian approach that defines shame as a discovery of injustified facticity of power and freedom, but rethinking it from the human relation to other endangered and vulnerable living beings. Shame, I argue, is a revolutionary feeling able to operate a conversion of environmental consciousness and transform our manner of being in the world by actualizing the “potential-not-to”, i.e. the negative potential that allows inoperativity of human power.
Bio: Maria Galkina is a pre-thesis student in philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris (PSL). Her research interests cover phenomenology of emotions and environmental ethics. Her Master's thesis (2021, ENS-PSL) focused on the dialectic of negativity and creativity of shame, namely analyzing the works of Levinas, Agamben and Dostoevsky. Next year Maria starts her PhD thesis under the supervision of Dr. Marc Crépon (Archives Husserl Laboratory, ENS-PSL). thesis will propose a phenomenology of environmental shame making use of both phenomenological and psychological methods and mobilizing, among others, the conceptions of Levinas and Günther Anders.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Paul Tuppeny, University of the Arts, London (Chelsea College of Art).
Paul Tuppeny '“I didn't want their past to be a mark on them.”(R. Rauschenberg): A Sculptor's Investigation into the Phenomena of Objective Age'
Abstract: It is in the nature of the world to be a place of constant change and transformation; trees grow, skin wrinkles and paint discolours. Every state of being is finite and all opportunity is fleeting. In his insistence that his 1951 White Paintings be regularly overpainted, the artist Robert Rauschenberg recognised how such ‘natural' processes of change not only generate affect in our interpretation of physical objects but, in doing so, can make us ‘feel' time. Intrinsic to the apparatus of perception are pre-cognitive judgements concerning the transformative processes that define our world and which we experience as ‘age'; through these perceptual intuitions, derived from momentary observations, we are able to ‘chronicle' the flux and stabilise our environment . The paper sets down hypotheses concerning the mechanisms that underlie age phenomena, developed through a doctoral research project pairing traditional literature-based research with the practice of sculpture, proposing routes by which these structures adjust meaning and generate affect. Convergent aspects of several phenomenological primary sources, including Aristotle, Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, are interwoven to illuminate our interaction with the material-temporality of the world. Throughout the research, this relationship is given physical expression through three-dimensional artworks. Central to our experience of age are the processes through which we assimilate the changing nature of entities (biographic mental object-files) around temporal-archetypes, the states in which objects carry greatest meaning, significance or use for us. Clearly an informed understanding of our experience of objective age is crucial not just for artists like Rauschenberg, but for anyone engaged with the physical world. Armed with a structured view of how age ‘moves' us we can progress toward being culturally comfortable with the phenomenon, both in ourselves and the things around us, leading to relationships within our society which displace damaging predispositions toward the young and the new.
Bio: Formerly an architect, Paul Tuppeny completed his MA Fine Art in 2016, also receiving an award in the National Sculpture Prize that year. He was longlisted for The Ruskin Prize in 2017 and 2019 and has exhibited across the UK with outdoor venues including Broomhill and Cotswolds Sculpture Parks. Gallery exhibitions include Atkinson Gallery(Street), Sluice Art at Oxo Tower, Edge Gallery(Bath), ING Discerning Eye, Jubilee Library, Grand Parade Gallery(Brighton), and Murmuration Gallery and De La Warr Pavilion(Bexhill). Paul was invited to join the Royal Society of Sculptors in 2017 and is currently researching his PhD at Chelsea College of Art(UAL).
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Adam Takacs, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest.
Adam Takacs 'Ageing Being: Temporality, Corporeality, and Shared World'
Abstract: “The objective world is incapable of sustaining time”, writes Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception, and almost the entire phenomenological tradition seems to echo this thesis from Husserl to Heidegger and beyond. Besides the fact that this claim appears to be at odds with the findings of historical science, and archaeology in particular, it also blocks the way to explore a phenomenological possibility. The possibility of looking at the experience of temporality not in terms of ecstatic subjectivity, but in terms of material and corporeal ageing. This paper sets out to develop two arguments: 1) The first is that the phenomenon of “ageing” – taken as a synonym of temporal change or becoming – can be meaningfully presented in a phenomenological framework as a general ontological condition that is shared by all material and corporeal beings, including the human subject. 2) The second is that the manifestation of the shared nature of ageing can reveal implications for a new phenomenological understanding of already familiar experiential qualities. I will argue that the experience of growing old with things and with the material environment disclose a disposition that informs a common horizon of memory, empathy, and corporeality.
Bio: Adam Takács is Senior Lecturer in philosophy and humanities at Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, and currently Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta, Canada (2021-2023). His publications include Le fondement selon Husserl (Paris, 2014), Traces de l'Etre. Heidegger en France et en Hongrie (Paris, 2016), and more recently “Time and Matter: Historicity, Facticity and the Question of Phenomenological Realism”, Human Studies (vol. 41, no. 4: 661-676.).
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Gage Krause, Fordham University.
Gage Krause 'Desynchronization, Alienation, and the Social World in Grief'
Abstract: Recent phenomenological approaches to grief have, understandably, focused primarily on the relationship between the griever and the deceased, describing grief as an experience of different kinds of losses and as a transformation of various structures of subjectivity. In addition to the griever-deceased relationship, phenomenologists have even more recently begun to attend to the cultural and social aspects of grief (e.g. Køster and Kofod 2021). However, phenomenologists have yet to provide a thorough examination of the social dynamics and the sense of social isolation and alienation that can appear in grief. In order to address these issues, this paper will clarify the interplay of temporality and sociality in grief. Building on Thomas Fuchs' account of ‘contemporality', I argue that grief involves a desynchronization between the griever and their social world, which diminishes the griever's sense of belonging with and ability to relate to non-grieving others. Further, I argue that a griever's implicit or explicit awareness of their desynchronization from the social world accounts for the sense of alienation and estrangement often experienced when engaging in daily routines, projects, and social interactions. That is, the transformations in temporality in grief also involves an awareness that the griever temporally inhabits the world differently than others, causing the griever to experience once-familiar activities and social engagements as alien and strange. To make this argument, this paper will draw on literary-autobiographical accounts, namely Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Notes on Grief, Denise Riley's Time Lived, Without Its Flow, and C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed, with a focus on their descriptions of social interaction, performing daily routines, and self-understanding. Attending to these intertwined temporal and social aspects will provide a clearer understanding of how grievers renegotiate their relationship to their social world in the wake of their loss.
Bio: Gage Krause is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at Fordham University. His research focuses primarily on Phenomenology and Social & Political philosophy, working at the intersection of Critical Phenomenology, Phenomenological Psychopathology, and Philosophy of Disability.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Ronja Griep, University of Cambridge.
Ronja Griep 'When Does Bodily Shame Turn Unjust? The Case of Menstrual Shame'
Abstract: A concern with menstrual shame has occupied policymakers, educators, and charity workers abroad for decades (ActionAid 2021, Amnesty International 2019). Increasingly, the ‘fight against period shame' has been discussed within the UK, amid news of the Scottish government scrapping the ‘tampon tax' and the award of an MBE to Amika George for her activism in offering free period products in schools (BBC 2021).
What is it that troubles many about menstrual shame? What exactly are activists fighting against? I argue that these questions are best answered by attending closely to the phenomenology of menstrual shaming - this phenomenology not only reveals menstrual shaming to be insidious, but to constitute an injustice. I argue, drawing on Iris Marion Young and Julia Kristeva, that menstrual shaming takes place mainly at the level of habits and unconscious behaviour in everyday social spaces. It reaches all corners of life - from personal to interpersonal and institutional. The phenomenology itself plays a crucial part in discovering just what the injustice consists in: I argue that habit-formation influenced by shame and institutional failures, as I highlighted, leads to women's self-respect being undermined before they even begin to engage in projects. It undermines their self-respect at early yet important stages of women's lives, while remaining often invisible and highly normalised.
This account of injustice arising from the phenomenology of menstrual shaming, I conclude, gives us important insights into which other forms of bodily shaming constitute injustice and why they do so. This allows me to answer one of the most powerful objections to my argument, namely that we all conduct certain bodily needs in private and would be ashamed if discovered, yet do not think of this as an injustice. The specific phenomenology of menstrual shame, I contend, allows us to differentiate different forms of bodily shaming.
Bio: Ronja Griep is a PhD Student in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Her research focusses on menstrual shaming, starting from its phenomenology to its status as an injustice and ending with thoughts on possible empowerment. She is especially interested in FemTech's promise to ‘empower' women from menstrual shame, e.g. by offering them to track their periods. Her research is funded by the Gates Cambridge Scholarship Programme and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Oskar Otto Frohn.
Oskar Otto Frohn - 'Shame and Depression – A Phenomenological Qualitative Exploration of Shame in Depression'
Abstract: The individual suffering from depression is prone and susceptible to normative, precise, rigid ways of being, and expectations in social and societal spheres induce exceptional strong feelings of obligation towards oneself, others, and society – as though they are constantly in debt and owe something of value. Ways of how one ought to be and act quickly becomes performative tasks for the person with depression, and failing to perform or falling short of their self-established duties in social interactions, even when alone, evoke feelings of existential shame. Taking the shape of something irrevocable, and becomes part of the individual’s essence, a character trait, or even a state of being, a shame for existing. Shame, then, is an integral part of depression and the lived experience. Therefore, based upon phenomenological qualitative interviews of people with depression, I argue in this talk, firstly, that the shame of not living up to self-imposed, rigid, specific normative ways of being drastically affect the lifeworld of the person with depression with a hypersensitivity, where otherwise local affordances has become global, threatening the ‘I’ in relation to itself – representing ways in which to either prove or disprove an identity, which potentially leads to what Thomas Fuchs (2013) calls the corporealization of the lived body, as a means to protect the ‘I’. Secondly, shame shows how people with depression, unlike commonly considered, live rich inner social lives. And although shame is a, seemingly, overly negative emotion, it also points towards meaningful personal relations with others, and just how valuable these are to people with depression, and how extremely hyperaware they are of the social dimension, even if they withdraw themselves.
Bio: Oskar Otto Frohn graduated as an undergraduate in philosophy from University of Copenhagen, and recently obtained a M.A from KU Leuven. He has worked with and researched depression for almost four years as a scientific assistant in philosophy and has focused primarily on phenomenology of psychopathology and first-person lived experience in his master’s programme.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Emily Hughes, University of York.
Emily Hughes '"Heavier, and less mine": grief and the modification of bodily experience'
Abstract: This paper gives a phenomenological analysis of the impact of grief upon bodily experience. In the first half of the paper I will provide an analysis of responses to Question 7 of the ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience' questionnaire, ‘Has your body felt any different during grief?' which was conducted with colleagues from the University of York. Using Braun and Clarke's qualitative method of thematic analysis, I will organise the descriptions of bodily experience into patterns of themes, including feelings of heaviness, emptiness, constriction, numbness and depersonalisation. In the second half of the paper I will critically evaluate these themes in light of the broader literature on the lived body and lived space, as given in the work of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Marcel, Minkowski, Bollnow and Schmitz. In so doing, I will explore the ways in which modifications to bodily experience in grief can be seen to impact spatial experience and, by implication, the way in which the mourner finds themselves in the world as a whole.
Bio: I am a postdoctoral research associate in philosophy at the University of York working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience.' I completed my PhD at the University of New South Wales. My research is situated in the intersection between existential phenomenology and the philosophy of psychiatry and psychology, with a particular focus on phenomenological interpretations of affect and the way in which emotions modify temporal experience.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Pat McConville, Monash Bioethics Centre, Monash University.
Pat McConville 'Phenomenology and Artificial Hearts: Three scales of temporal change'
Abstract: Heart failure is a widespread and increasingly common disease. Its symptoms can be dramatic and debilitating. Serious heart failure is also incurable and represents a clear example of the kinds of serious illness and disability discussed by phenomenologists of health and illness. The gold standard treatment for end-stage heart failure is heart transplant. Increasingly, however, patients are offered artificial hearts – either Ventricular Assist Devices (VADs) or Total Artificial Hearts (TAHs) – as either a bridge-to-transplant or as a final or “destination therapy”. Artificial hearts supplement or replace the organic heart and perform the heart's blood-pumping function, or what might be described as in Albert Borgmann's “device paradigm” as the commodity of circulation. However, while they can provide this life-saving function, artificial hearts also generate both obvious and subtle phenomenological changes in their bearers. Incorporating a mechanical heart with both interior and exterior features is challenging. Artificial hearts produce and draw attention to new representations of otherwise felt or interocepted visceral states, and might interrupt pre-device motor intentionalities. Devices detach circulation from ordinary cardiac rhythms, while machine routines mark out new temporalities. In this paper, I introduce artificial hearts and why phenomenology is useful for considering them, then focus in on the three scales – short-, medium-, and long-term – of temporal change they may generate.
Bio: Pat McConville is a doctoral candidate in philosophical bioethics at the Monash Bioethics Centre, Monash University, Australia. He principally draws on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to explore the phenomenology of medical devices, particularly artificial hearts. He has also published on phenomenology and congenital illness, phenomenology and reverse triage, and phenomenology and the aesthetics of the early arcade game Asteroids.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Penelope Lusk, University of Pennsylvania.
Penelope Lusk '“It said the quiet part out loud”: Reshaping Shame in the #MedBikini Twitter Movement'
Abstract: Becoming-a-physician through medical education is a process often mediated by shame (Bynum); that shame is not always as explicit or discriminatory as in July 2020, when the Journal of Vascular Surgery published an article classifying surgery trainee social media posts as either ‘professional' or ‘unprofessional.' Considered unprofessional: controversial social or political comments, and “inappropriate” attire including bikinis and swimwear. The article was interpreted as explicit shaming of gendered bodies within the profession and met backlash in the form of a Twitter campaign in which healthcare workers posted their bikini pictures with the hashtag #MedBikini. Here, I analyse Twitter discourse and popular coverage of #MedBikini as a surface reworking of the affective economy in medical training and suggest potential phenomenological implications of this shift (Ahmed).
The Vascular Surgery article made the nature of medical professional discipline visible, as it utilized surveillance and classification to manifest power and encourage normalization—and attempted to circulate shame among trainees. However, participants in #MedBikini re-signified bikinis (and their gendered and racialized bodies) as not-shameful, but valuable and resistant to dominant norms. Simultaneously, the #MedBikini movement highlights how racialized attire (hijab) and racialized bodies continue to be attached to negative feelings in the profession, complicating the potential meaning of the response as a social movement. Phenomenologically, the signification of bodies has potential impact on the experience of being- or becoming-a-physician. The revaluing of bodies within medical training reassigns group notions of shame and pride, reflecting Sedgwick's notion of shame as a mobile and identity-producing emotion. The reshaping of the affective economy at the discursive level highlights the potential role of ‘affective activism' in forming the power dynamics of medical training and the profession. That potential can be fulfilled when discourse translates into political and institutional responses which manifest change in the embodied experience of medical training.
Bio: Penelope Lusk is a doctoral student in Education, Culture, and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She was a 2020-2021 Fulbright student fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research interests are focused on healthcare and professional education, affect theory, critical theory and philosophy.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Janna van Grunsven, Delft University of Technology.
Janna van Grunsven 'Reimagining Embodied Well-Being: Quasi-Cartesianism, Crip Technoscience & 4E Cognition'
Abstract: The aim of my paper is to show that insights from the field of embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition can be used to articulate a more inclusive socio-technical imaginary of human well-being. I borrow the notion of a socio-technical imaginary from Jasanoff and Kim (2015), who define socio-technical imaginaries as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology.” I begin by arguing that a quasi-Cartesian conception of the mind and the body currently shape our sociotechnical imagination, informing widely held ideas of:
- what minds and bodies are
- what well-functioning minds and bodies look like &
- what it means to design technologies that purport to support, augment, cure, and rehabilitate minds and bodies that deviate from the widely shared view of properly functioning bodies and minds.
I will discuss how developments in Crip Technoscience allow us to interrogate and critique this quasi-Cartesian socio-technical imaginary. I will then propose that these Crip Technoscientific insights can be bolstered with insights from the field of embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition, also known as 4E Cognition. After I discuss how 4E offers an alternative take on ideas 1-3, listed above, I offer a tentative sketch of a more inclusive sociotechnical imaginary centered around Crip Technoscientific and 4E insights.
Bio: Janna van Grunsven is an assistant professor in philosophy of technology at TU Delft and a research fellow in the NWO-Gravitation research programme “The Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies”. Van Grunsven's work combines insights from philosophy of technology and the field of 4E cognition and examines how different theoretical accounts of the mind and different technological developments can have decisive ethical implications for how disabled people are brought in view in a moral sense. Her work has appeared in journals such as Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Topoi, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Michael Greer, The Graduate Center, CUNY.
Michael Greer 'On Oscillating Between Fatness and Thinness in a Fatphobic World: Weight-Cycling, Apprehensive Perception, and the Body You Might Have'
Abstract: Content note: diet culture, eating disorders, fatphobia Diets ostensibly function as reactions against and prophylaxis from “excess” body weight. However, diets rarely affect long term weight-loss. “Weight-cycling” (sometimes called “yo-yo dieting”) describes the phenomenon of losing weight and gaining it (and often more) back in repetitive cycles as a result of dieting behavior(s). The paradigmatic experience of what I call being a “weight-cycler” is therefore that of oscillation between being fat and being relatively thin(ner) in a fatphobic society. A phenomenological analysis of this experience of weight-cycling is missing from the interdisciplinary literature of Fat Studies. Using tools developed within the canon of critical phenomenology, which has historical roots in Merleau-Pontian, Sartrean, and Beauvoirian existential phenomenology, I fill this gap. Weight-cyclers commonly experience disordered relationships with their own bodies and the things that sustain it: food and exercise. I examine weight-cyclers' troubled relationships with food, exercise, and their bodies, alongside their oscillation between different body-sizes, to argue that the phenomenology of the weight-cycler creates the conditions for an “apprehensive perception” towards the futurity of their own embodied selves. This feeds into further weight-cycling. I contend that part of the weight-cycler's difficulty is that they focus on the body they “might have” instead of the body as lived.
Bio: I am a white cis-woman PhD student in Philosophy at CUNY. Broadly speaking, I work in moral and social philosophy. More narrowly, my projects typically involve questions at the intersections of feminist philosophy, existential phenomenology, bioethics, social epistemology, philosophy of language, and fat studies.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Bence Marosan, Budapest Business School. Pazmany Peter Catholic University.
Bence Marosan 'Towards a Phenomenological Theory of Animal Emotions. A Husserlian Perspective'
Abstract: Edmund Husserl and other classical authors of phenomenology (such as Heidegger, Scheler, Plessner, and others) considered the problem of animal being a particularly important topic. As far as I know, however, none of these authors (including Husserl) devoted special attention to the problem of animal emotions. In this conference presentation, I would like to sketch out a phenomenological theory of animal emotional life from a Husserlian perspective. Just as the phenomenological study of emotion has contributed to understanding the essence of consciousness, it is my contention that the study of animal consciousness can similarly offer crucial insights. Both of these subjects help us to examine certain crucial features of consciousness in a sharper light. Animal consciousness represents a more elementary level of consciousness. Emotions, in turn, play a fundamental role in organizing conscious life; they underlie our goals, they also disclose the world in a fundamental way. In these respects, I believe that a better understanding of animal emotions could serve research on consciousness in general. In this presentation, I take Husserl's theory of emotions, as presented in his unpublished work, “Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins”, as a point of departure, and I apply this conception to the case of animals. In Husserl's work, there are three principle levels of affectivity and emotion: feeling-sensations, “moods” or “dispositions”, and acts of feeling and emotion. I show that this schema is applicable to various kinds of animal consciousness, since wherever animal consciousness is concerned there are, at the very least, minimal (feeling-sensations) present. On this point, I also engage with contemporary scientific and neuroscientific research – especially the works of Jaak Panksepp. This makes it possible to explore how, while mammals have a quite rich and sophisticated emotional life, even insects might plausibly have certain elementary feelings (Perry, Baciadonna, & Chittka 2016).
Bio: Name: Bence Peter MAROSAN Date of Birth: 01. 04. 1978. Place of Birth: Budapest, HUNGARY BA and MA Studies: Philosophy, Theory of Arts and Media. Institute: Eötvös Loránd University PhD Studies: Philosophy, Phenomenology. Institutes: Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary). Affiliation: Budapest Business School, Pázmány Péter Catholic University More important international publications: 1) “Levels of the Absolute in Husserl”. In Continental Philosophy Review. 2021. 2) “Husserl on Minimal Mind and the Origins of Consciousness in the Natural World”. In Husserl Studies. 2021. Research interests: Phenomenology (Husserl in particular), Hermeneutics, Philosophy of Mind, Political Philosophy, Eco-ethics, Eco-politics
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Joe MacDonagh, Technological University Dublin.
Joe MacDonagh 'Daseinic elements of the ethicality of nursing practice'
Abstract: This paper will examine the ethical basis of nursing using the prism of Heidegger's idea of dasein. It will look at how, in the nursing ‘moment' between a nurse and their patient, a nurse is called upon to be ethically responsive to the patient in a manner that engages in a dialogue with all those nurses who have provided care theretofore, are currently doing so and who will do so in the future. In direct patient care a nurse is responding to the ‘other' in front of her, with their specific personhood and needs, but also to the generalised other person who may fall into one or more disease categories. This toggling between a specific and generalised patient ‘other' presents dilemmas for nurses of how to shape care that attends to the needs of that individual patient while observing care guidelines and professional ethical precepts that are required by hospitals and professional nursing bodies. Data will be presented from interviews with nurses and from field notes observing nursing practice to substantiate the above and to show how nursing practice is not simply the observance of set and invariant modes of activity. Rather, nurses have to navigate the needs of: their professional training, their empathy with an often empained patient other, the changing expectations of those receiving care, the embodiedness of the other and their own embodiedness as well as supporting the patient to wellness, a less empained existence or through palliation to death. An understanding of nursing will be presented in which hermeneusis is suggested as a central part of nursing practice, wherein nurses- acting ethically- continually interpret the needs of their patients in providing the most appropriate care, against the backdrop of a constantly shifting personally and professionally accumulated knowledge of their role in providing care.
Bio: Dr Joe MacDonagh is a Chartered Psychologist and a member of the research ethics boards of two acute hospitals in Dublin, Ireland. He is also a member of the Life and Medical Sciences committee of the Royal Irish Academy. He has a particular interest in bioethics, and has been involved in the organisation of seminars and webinars on this area. Finally, he is a former Honorary Secretary of the History and Philosophy of Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Tristan Hedges, University of Copenhagen.
Tristan Hedges 'Towards a phenomenology of discrimination'
Abstract: As I walk down the corridor, I barely slow my pace, extend my arm, and am then thrown by the wholly unanticipated experience of my body crashing into the unbudging door. I typified the door as a ‘push-door' and approached it with the presupposition that my expectation of it opening upon being pushed would be fulfilled. I argue that this all-too-familiar experience illuminates a tendency toward concordance which underlies the most pernicious and unintentional discriminatory practices. Concordance, understood as the cohering of experience with one's expectations, provides us with a sense of normality which is fundamental for epistemic, normative, and doxic familiarity. In this talk, I bring Husserl's phenomenological understanding of concordance-normality into dialogue with social scientific and philosophical work on discrimination. Historically, phenomenology has concerned itself with the lived experience of the discriminatee. However, it is also well-equipped for thematising the ways in which we discriminate at the pre-reflective levels of perceptual experience and bodily being. Discriminatory practices manifest in the unintended turning of heads, prolonged looks, or prejudicial ways of seeing and hearing. Drawing on examples of stereotyping, cognitive biases, and spatial exclusion, I show how discrimination is often a naïve, normalising attempt to stabilise concordance at the expense of new, revised, and dialogically established ways of seeing. To these ends, I begin with Husserl's understanding of normality and its constitutional significance for our typifying experience of the world. I then illuminate the attitudinal character of discrimination and argue that there is a normalising tendency toward concordance underlying discriminatory practices. Lastly, I want to problematise this tendency toward concordance by arguing for the normative, epistemic, and experiential richness of discordance. Despite their disorientating and unfamiliar character, discordant experiences allow us to revise, critically reflect on, and expand our horizons of expectation.
Bio: Tristan Hedges is a PhD fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. He is working under Dan Zahavi as part of the Who Are We research project, for which he is exmaning the phenomenological notion of we-identity. Within this context his research is interested in the Us/Them dichotomy, and how we-identities can be antagonistic and exclusionary, but also provide senses of belonging and political solidarity.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Charlotte Knowles, University of Groningen.
Knowles & Melo Lopes - 'How to Dress Like a Feminist'
Abstract: From Mary Wollstonecraft to Sandra Bartky, feminist philosophers have historically denounced women’s attention to clothes as a form of complicity with patriarchal hierarchy. Through self-objectifying and laborious forms of dress, women constitute themselves as passive objects, rather than active subjects. The key to liberation, then, has been said to lie in ‘opting out’ of care for one’s appearance. However, this strategy problematically dismisses the pleasure and the sense of creative self-fashioning that women experience in selecting, wearing, and making clothes. Feminist philosophers face therefore an impasse: either we acknowledge the oppressive function of clothes, but risk ignoring women’s lived experience; or we recognise the genuine pleasure and expressive freedom derived from clothes but undermine our ability to critique them. What then, if anything, can we say about what it is to ‘dress well’, in an ethical sense, in a patriarchal society? To answer this question, we adopt a phenomenological perspective, focussing on the relational, dynamic and embodied nature of meaning. We argue that the meaning of clothes is never entirely fixed and that they sit within a relational whole of significations (a ‘world’). Therefore, complicity with gender hierarchy is not a matter of what one wears, but primarily of how one wears it: of one’s relation to clothing and to the world. We develop a phenomenological account of Effortless Dressing that seeks to do justice to feminist critiques, whilst also recognising the pleasure and possibilities that can be found in practices of dressing. We argue ‘effortlessness’ involves: 1) a recognition that clothes have meaning, but that this meaning is not entirely fixed, 2) a critical awareness of the social scripts around dressing, and 3) a relation to clothes that values them for how they enable us to do things in the world, rather than as ends in themselves.
Bio:
Charlotte Knowles is an Assistant Professor in Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Groningen. Her primary research areas lie in feminist philosophy and phenomenology, particularly Heidegger and Beauvoir. These interests come together in her work on complicity where she explores issues of freedom, responsibility, agency and oppression from a phenomenological perspective, in order to examine why women sometimes reinforce or uphold their own subordination.
Filipa Melo Lopes is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where she researches feminist politics, sexual ethics, social philosophy, and the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. Her recent publications include Beauvoirian analyses of incel violence and the #Metoo movement.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Matthew Pritchard, University of Oxford and Phil Tovey, Independent UK.
Pritchard & Tovey - 'Ecophenomenological Perspectives on Human Augmentation'
Abstract: Just as the Anthropocene marked a geological epoch that, for the first time, would be attributed to actions according of a single species, Homo Sapiens is on the precipice of another epochal transition through Human Augmentation (HA) whereby, through technological alteration, a single species is decoupling its own evolutionary trajectory from that of its natural environment. Through HA we should anticipate major disturbances concerning the classification of what it is to be human- taxonomically, socially and importantly, phenomenologically – owing to the intrinsic relational basis of our evolutionary-biological models with nature and their effects on perceptions of selfhood. By extension, this affects what it is to be a non-human and therefore has important ethical implications beyond an anthropocentric purview, to a more-than-human world whose only opportunity for augmentation arises in tight ecological symbiosis with its natural ecosystem. HA therefore represent a sociotechnical pivot point whereby the construct human is existentially disrupted through assimilation with either the purely machinic (i.e., Cyborgs) or the animalistic (i.e., Chimeras) both leading to what we coin as ‘ecophenomenological self-disruption’. We highlight HA’s self-disruptive potentiality through re-examining Wood’s (2001) rich dimensions of ecophenomenology - the plexity of time and the boundaries of thinghood – to reveal how these technological augmentations in our physiological structures (including our sensory modalities) threaten to either entrench ontological anthropocentrism or offer a promising opportunity to transition away from it towards ecocentrism.
Bio:
Dr Matt Pritchard is Visitor to the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University. He has BA and MPhil degrees in Archaeology and Anthropology from Cambridge University and a DPhil in Embodied Cognition and Religious Naturalism from Oxford. He was Co-Chair of the Civil Service Environment Network for 2021/22 and is on the Government Office for Science's Expert Advisory Group for Resilience.
Philip Tovey is the Head of Futures in the public sector organisation. He holds a MSc by Res in Policing from Canterbury Christ Church University and his research focuses on the cognitive phenomenology of time and futurity. Phil is a strategic partner of the University of Bristol’s ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, whereby he focused on interdisciplinary research to address environmental issues of strategic importance to the UK.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Maxim Miroshnichenko, Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University.
Maxim Miroshnichenko 'The Painful Incorporation: Hybrid Intercorporeality in the Case of Dialysis and Chronic Kidney Disease'
Abstract: I am going to collide two approaches to technology in disability and chronic kidney disease: extension and incorporation. For the 4EA view, the metabolically considered living systems can include resources and processes beyond their bodies. The individual enacts autonomous self-monitoring, control of internal regulation, and exchanges. This ‘hybrid intercorporeality' exists with graded norms of vitality – health, sickness, stress, and fatigue. It is an incorporation that affords the individual to enact her sense-making through the integration of technologies, artifacts, and prostheses into her body schema. This view emphasizes the body-as-subject, in contrast to the extended cognition thesis characterized by the tendency to objectify the body. The central problem of this approach is its view of incorporation as fruitful and enabling. I want to concentrate on the case of dialysis in chronic kidney disease as painful and discomforting integration of technology. This shows the intertwinement of the lived body and biomedical body-as-object. Dialysis is prescribed for persons with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) – kidney failure. The patient needs to rid her blood from toxins. This leads to the need for a regular course of long-term dialysis accomplished with an artificial kidney–dialysis machine. Based on the phenomenological interviews with the patients going through dialysis, I will analyze their view of technology as a life-supporting machine and a trap. The patients feel disgust and abjection towards the body due to the aggressive and painful presence of equipment – tubes and needles, fluid filling the body, changes in body shape and weight, nausea and fatigue, immobility, and limited social activities. Based on the materials of the phenomenological interviews with the patients going through dialysis, I want to show how the incorporation of technology and bodily integrity is enacted through pain and discomfort.
Bio: I am a Senior Lecturer in Bioethics at Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University. Also, I am a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Philosophy at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (remotely). I hold a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Higher School of Economics (2019). The dissertation committee included Catherine Malabou and Adam Berg. My recent studies revolve around embodiment, disability studies, bioethics, and media theory. Currently, I am finishing phenomenological research on relations between doctors, patients, and technologies in palliative care. Also, I am conducting the phenomenological interviews with patients going through hemodialysis under the condition of chronic kidney failure.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Liesbeth Schoonheim, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Liesbeth Schoonheim 'Posters, protests, and reclaiming the streets'
Abstract: Street protests create spaces of appearance (Arendt) that galvanize public support for hitherto hidden forms of precarity and oppression. Put in these terms, street protests raise questions about their duration, as they rely on the physical proximity of people; they also raise issues of who can and cannot participate in this space of appearance and in what way, as public space is subject to various forms of policing(Butler). In this paper, I investigate these limits of embodied resistance by looking at a different form of street protest, namely the feminist collectives that put up posters in the streets of Brussels denouncing gender-and sex-based violence. Some of these target street harassment by imploring passers-by to “laisse[r] les filles tranquilles”, while others focus on feminicide, publishing the name of victims of domestic violence. In different ways, these interventions relate isolated and privatized experiences of violence to patriarchal structures. First, deploying Arendt's political phenomenology, I argue that these artefacts are intended as a (semi-)permanent mark on the public space; and they invoke the victims of various forms of gender-and sex-based violence, reclaiming the streets as a site of commemoration and of free movement. Secondly, I show how they also presuppose passers-by that stop, read and respond to them. I suggest this interpellation should be understood as a moment of critique, in the sense in which critical phenomenologists (Guenther, Al-Saji, Salamon) have defined it as the suspension of everyday comportment and the exposure of historically contingent structures of oppression. Thirdly, I argue (contra Arendt) that protest does not always require the physical proximity of a group of people engaging in purposeful action-in-concert, but can also develop as a series (Sartre, Young), in this case, as the interpellation of passers-by as possible agents of social change, engaging in acts of indignant remembrance and of leaving women and other targeted groups alone.
Bio: Liesbeth Schoonheim is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University, Berlin, working on the intersection of political theory, feminism, and social theory. Previously, she held a postdoctoral research fellowship at KU Leuven (Belgium) and an appointment as a lecturer at University of Amsterdam (Netherlands).
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Eugenia Stefanello, University of Padova.
Eugenia Stefanello 'Empathy, Narrative Medicine, and (Mis)Representation of Illness: A Phenomenological Perspective'
Abstract: It is often argued that mutual understanding is crucial in clinical encounters. In particular, narrative medicine proponents strongly believe that through mutual understanding and doctors' narrative skills it is possible to increase both empathy in the doctor-patient relationship and affiliation within the community of healthcare professionals (Charon, 2017; DasGupta & Charon, 2004). However, although empathy appears to be one of the main aims of narrative medicine, it has not been extensively analyzed by its supporters. For this reason, I argue that narrative medicine should discuss on the one hand what the role of empathy is in narrative medicine's proposal and, on the other hand, what kind of empathy should be involved in the clinical encounter. In this regard, I show that if the type of empathy involved in narrative medicine is understood as synonymous with the doctors' ability to simulate the patients' perspectives as proposed by Simulation Theory (Goldman, 2006), narrative medicine and the clinical encounter can be negatively impacted (Gallagher, 2007). In addition, when empathy is reduced to a simulation-plus-projection mechanism, it can not only radicalize the other's alterity triggering possible harm towards others (Bubandt & Willerslev, 2015) but also disregard whether and how deeply people want or need to share their perspectives and ignore the situatedness of the empathic understanding exacerbating existing inequalities (Hollan, 2008, 2017). Finally, I suggest that narrative medicine should explore alternative accounts of empathy. Specifically, the phenomenological approach (Scheler, 1913; Stein, 1917) offers one that is multifaceted and layered in which empathy has a specific but partial role in understanding others (Throop & Zahavi, 2020). Accordingly, I will try to show that phenomenological empathy seems able to provide healthcare professionals guidance to improve their narrative skills and achieve the ultimate goal of affiliation, without having to face the objections raised against a simulationist concept of empathy (Vendrell Ferran, 2015; Zahavi, 2014). References Bubandt, N., & Willerslev, R. (2015). The Dark Side of Empathy: Mimesis, Deception, and the Magic of Alterity. Comparative Studies in Society and History, 57(1), 5–34. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0010417514000589 Charon, R. (2017). The principles and practice of narrative medicine. Oxford University Press. DasGupta, S., & Charon, R. (2004). Personal Illness Narratives: Using Reflective Writing to Teach Empathy. Academic Medicine, 79(4), 351–356. https://doi.org/10.1097/00001888-200404000-00013 Gallagher, S. (2007). Simulation trouble. Social Neuroscience, 2(3–4), 353–365. https://doi.org/10.1080/17470910601183549 Goldman, A. I. (2006). Simulating minds: The philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience of mindreading. Oxford University Press. Hollan, D. (2008). Being There: On the Imaginative Aspects of Understanding Others and Being Understood. Ethos, 36(4), 475–489. Hollan, D. (2017). Empathy across cultures. In The Routledge Handbook of Philosophy of Empathy. Routledge. Scheler, M. (1913). The nature of sympathy (W. Stark, Trans.). Routledge and KPaul. Stein, E. (1917). On the Problem of Empathy (W. Stein, Trans.). Springer Netherlands. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-5546-7 Throop, C. J., & Zahavi, D. (2020). Dark and Bright Empathy: Phenomenological and Anthropological Reflections. Current Anthropology, 61(3), 283–303. https://doi.org/10.1086/708844 Vendrell Ferran, Í. (2015). Empathy, Emotional Sharing and Feelings in Stein's Early Work. Human Studies, 38(4), 481–502. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10746-015-9346-4 Zahavi, D. (2014). Empathy and Other-Directed Intentionality. Topoi, 33(1), 129–142. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11245-013-9197-4
Bio:
Eugenia Stefanello is a PhD Student in Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology (FISPPA), University of Padova, Italy. Her research focuses on Phenomenology, Moral Philosophy, Bioethics, and Philosophy of Mind with a particular interest in empathy and its influence on the deliberative process.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Joshua Bergamin, University of Vienna.
Joshua Bergamin 'When is ‘my truth' true? Interpreting lived experience in phenomenological interviews'
Abstract: Many topics and methodologies for investigating subjectivity that have become widespread in the social sciences – for example, an emphasis on ‘lived experience' – have been significantly developed by applied phenomenologists. Yet phenomenology's own commitments often bring it into tension with giving full voice to its subjects. For example, the ‘bracketing' of prejudices may not take into account how those prejudices are constitutive of the subject herself. Furthermore, researchers are rarely trained to self-reflect on how their own history – cultural, sexual, professional – might colour their interpretation of a subject's ‘bracketed' responses. A risk therefore is that a subject's experience be distorted by the researcher's own interests. But at the same time, the latter's immersion in a broader investigative discourse offers insights to which their subject may have little access. My paper examines this tension as it manifests in an ongoing interdisciplinary research project, working with improvising musical ensembles. Centred on the co-creation of a ‘hermeneutic circle' between artwork, artist, and analysts, the project aims not only to render the research process itself transparent, but to consciously blur the distinction between researchers and research subjects, treating subjects as partners in a creative process in which all participants have a voice and an opportunity to learn/grow. After briefly outlining our methodologies, I dig deeper into the problems of truth and interpretation that this process exposes, namely: – At what points do ‘lived experience' accounts reach limits that might be better informed by critical distance or historical consciousness? – Is it essential to reconcile contradictions between levels of analysis? If so, how do we give weight to values like truth while doing justice to different lived realities? If not, can we avoid reperpetuating power imbalances between researcher and subject? I examine these questions with reference to particular case studies, while suggesting potential generalisable conclusions.
Bio: Joshua Bergamin is a philosopher at the University of Vienna and co-PI of the interdisciplinary artistic research project (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). He has a PhD from Durham University, where he worked as an ‘applied phenomenologist,' an MA from the University of Queensland for work on Heidegger and cognitive science, and BAs from the University of South Australia. His academic work is supplemented by training and practical experience as a physical artist and musician (mostly percussion), and he has choreographed and performed at many festivals and immersive events.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Tom Hey, Lancaster University.
Tom Hey 'A Phenomenological Approach to Bulimia'
Abstract: Bulimia has been medically and socially constructed as an illness afflicting affluent, young, white women, which is to be cured through weight gain and the resumption of a ‘normal' relationship with food. This myopic depiction of bulimia represents a predilection to ‘make sense' of illness experiences in medically- and/or culturally-intelligible terms, and constitutes epistemic violence towards sufferers through its erasure of diverse forms of suffering and its disavowal of the subjective complexities of recovery. The pervasiveness of the eating disorder memoir, which dominates written representations of bulimia and positions linear recovery (expressed in narrative terms) as an experiential norm, further marginalises ongoing experiences of suffering; as Angela Woods argues, ‘[n]arrative does not have a monopoly on expressivity' (Woods, 2013: 124). In this paper I will use a phenomenological approach informed by affect theories, specifically Sara Ahmed's work on orientations and attachments, to engage with embodied experiences of bulimia. I will read Bulimics on Bulimia (2009), a collection of fragmented, first-person, present-tense accounts of bulimia edited by Maria Stavrou, to propose that living with bulimia can engender individualised, affectively-charged attachments between selves, objects, and spaces through which each is destabilised and redrawn. Aiming to ‘provide a sample of insight into what life is like living with bulimia' (Stavrou, 2009: 7), Bulimics on Bulimia seeks to address the privileged articulacy of narrativized accounts of bulimia through its representation of moments of intensity situated within social worlds from a polyphony of voices. Using an engaged phenomenological methodology which provides new ways of listening to written accounts of living with bulimia, I will seek to rearticulate bulimia as an object around which surges illogical, ambivalent feelings and emotions.
Bio: Tom Hey is an AHRC-funded PhD student at Lancaster University, researching representations of eating disorders in contemporary literature through the intersecting frameworks of the medical humanities, postcolonial theories, and affect theories.
This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP?
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Ida Djursaa, Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, London.
Ida Djursaa 'Towards a Critical Phenomenology of the Erotic'
Abstract: This paper seeks to advance a phenomenological notion of sexuality as a modality of bodily sensibility through the lens of Merleau-Ponty. Feminist philosophers such as Judith Butler (1989) and Elizabeth Grosz (1994) have critiqued Merleau-Ponty's analysis of sexuality in the Phenomenology of Perception for presenting sexuality in a universalist (hence masculinist) way, abstracted from the reality of gender difference and non-heterosexual identities. Drawing on Alia Al-Saji's (2008) and Tom Sparrow's (2015) work on sensibility, however, this paper argues that Merleau-Ponty's notion of sexuality should be understood as a modality of sensibility that operates prior to, and as generative of, categorisations into sexual identities. I show how Merleau-Ponty's analysis of sexuality, rather than making a claim about the universalist character of desire such as it must be for everyone, in fact makes a more basic claim about the strictly bodily, that is, the sensible dimension of our most intimate intercorporeal relations. Insofar as sensibility designates the pre-reflective and pre-perceptual binding of bodies, then, understanding sexuality as a modality of sensibility, this paper argues, allows us to investigate the ways in which bodies live desire prior to perception and reflection. In this respect, Merleau-Ponty's description of sexuality as the ‘blind linking of bodies' (Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, p159) is thus not reducible to sexual identity but is rather descriptive of the erotic as the life force that motivates attractions and repulsions – affective ‘pulls' – between bodies. Finally, the paper asks how this erotic life force itself, and hence our bodies' (in)capacity for intimacy, is structured by our socio-politico-historical contexts, including the reality of gender norms? Can a critical phenomenology of sexuality help us to not only understand but also empower the erotic lives of bodies?
Bio: I am a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, London. My research project critically traces the phenomenological notion of transcendence such as it operates in Husserl, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty. It argues that transcendence works, most basically, at the level of bodily sensibility rather than consciousness or perception. Ultimately, I employ this notion of sensibility to investigate how the particular ways in which our bodies move are structured by our individual history as well as the socio-cultural-historical contexts which invisibly prescribe normative ways of moving and acting based on gender, race, class.
Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Kira Meyer, Kiel University.
Kira Meyer 'Ecophenomenology as a Contribution to Transformation'
Abstract: Engaged phenomenology does not only have the potential to transform socio-political realities and power relations between human beings, but also those between man and nature. Currently, anthropocentrism, namely the view that nature has only an instrumental value which is relative to the ends of human beings, governs these realities and relations. Phenomenology can contribute to transform them by including the lived body in the self-understanding of human beings. Understanding the lived body as the “nature that we are ourselves” (Böhme, 2019) would involve a different conception of nature as well: Man and nature wouldn't be dichotomic anymore, rather human beings would be part of nature. Embracing such an ecophenomenological (cf. Brown and Toadvine, 2003) conception would have important normative implications. I will present them in three steps. Firstly, I argue that the instrumental value of nature for the fulfillment of human basic needs and health can be particularly well justified based on an ecophenomenological approach for it is precisely man's corporeality by virtue of which he has these needs and through which health (or illness) manifest themselves. Secondly, sentience is inseparable from corporeality. Therefore, insofar as it is a concern of the ecophenomenological approach to take corporeality and its implications seriously, sentient beings deserve direct moral consideration. Thirdly, natural entities build an integral part of the good life of human beings, hence they deserve indirect moral consideration because of their eudaimonic value (Chan et al., 2016). As corporeal beings, humans can enjoy nature aisthetically, that is via their senses: The beautiful, the sublime, but also nature as home, as offering leisure and recreation, spirituality and transformation (Krebs et al., 2021). Taking corporeality into account, that is embracing an ecophenomenological account, thus leads to a deep anthropocentric position (Ott, 2016) and facilitates the transformation of current power relations and thereby shaped human-nature-relations. (301 words exclusive of literature) Literature:BÖHME, G. 2019. Leib: Die Natur, die wir selbst sind, Berlin, Suhrkamp.BROWN, C. S. & TOADVINE, T. 2003. Eco-Phenomenology. An Introduction. In: BROWN, C. S. & TOADVINE, T. (eds.) Eco-phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself. New York: State University of New York Press.CHAN, K. M. A., BALVANERA, P., BENESSAIAH, K., CHAPMAN, M., DÍAZ, S., GÓMEZ-BAGGETHUN, E., GOULD, R., HANNAHS, N., JAX, K., KLAIN, S., LUCK, G. W., MARTÍN-LÓPEZ, B., MURACA, B., NORTON, B., OTT, K., PASCUAL, U., SATTERFIELD, T., TADAKI, M., TAGGART, J. & TURNER, N. 2016. Why protect nature? Rethinking values and the environment. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 113, 1462–1465.KREBS, A., SCHUSTER, S., FISCHER, A. & MÜLLER, J. 2021. Das Weltbild der Igel. Naturethik einmal anders, Basel, Schwabe Verlag.OTT, K. 2016. On the Meaning of Eudemonic Arguments for a Deep Anthropocentric Environmental Ethics. New German Critique, 43, 105-126.
Bio: Kira Meyer is a doctoral candidate in the field of environmental ethics at Kiel University. In her dissertation project she investigates the connection between the lived body and a relational understanding of freedom and argues on this basis for the compatibility of (strong) sustainability and freedom. Her research focuses on (eco-)phenomenology, new phenomenology, environmental ethics, and the concept of political freedom.
Season 6 continues with another keynote presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.
‘Is Heidegger’s Other Thinking necessarily an Ecological Thinking? Reflections on the Absence of Nature and the Destiny of Technology’
This year saw the 50th anniversary of The Limits of Growth, the publication by the Club of Rome, which for many was the trigger of the birth of climate activism. The message was that action on global warming now was necessary immediately – but nothing much happened until the Fridays for Future movement, which appeared as if it just occurred to us that there might be a problem. About a decade after the publication of The Limits of Growth, parts of the ecological movement wondered why nothing happened and turned towards the critique of technological rationalism, following Nietzsche and Heidegger, to provide an explanation for that inaction and to open the way for a more radical ecological thinking. While the insight that nothing would change as long as ecology would either be swallowed up by the same technological rationalism that caused the crisis, nor by some middle-class Europeans ‘moving off grid’, did give rise to more than a decade of engagement, what in turn has happened to this movement, which claimed that ecology can only be meaningful when joining postmodernism’s turn to language, while also claiming that postmodernism is essentially an ecological thinking? Again, nothing. Instead, all we wonder about today is whether Heidegger was an antisemite or not. In this talk I will reflect on the reasons for which Heidegger’s other thinking has become so unpalatable in our age and why these reasons are the same that should still engage us with the problems of global heating and globalization and the critique of the feverish search for technical solutions to the problem of technology.
Ullrich Haase is Principal Lecturer at the Manchester Metropolitan University. His research centres on 19th and 20th Century German and French Philosophy, especially Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and Blanchot. He served as the editor of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology from 2005 to 2020.
Season 6 continues with another keynote presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.
‘Varieties of incorporation: beyond the blind man’s cane’
In post-phenomenology and other disciplines, “incorporation” refers to the assimilation or integration of tools into the body. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty had already discussed examples of tool-incorporation—including, famously, the example of the blind man and his cane. Merleau-Ponty's analysis refers to what he called the “body schema”: our prereflective awareness of ourselves in terms of what we can do and perceive in the world. Subsequent discussions of incorporation have similarly focused on the integration of tools into the tacit (or even unconscious and sub-personal) sensorimotor body. In my talk I want to draw attention to the fact that we can incorporate tools in other ways, too, because we experience ourselves not just as tacit sensorimotor bodies. First, we can also incorporate tools into the so-called “body image”—the experience of our body as an intentional object of awareness, which can itself be distinguished into various (sub)experiences. Second, we can incorporate tools into our “lived seen body”—our sense of how we appear to others. I will illustrate these distinctions with examples and empirical evidence, and conclude with some reflections about the relationship between experiences of incorporation and the much discussed notion of the “extended mind”.
Giovanna Colombetti is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology of the University of Exeter (UK). She was educated in Italy and the UK, and after receiving her PhD from the University of Sussex in 2004, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the universities of York (Canada), Trento (Italy), and Harvard. Since 2007 she has worked and lived in Exeter, temporarily visiting various research centres in Europe, Asia, and Australia. At Exeter she is also member of EGENIS (The Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences), where she leads the Mind, Body, and Culture research cluster. She is further affiliated with the University of Southern Denmark, where since 2021 she has been Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at the Faculty of Health Sciences, and collaborates with its research cluster on Movement, Culture, and Society. She is also Associate Editor of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy of cognitive science (especially embodied and situated cognition), philosophy of emotion, phenomenology, and material culture studies. She has worked the notions of emotion and affectivity, and on their relation to theories of cognition, embodiment, enaction, and extended mind. She is the author of several articles and book chapters in which she argues that, from an embodied-enactive perspective, cognition and emotion are not separate mental faculties, and rather emotion is a primordial and all-pervasive dimension of the mind. In 2010-2014 she was Principal Investigator of a Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council, titled “Emoting the Embodied Mind”, during which she wrote her monograph The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (MIT Press, 2014). Since then, she has worked mainly on the notion of “situated affectivity” and is currently writing a second monograph on how we use objects to influence our affective life.
The BSP Podcast Season 6 begins with the first keynote speaker from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II.
'Fanon and an Engaged Phenomenology of Affect: Touching the wounds of colonial duration'
Surrounding Frantz Fanon's work is a persistent, and at times reductive, debate on method: phenomenological, psychoanalytic, psychiatric, Merleau-Pontian, Sartrean, afropessimist, or decolonial. What is often forgotten is that the originality of Fanon's philosophy comes from the multiplicity of approaches he was able to weave together. More so, in attempts to read Fanon through other philosophers (e.g. Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, or Lacan), his contemporaneity with these thinkers is elided. I propose it might be time to read phenomenology through Fanon, rather than centering analysis on Fanon's assumed debt to Merleau-Ponty's body schema. In this paper, I focus on the question of phenomenological method (without assuming this to be the defining method of Fanon's work). My argument is not one from continuity. Rather, I want to show how Fanonian phenomenology is one of rupture with, and ungrounding of, the phenomenological tradition—how Fanon creates his own method through an engaged phenomenology of racialized affect and touch that breaks with the perceptual spectacle at the centre of most phenomenologies before him. This is to say that Fanon's phenomenology is not mere description, that he invents a critical, distinctly temporal, and anticolonial method from the affective territory in which he has had to dwell.
Alia Al-Saji is Associate Professor of Philosophy at McGill University. Her work brings together phenomenology, critical philosophy of race, and feminist theory, with an abiding interest in questions of time, affect, and racialization. Notable among her works, she is the author of “The Racialization of Muslim Veils” (Philosophy and Social Criticism, 2010), “Decolonizing Bergson” (Beyond Bergson, SUNY 2019), and “Glued to the Image: A critical phenomenology of racialization through works of Art” (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 2019). Al-Saji argues for the philosophical, political, and lived importance of affective hesitation, and is currently completing a monograph entitled Hesitation: Critical Phenomenology, Colonial Duration, and the Affective Weight of the Past.
Season five of our podcast concludes with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features a presentation from Marieke Borren, Faculty of Humanities, Open University Netherlands.
ABSTRACT: Within critical race theory, phenomenological scholarship is unique in focusing on the racialized body. Based on the work of Fanon and Merleau-Ponty (even if the latter does not address racial difference), phenomenologists have recently developed rich explorations of racial embodiment, predominantly in a visual register (Alcoff, Al-Saji, Gordon, Weiss, Yancy, among others). However, ‘white’ and ‘black’ embodiment are not just involved in perceptual (notably: visual) habits, but also, so I will argue in this paper, in ways of inhabiting and taking up space and habits of moving. What ‘I can’ do, and where, is to a large extent dependent upon my racial situation. This presentation seeks to expand the phenomenology of racial embodiment, more particularly whiteness, by attending not just to the (in)visibility but also to the spatiality and motility of racialized – in particular: white – embodiment. To this end, I will I confront the conceptual resources for understanding spatiality and motility in relation to embodiment, present in the work of Merleau-Ponty (while challenging its false racial neutrality), Fanon’s phenomenological account of black racialization, and Shannon Sullivan’s (feminist) pragmatist account of the ‘ontological expansiveness’ of whiteness. Being a key feature of what the latter calls ‘the unconscious habits of racial privilege’, white expansiveness entails the taken-for-granted freedom to inhabit space and move around as one sees fit. Finally, I will argue that the normative implications of the phenomenology of white expansiveness are undecided. It might be strategically employed for undercutting itself. However, any effort to fight white privilege may end up reconfirming rather than undermining white expansiveness. I will illustrate this undecidability with the case study of Carola Rackete, the self-proclaimed white and privileged German captain of the Sea-Watch 3, who rescued 42 African migrants on the Mediterranean and brought them into port in Lampedusa in July 2019.
BIO: Marieke Borren currently works as an assistant professor in philosophy at Open University Netherlands. From 2015-2017, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the department of philosophy of the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Specializing in Hannah Arendt’s political phenomenology, her research expertise lies at the intersection of continental political philosophy, philosophical anthropology and phenomenology. She is particularly interested in feminist and postcolonial perspectives. She has widely published on Arendt’s work, in particular about dis-placement and having a place in the world (‘the right to have rights’), focusing on the predicament of refugees and undocumented migrants.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Ondra Kvapil, École Normale Supérieure de Paris / Charles University in Prague. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: My paper will focus on Sartre’s meditations on death. Sartre formulates them as a critique of Heidegger – and the majority of commentators adopt his approach. I will however claim it more fruitful to read Sartre’s conclusions in the light of Husserl’s analyses of death. These were indeed unknown to Sartre, nonetheless the two share key presuppositions: Because our death cannot be grasped in reflection on our subjectivity, it cannot belong to the ontological structure of subjectivity itself; death is then classified as a mundane event, as well as a limit-problem of phenomenological description. I will demonstrate how Sartre radicalizes this notion. Death is not a limit-problem only for transcendental reflection, but already in pre-theoretical and pre-phenomenological attitude. Not only can we never live to seeit coming, we cannot even anticipate it, as the instant of death is principally indeterminate. The only meaning we can attribute to our death is that of the end of our –meaningful, or meaningless – existence. Our death is thus categorically different from all that is intended in the world. There is also a tacit consequence to the exclusion of death from subjectivity: mortality is reduced to bodily vulnerability. Death is the final strike, which may come in various disguises – perhaps that of a virus. Coming from the world, where we nevertheless cannot intend it, death remains essentially exterior to us. In sum, I will unravel the missing link between Husserl’s unpublished reflections on death and Levinas’ grasp of death as radically Other. Moreover, it will emerge that death, which as a mundane fact becomes a subject to a variety of disciplines, at the same time exceeds all empirical facts and thus engages philosophy. Far from being limited to academia, death engages thinking of each and every one of us – no matter where we come from.
BIO: I am a postgraduate researcher at École Normale Supérieure de Paris and Charles University in Prague, currently working on my dissertation The Philosophical Significance of Death. Previously, I have also studied at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. I have taught several courses in phenomenological philosophy, mainly on Heidegger, at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Charles University. My research concerns phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics, as well as 19th-century continental philosophy, with particular research interests that include death and mortality, relation between being and nothingness, and the problem of time.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features a presentation from Sam McAuliffe, Monash University
ABSTRACT: Hermeneutic-phenomenology as a method of inquiry is increasingly finding its way into music studies, and the performing arts more generally. Indeed, with respect to music studies there is no shortage of projects where hermeneutic-phenomenology is employed as a means to better understand music, both from the perspective of creating music and experiencing it as a spectator. There is a clear distinction, then, between the practice of music and the application of hermeneutic-phenomenological inquiry; one is used to understand the other. Rarely acknowledged however, are those characteristics that are common to both music and hermeneutic-phenomenology. In this paper I would like to explore one of those shared characteristics: improvisation. By exploring the hermeneutic-phenomenological tradition from a Gadamerian perspective and the practice of music, broadly conceived, I argue that what is common to each is the ‘improvisational encounter’. Which is to say, the improvisation that is essential to the practice of music is equally essential to hermeneutic-phenomenological inquiry. By highlighting the hermeneutic-phenomenological nature of improvisation in music and the improvisational nature of hermeneutic-phenomenology we might better notice the relevance of each field to the other. Consequently, not only can applied hermeneutic-phenomenology better speak to the practice of music, but so too can studying music provide insight into hermeneutic-phenomenology as such. Thus, perhaps by acknowledging the commonalities between art and philosophy we can notice ways in which these disciplines might speak to and complement one another.
BIO: Sam McAuliffe is a PhD candidate at Monash University, working at the intersection of improvised music and philosophical hermeneutics. In addition to his academic work Sam has worked as a musical director for experimental theatre productions, has curated sound installations for major Australian art festivals, and he plays guitar in a variety of ensembles.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Adriano Lotito, Milano-Bicocca University. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: This contribution focuses on the Tran Duc Thao’s work, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, that is fundamental to post-war French thought, having influenced thinkers as Lyotard and Derrida amongst others and representing the first systematic attempt to synthesize Marxism and phenomenology. Firstly I examine the Tran’s reconstruction of Husserlian phenomenology. Originally there is an objective idealism theorizing the independence of the object; then there is its reversal in a subjective idealism highlighting the constituting consciousness; finally there is the switch from static to genetic phenomenology with the thematization of the life-world as historical-empirical ground (I). Secondly I explore the contradiction indicated by Tran between the Husserl’s idealistic frame, implicating the reproduction of an abstract dualism, and the results of the concrete analysis, bound to the original claim of going back to the things themselves. This tension is particularly detectable in The Origin of Geometry (II). Thirdly I discuss the Tran’s solution to this riddle, namely the radicalisation of the materialistic stance discovered in the Husserl’s late writings towards a Marxist horizon. The genesis of the a priori forms of the antepredicative experience is derived from the evolution of species and from the development of human work. The dialectic of behaviour as practical interaction between organism and nature determines the emergence of meanings structuring the experience. The notion of intentionality is interpreted as result of an immanent negation, the aufhebung of any immediate determinations through the work of an emerging bodily-social intersubjectivity that in this way reaches the self-consciousness. The real movement, insofar as is sketched out and repressed at once, is sublated as intentional content. Transcendental subjectivity becomes an immanent subjectivisation of the object through praxis. This could lead to an alternative antireductionist ontologization of phenomenology despite a teleologism that risks to cage the dialectic in a too narrow path (III).
BIO: Adriano Lotito graduated in Philosophy (B.A) at the University of Bologna with a thesis entitled Phenomenology and Marxism in Tran Duc Thao (Supervisor Prof. Manlio Iofrida) and in Philosophy of the Contemporary World (M.A) at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University with a thesis entitled Criteria of Normativity in the Axel Honneth’s Critical Theory (Supervisor Prof. Roberto Mordacci). He is currently attending the Advanced Course in Critical Theory of Society at the Milano-Bicocca University. He is focusing, with the view to a future Ph.D., on the rethinking of the immanent critique specifically in connection with the work transformations.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features a presentation from Maria-Nefeli Panetsos, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.
ABSTRACT: When talking about Phenomenology we usually think about only the traditional studies of the subject’s perception of its surrounding phenomena. However, when turning the point of view towards the body, except the first steps done by Merleau-Ponty, Philosophy remains under some limitations of the orthological perception of reality. I found interesting the fact that in the history of Philosophy there is a clear absence towards the art of Dance, as the main corporeal - and for Hegel ‘primitive’ and ‘uncivilized’ - form of art which has no place in the fine art hierarchy. Looking for the reasons why this may have happened, I see that there always have been the fear of the body as a source of knowledge, as it has been always seen as unreliable filter of the human perception. However dance helps to see how the process of sensing and understanding one’s subjectivity and may enrich and change the perspective of one’s identity. I would like to merge the concept of the dancer with the phenomenological existential subject, as an example of conscious and aware subject that actively experiences its existence, transcendental self and its physicality into the intersubjective space where it lives. Through dance, borders and ‘merleaupontian’ fleshes can be managed in a conscious way, essentially focusing on one’s subjectivity and its relationship with time, space, other objects and subjects. As Prof. Shusterman already proposes in his Somaesthetics, the philosophical research can be amplified in the embodied experience of other corporeal activities that usually are not taken into consideration as explanatory for the human existence. An involved, inclusive phenomenological process, will definitely find further ways to sense and understand the aspects of the subject’s condition, as the self and identity are always related and influenced by the corporeal dimension of the human.
BIO: My name is Maria-Nefeli Panetsos, born in Madrid (Spain), student of the Italian School of Madrid, and recent graduate student of the faculty of Philosophy, Pedagogy and Psychology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where I specialised in Philosophy and my main fields of interest have been Phenomenology, Existentialism and Aesthetics. Since 2016 I started personal research focusing on the Identity of Dance and its Aesthetics, and later I continue finding connections with Philosophy of the Body and other applied phenomenological and existentialist perspective of Philosophy. I'm currently interested in continuing my research in Art History studies and Aesthetics in a postgraduate level.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Pablo Fernandez Velasco, Institut Jean Nicod. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: This paper provides a comparative phenomenological analysis of the navigational practices of Evenki reindeer herders in arctic Siberia and of the artistic dérives (drifting excercises) of the Situationist movement. This paper will build on an existing analysis of the phenomenology of disorientation (Fernandez 2020, which focused on the negative aspects of the phenomenon) and on ethnographic research among the Evenki natives of central Siberia. Evenki reindeer herders and hunters have unique navigation methods that result in a very special relationship to their environment. A central aspect of this relationship is the feeling of being ‘manakan’ (‘making your own way’ in Evenki language), a feeling of autonomy and independence. A study of Evenki navigational style and its relationship to manakan will serve to elucidate the workings behind the emergence of the positive aspects of spatial disorientation. Section 1 introduces the topic. Section 2 provides an overview of the phenomenology of spatial disorientation. In section 3, we will introduce the case of Evenki reindeer herders and hunters and discuss their navigational methods, using both our own ethnographic work and previously existing research. Section 4 will analyse the central features of the experience of manakan in Evenki culture and how it relates to the positive aspects of spatial disorientation. Section 5 will provide a conclusion and potential avenues for future research.
BIO: I am a doctoral researcher working at Institut Jean Nicod, an interdisciplinary research centre at the interface of philosophy and cognitive science. The focus of my work is on how space structures our experience of the world and of ourselves. The topic of my doctoral thesis is the phenomenology of spatial disorientation. Studying disorientation is studying how, through our bodies, culture and technology, we humans are connected to our environment, and what happens when this connection is weakened or severed.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features a presentation from Mary Coaten, Durham University.
ABSTRACT: My paper explores doctoral research on the therapeutic mechanisms of Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP) in an in-patient setting for acute adult psychiatry through the qualitative dynamics of movement and the symbolic and metaphoric processes present. Previous research has focussed on the efficacy of DMP in relation to psychosis spectrum disorders, but little on the mechanisms, especially the role of the moving body within phenomenological approaches. I drew on the phenomenological tradition through Heidegger and Jung, utilising similarities between the two to develop ideas about body movement, space and time. For Brooke (1988), Jung and Heidegger understood the body as the incarnation of psychological life and not as the meaning-less body of anatomy; they saw psyche and dasein as spatial, viewing distance and closeness as lived realities, and not merely in absolute time which they both argued is a limited abstraction from lived reality. “Jung’s method is primarily hermeneutic-phenomenological; the psyche is not “mind” or an inner realm more or less linked to the body, but is the embodied life world, and Jung’s descriptions of it - of its autonomy, spatiality and bodiliness, for instance – achieve ontological clarity when it is articulated as Dasein." (Brooke, 1988:ii). The results demonstrated an altered sense of space and time and a specific imbalance in engaging with the future and the past. The study revealed gender differences in the use of space and sense of self. Both men and women’s movement lacked structure, a lack compensated for through my movements. Participants expressed their sense of self differently by gender. The men engaged more with one another as a group and women focussed more on the individual bodily self. Symbolic and metaphoric communications indicated a relationship between an altered sense of space and time, and the movement dynamics present acted synchronistically with the symbols and metaphors.
BIO: I am a dance movement psychotherapist (DMP) with a special interest in psychosis and have recently completed my doctoral thesis at Durham University which explored the therapeutic mechanisms at play in the acute psychotic episode. For the past 15 years, I have delivered DMP groups within the acute inpatient mental health setting. My work is informed by a Jungian and phenomenological framework which highlights an embodied approach to psychopathology. I also work as a DMP within an outpatient psychological therapies team with a trauma focus.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features María Jimena Clavel Vázquez, University of Stirling and University of St Andrews. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: In what sense is perceptual experience situated? Embodied theories of perception might be good candidates to answer this question. However, most of these views have omitted the situated aspect of embodiment, i.e. the way perceptual experience is shaped by a body that is the concrete locus of our social, historical, economic and cultural situation. In this paper, I focus on sensorimotor enactivism (SMEn). I aim to show that this view can remedy this omission by paying closer attention to the idea that perceptual experience consists in situated embodied skills I begin by outlining the relevant aspects of SMEn, a theory that claims that perceptual experience is enacted by the interactions of an embodied agent with her environment (see Hurley 1998, O’Regan & Noë 2001, Noë 2004, O’Regan 2011). In section II, I argue that, although for SMEn perceptual experience is shaped by the body of the perceiver, the view fails to do justice to the situated aspect of embodiment. This aspect is reflected in perceptual experience’s lack of social and cultural neutrality. In section III, I articulate the lack of neutrality of the body by drawing on Iris Marion Young’s view of the gendered situated body (Young 1980). She claims that our social, cultural, economic, and political situation is embodied in that it is manifested in the way we relate to and inhabit our space, i.e. in our movements and comportment. In section IV, I argue that, if we accept with SMEn that perceptual experience is constituted by practical knowledge and consists in the execution of embodied skills, we should accept that these skills are also a manifestation of our situation. If perception is “something we do” (O’Regan and Noë 2001, p. 970), as the motto of SMEn goes, it is something we do as situated agents.
BIO: I am a PhD candidate at the St Andrews/Stirling Philosophy Graduate Programme. I work on Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Mind. I am particularly interested in embodied approaches to cognition and the way these can be informed by phenomenology. For my doctoral research, I have focused on the sensorimotor theory of perceptual experience and the notion of embodiment within this approach. I have also developed an embodied approach to imagination.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features a presentation written by Mary Fridley & Susan Massad, with Gwen Lowenheim presenting for Susan Massad, all from The East Side Institute, New York City.
ABSTRACT: As viewed through a biomedical lens – which remains the dominant way in which dementia is seen – Alzheimer’s and related dementias (ADRD) is seen primarily as a condition of loss of capabilities within an individual: of speech, of cognitive abilities, of physical capacities and, eventually, of life while research and treatment is directed toward cure of the individual. Dementia activists across the globe are now raising the question: Is the shame, stigma, and isolation that people with ADRD and their families experience in large part a result of this very narrow lenses through which dementia is understood? In this paper we will present on the Joy of Dementia (You’ve Got to Be Kiddin!) project, a playful, philosophical and conversational collective exploration of the dementia experience as an effort to introduce a different lens – a development lens – as a counter narrative that challenges the current “tragedy narrative” surrounding ADRD. Seen through a development lens, humans are no longer are viewed, not as discrete and isolated individuals but as relational beings, connected to one another in ways that allows us to grow with, rather than fear, uncertainty. In this view, a dementia diagnosis presents transformational opportunities not just for the individual diagnosed, but to everyone in the “dementia ensemble” – including people of all ages who fear growing older and losing cognitive abilities. The workshops, always experiential, often involve mixed groupings of family members, care givers, professionals and those diagnosed, introduces improvisational play and philosophical conversation as activities that support the discovery of new ways of relating, being together, listening and responding. Participants are supported to challenge deeply held assumptions about what we and others “know” about the dementia experience, and it is within this collaborative ensemble building activity that the joy that comes with creating a new performances of dementia is discovered.
BIOS:
Mary Fridley is pro-bono Director of Special Projects at the East Side Institute in NYC and an accomplished teacher and workshop leader. She practiced social therapy for 12 years and continues to use the social therapeutic approach as an Institute faculty member. Mary co-leads two popular workshop series, “The Joy of Dementia (You Gotta Be Kidding)” and “Laughing Matters” and was featured in a February 2019 Washington Post article, “Changing ‘the tragedy narrative’: Why a growing camp is promoting a more joyful approach to Alzheimer.” Mary is also a playwright and theater director and works as a non-profit fundraising consultant.
Susan Massad is a retired clinician and medical educator. A primary care physician she has researched and taught in the arena of doctor-patient communication and the social-cultural-biological dimensions of health and wellness. She is a faculty member at the The East Side Institute where she is the co-creator of the Joy of Dementia© workshops that she coleads all over the US with colleague, Mary Fridley.
Gwen Lowenheim is a learning design specialist and TESOL instructor. She is co-founder/co-director of The Snaps Project, an educational consulting firm. Gwen trains and supervises educators and social entrepreneurs around the world in a social therapeutic, performance-based learning approach that brings creativity and innovation into classrooms and community-based programs. Her programs introduce theatrical improvisation, philosophical exploration, remix and group play as part of developing collaborative teams, language learning and stress management.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Giuseppe Torre, University of Limerick, Ireland. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: With respect to digital technologies, noise is something that is at once both fought and sought. We may wish to minimise noise in communications but require it for encrypting the very content communicated. We may wish to minimise noise when recording sound but also want to use it to improve the fidelity of the recording process. The catch is that noise is both an abstract idea and a concrete thing that does not sit comfortably in relation to systems that are deterministic/probabilistic, such as digital technologies. This is a fact that computer scientists know well but that is systematically overlooked in order to safeguard and improve the functioning of digital technologies, such as digital instruments. Indeed beyond the plethora of different kinds of noises, the comparison between analogue and digital technologies highlights the existence of just two types of noise: one that is naturally occurring (noise) and one that is humanly constructed (pseudo-noise). Digital technologies operate by moving from noise to pseudo noise, in order to then 1) crystallise reality into mathematical constructs and 2) create realities from mathematical constructs. This makes the digital realm a type of technology different from any other, namely, one in which noise is fiercely fought and used for the digitisation process but then relentlessly sought, and always denied, within the digital realm. This observation points to at least two further implications: one is that noise may point to essential differences between analogue and digital technologies; the second is that the presence or absence of noise may lead to either crippled or diverse phenomenologies. To this extent, digital technology, rather than revealing by challenging (Heidegger), has more to do with enabling a psychotic stance towards reality - one in which reality has been made to conform to our mathematically constructed idea of it … and one which might be too much even for a phenomenologist to overcome. These arguments will be developed from the perspective of a digital art practitioner.
BIO: I am a lecturer in Digital Arts at the University of Limerick (Ireland). My research interest lies at the crossroads between digital art practices, open source technology/culture and philosophy. These interests respond to a questioning of the relationships between art and technology and that has so far led me to question under what forms and forces truly creative efforts may, or may not, arise.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast is back after a short break, and continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Joel Krueger, University of Exeter.
ABSTRACT: Despite increased interest in comparative philosophy within the past few decades — including particular interest in the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy — Tetsurō Watsuji has not received the attention he deserves. Watsuji was a broad-ranging and original thinker who developed important insights into culture, ethics, religion, embodiment, and the self. He was also a skilled phenomenologist. His rich analysis of embodiment, space, and intersubjectivity not only predates insights developed by phenomenologists such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty but also deepens and extends their analysis in productive ways. This talk has two objectives: first, to briefly introduce Watsuji’s phenomenology of aidagara (“betweenness”), including its novel analysis of embodiment, space, and intersubjectivity; second, to use aidagara to think through the dynamics of subjectivity and expression within the Internet-enabled “techno-social niches” found in everyday life. I argue that Watsuji develops a prescient analysis of embodiment and expression — centered around core notions of “subjective spatiality” and “spatial extendedness” — anticipating modern technologically-mediated forms of expression, connection, and engagement. More precisely, I show that instead of adopting a traditional phenomenological focus on face-to-face interaction, Watsuji instead argues that communication technologies — which now include Internet-enabled technologies and spaces — are expressive vehicles enabling new forms of emotional expression and co-regulated experiences that would be otherwise inaccessible without these technologies. For Watsuji, these expressive vehicles and spaces aren’t mere add-ons to the self and its capacities. Rather, they are progressively incorporated into the self, understood as “betweenness”. Accordingly, they should be seen as constitutive parts of our “subjective spatiality” — that is, part of the embodied self and the rich pathways of “spatial extendedness” that establish enduring interconnections with others. I consider some of Watsuji’s arguments and indicate how this view might productively impact several debates, including debates over our perceptual access to other minds.
BIO: Joel Krueger is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Exeter. He works primarily in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of cognitive science — with a particular focus on issues in 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognition, including emotions, social cognition, and psychopathology. He also works in comparative philosophy and philosophy of music.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Juan Toro, Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen. Toro’s co-authors are Erik Rietveld, Amsterdam University Medical Center; Department of Philosophy, University of Twente, Enschede; Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam; and Julian Kiverstein, Amsterdam Brain and Cognition; Amsterdam University Medical Center.
ABSTRACT: In the last 50 years, discussions of how to understand disability have been dominated by the medical and social models. According to the medical model, disability can be understood in terms of functional limitations of a disabled person’s body caused by a pathological condition, to be treated and cured through rehabilitation or normalization. In contrast, the social model claims that disability is not an individual physical condition, but is rather the outcome of oppressive conditions imposed by society on physically impaired people. Paradoxically, both models overlook the disabled person’s experience of the lived body, thus reducing the body of the disabled person to a physiological body. Based on a co-authored paper (by Juan Toro, Julian Kiverstein, and Erik Rietveld [‘The Ecological-Enactive Model of Disability: Why Disability Does Not Entail Pathological Embodiment’]) I introduce the Ecological-Enactive (EE) model of disability. The EE-model combines ideas from phenomenology, enactive cognitive science and ecological psychology with the aim of doing justice simultaneously to the lived experience of being disabled, and the physiological dimensions of disability. More specifically, we put the EE model to work to disentangle the concepts of disability and pathology. From an ecological-enactive perspective, we locate the difference between pathological and normal forms of embodiment in the person’s capacity to adapt to changes in the environment by establishing and following new norms. From a phenomenological perspective, we distinguish normal and pathological embodiment of disabled people in terms of the structure of the experience of I-can and I cannot. The I-cannot experienced by the non-pathologically disabled person can be understood as a local I-cannot, with a background of I-can: I-can do it in a different way, I-can ask for help, etc. This contrasts with the experience of I-cannot of the pathologically embodied person, which deeply pervades their being-in-the-world. To ensure that the discussion remains in contact with lived experience, we draw upon phenomenological interviews we have carried out with people with Cerebral Palsy.
BIOS:
Juan Toro: I’m a PhD student at the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, and a researcher at the Enactlab – an interdisciplinary team of researchers, artists, journalists and practitioners working on solutions for complex problems faced by minorities in society. In my research, I combine an empirical approach to physical disabilities – focusing on cerebral palsy – with insights from phenomenology, 4E cognition and ecological psychology.
Prof. dr. Erik Rietveld is Socrates Professor, Senior Researcher at the University of Amsterdam (AMC/Department of Philosophy/ILLC/Brain & Cognition) and a Founding Partner of RAAAF [Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances]. In 2013 his research project on skilled action titled “The Landscape of Affordances: Situating the Embodied Mind” was awarded with a NWO VIDI-grant for the development of his research group on skilled intentionality & situated expertise. Recently he received an ERC Starting Grant for a new philosophical project titled “Skilled Intentionality for ‘Higher’ Embodied Cognition: Joining Forces with a Field of Affordances in Flux”. His work as a Socrates Professor at the University of Twente focuses on humane technology: the philosophy of making and societal embedding of technology in the humanist tradition.
Julian Kiverstein is Assistant Professor of Neurophilosophy at the University of Amsterdam. He is currently writing a monograph for Palgrave Macmillan entitled The Significance of Phenomenology. He edited a comprehensive handbook for Routledge Taylor Francis on the philosophy of the social mind. He is associate editor of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences and was until recently Book Review Editor for the Journal of Consciousness Studies. Before his appointment at Amsterdam in 2011, Kiverstein was teaching fellow at Edinburgh University, where he played a lead role in developing and designing the Mind, Language and Embodied Cognition Masters Programme, of which he also became director.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Ellen Moysan, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: A musical performer plays or composes what is “heard in the mind.” I call this musical phenomenon: “inner song,” and I use a Husserlian framework to describe it as an object of phantasy. In the present paper, I will demonstrate how an accurate description of the inner song requires a rigorous praxis of phenomenology giving voice to actual performers coming from various backgrounds. The “inner song” is a musical phenomenon of phantasy in the sense that it is independent from the perception of a physical sound and constituted in consciousness by the imagination reshaping sensory-data (essentially sounds) in a totally new fashion. It can take two forms: a “pure phantasy object” (improvisation and composition), and a “hearing through seeing” (interpretation from a score); the difference between the two is the mode of involvement of perception. My method is to engage with phenomenology as a “praxis.” I go back to the experience of the inner song: (1) questioning my experience as a cellist, and (2) engaging in a dialogue with musicians from various traditions interviewing them about their practice. This approach provides a plurality of points of views and constitutes an “eidetic variation” that helps me to highlight the essential structures of the “inner song”. From this foundation I develop a description grounded in a Husserlian framework. Engaging with the inner song offers a unique perspective on the challenges of interdisciplinary phenomenology: first, it brings back to phenomenology as a “praxis” starting with the reduction and shaped by the object itself; second, it highlights the necessity to listen to a plurality of practitioners who have a first-hand experience of the object, here the musicians themselves; finally, it demonstrates how it is the object itself which brings together the phenomenologist and the practicing musician in a collaborative description of the lived-experience.
BIO: Ellen Moysan started her education in Philosophy at Paris-Sorbonne IV (France), before studying with the French and German Master Erasmus Mundus Europhilosophy at the Karl University (Czech Republic), Hosei University (Japan), and Wuppertal University (Germany). She is now a doctoral candidate at Duquesne University (USA). Over the last ten years, Ellen Moysan has researched the notion of “inner song,” interviewing more than fifty musicians from different horizons on that topic, and creating a digital archive where the collection of interviews is available in French, Italian, and English. Currently, she is working on her interviews and finishing her dissertation.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Bence Peter Marosan, Budapest Business School, Pazmany Peter Catholic University.
ABSTRACT: In my presentation, I will attempt to show how a phenomenologically consequent interpretation of narrative identity would lead to eco-ethical and eco-political consequences. In particular, I will try to show the outlines of an eco-socialist theory, which implies an egalitarian approach of all living beings, and which is motivated by a phenomenological understanding of narrative identity. My presentation consists of two main parts. In the first part, I would like to treat the relationship between freedom, responsibility and – narratively conceived – personal identity, from a phenomenological point of view. The main authors of this part will be Husserl, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Lévinas and László Tengelyi. For Husserl, the narrative aspect of personal identity was already an important topic. For Heidegger, our own decisions constitute our identity. But in my opinion, there is a decisive factor, which was marginal for Heidegger, in regard of our identity and freedom: the Other. The Other’s problem became central for Lévinas, and also for Ricoeur. László Tengelyi modified Ricoeur’s account of narrative identity on a decisive point: he draws the attention to the role of “events of fate”; events that change the course of our lives fundamentally. In the second part I would like to show the ethical and political implications of the first part. The way in which we treat in fact the Other shows the best, who we are in real. But the Other must not just be a human being; she or he can be a living being whatsoever. Here I would like to emphasize the eco-phenomenological motifs in Husserl (to this see also: Erazim Kohák); and I will try to show how such motifs lead to an egalitarian, eco-socialist view of everything which lives.
BIO: Bence Peter Marosan’s PhD Studies were on Philosophy and Phenomenology, and conducted at the institutes of Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary), University College Dublin (Ireland), Bergische Universität Wuppertal (Germany), Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, École Normale Supérieure, (France). His affiliations are now with the Budapest Business School, Pázmány Péter Catholic University. His more important publications include two monographies on Husserl (in Hungarian), and he has edited two volumes on Marx and on László Tengelyi (in Hungarian). His research interests are Phenomenology (Husserl in particular), Hermeneutics, Philosophy of Mind, Political Philosophy, Eco-ethics, Eco-politics.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Belinda Marshal, University of St. Andrews. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: Questions surrounding the nature of being and existence have been tackled by philosophers for centuries, however, in this paper I analyse how concepts explored by these philosophers translate into virtual environments, as explored within virtual reality technologies. To begin, I will discuss the concept of “realism” - in an attempt to argue for the case that virtual reality - although still technology - can actually be considered a form of reality in itself. In accepting that virtual reality is a form of reality - or at least, a convincing enough extension of reality, we can accept that many existential possibilities and freedoms can be explored within virtual realms. (See: Myeung-Sook (2001)) This then opens up the potential for discussion surrounding what kinds of experiences we could expect to have within virtual environments, how they compare to phenomenological discussion of experience within “real” environments - and how these still hold both philosophical, and real world significance. Phenomenological analysis of accounts of “being” in terms of technology are vastly unexplored, beyond the postphenomenological movement as written by the likes of Ihde and Verbeek - however, even within postphenomenology, this discussion rarely ventures into virtual reality technologies. This research is important due to the level of potential real world impact - which is something else I will further clarify; particularly, with the increased use of virtual reality technologies to treat people with severe disabilities, I believe that it is crucial to explore how virtual environments can best be used and designed, to enable the user to maximise their lived experiences within virtual reality, if it is not possible for them in the primary version of reality. This does not limit the impact of such research, however, as virtual reality is becoming an increasingly popular form of entertainment technology, it is critical that we aim to gain a well-rounded understanding of its potential impact. This level of research also expands beyond the phenomenological questions, but also gains strength from other areas of philosophy such as extended cognition; Clark and Chalmers’ original paper The Extended Mind (1998) has often been translated to suit modern day technology (such as the smartphone) - however, more recent research on extended cognition (and 4E cognition as a whole) has wide applicability to many forms of technology, yet is rarely explored within the context of computer-mediated reality. The cognitive links between technology and self, combined with the sensory and experiential links between virtual reality and self, can provide an excellent framework for further philosophical discussion on the phenomenology of virtuality.
BIO: I have a PhD in progress at the University of St Andrews as part of the SASP program, under supervision by Prof. Michael Wheeler and Dr. Kevin Scharp, project titled: ‘Virtual Reality and the Extended Mind’. Previously completed my MA thesis titled ‘The Question Concerning Virtual Reality’ for which I was awarded a Distinction. I have also presented my paper ‘Authenticity, Virtual Reality and AI’ at Cambridge University for the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, as well as in Nottingham for the British Personalist Forum; and my paper ‘Feminism and the Extended Mind’ at Cardiff University for the Feminism and Technology conference. I also have an upcoming chapter publication in an edited volume on Transhumanism, titled ‘Evolving the Natural-born Cyborg: Using Virtuality to Navigate the Posthuman’.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features D. R. Koukal, University of Detroit Mercy.
ABSTRACT: In this paper the author will report on an ongoing experiment: teaching graduate-level students of architecture how to use phenomenology as a technique of discovery to assist them in their design process. This experiment originated in directed readings that attempted to theoretically engage phenomenologically-informed “schools” of architecture, and over fifteen years has evolved into a small seminar-workshop that is focused on having students produce their own rigorous phenomenological analyses in the service of their various thesis projects. The paper will convey the challenges of grounding non-philosophers in the demanding literature of phenomenology and its place in modern thought, and then move on to outline the basic features of the course: exposure to the “orthodox” methodologies of phenomenology; highlighting examples of phenomenological analyses of place and space by philosophers and practicing architects; and an exploration of different ways of doing phenomenology collaboratively. However, most of the paper will be focused on the “practical” dimension of the course, where every member has a say in refining an adopted collaborative methodology to phenomenologically explore a different architectural “theme” every week, all of which are chosen by the class as a whole. These explorations have taken a variety of forms over the years, including peer-reviewed free writing, directed “free” writing, sketches, illustrations, word clouds, meaning-schematics, collaborative narration, and computer-generated eidetic imagery. In the end, the author will report on the course’s successes and failures, but will ultimately conclude that the biggest challenge to any “engaged” phenomenology is motivating others to “see” or intuit what phenomenology can reveal to them, and that the best way of doing this is giving them the tools to “do” phenomenology for themselves.
BIO: D.R. Koukal's research has centered on the phenomenological method and the problem of expression. They have published articles on Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre. They are interested in the actual practice of phenomenology, and have undertaken several investigations of the experience of media, lived space and the body.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Sadaf Soloukey, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) is a field of research currently experiencing unprecedented results in functional recovery of patients due to neurotechnological developments. As such, the number of patients with SCI receiving neural implants is expected to increase steadily. However, current literature seems to lack a parallel development focused on users’ experience in terms of implanted tool incorporation or embodiment of neurotechnological devices in general. As such, we ignore how interwoven neurotechnological efforts are with human experience, and how vital accurate considerations in this process are for treatment success. In a previous publication, I developed a theoretical framework forembodiment in neuro-engineering and defined three concepts that facilitate ‘transparency’: functionality, sensorimotor feedback and affective tolerance. Based on these concepts, I discuss practical guidelines for clinicians which can contribute to the actual success of embodiment: 1) The ‘Patient Preference Diagnosis’, which warms up the patient for the existential reorientation and 2) The ‘Patient Transparency Diagnosis‘ during and after implantation, which provides the patient with possibilities to fine-tune the level of incorporation. However, this attempt to capture the complexity of tool incorporation into a single theoretical framework might be inherently limited and calls for a move back from the bench to the actual bedside. In this paper, we present the results of a series of in-depth interviews with five SCI patients receiving temporary neural implants as part of a clinical trial. Based on our previously published embodied phenomenological framework, we questioned our patients on domains including 1) body image, 2) expectations of the neural implant, 3) their judgement on the possibility of incorporation of the device and 4) their ‘ideal’ implant. Interviews were performed both pre- and post-implantation, subjected to thematic analysis and compared against the backdrop of the previously mentioned theoretical framework based on embodied phenomenology as developed by group.
BIO: Sadaf Soloukey is a MD/PhD-Candidate in the departments of Neuroscience and Neurosurgery at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Sadaf holds two MSc-degrees (Neuroscience and Health Economics) and one MA-degree (Philosophy, cum Laude). Sadaf's research interests lie in neuro-technology and include neuromodulation for Spinal Cord Injury. Additionally, Sadaf works on identifying the phenomenological implications of neuro-technological interventions in the clinical domain.Sadaf’s applied philosophical work has so far received multiple awards, including the prestigious prof. Brouwer Prize awarded by the Dutch Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) to the best philosophical thesis of that academic year.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Michael Fitzgerald, Bruyère Research Institute. Fitzgerald’s co-authors are Esther Shoemaker, Simon Fraser University; Lisa Boucher, University of Ottawa; Claire Kendall, Bruyère Research Institute.
ABSTRACT: This paper draws on Husserl’s notions of epoché and phenomenological reduction to interpret patient engagement in research. The epoché suspends or bracket naturalistic assumptions about the existence of the world, so as to allow phenomenological inquiry to focus on meaning or significance. Phenomenological reduction to the life-world, in turn, functions to restore the significance of the concrete world of basic life, i.e., to allow the phenomenologist access to the structures of meaning that are the basis for all inquiry (Luft 2004). In particular, it suspends the assumptions of the positive sciences. Patient engagement in research is an approach that includes patients and caregivers as partners on the research team. Arguably, this approach has become the standard for a wide variety, if not all, types of health research, driven in part by funding agency imperatives. Studies of this approach have argued that the significance of and motivation for engaging patients can be understood in terms of three sets of values: “moral or normative (e.g., empowerment and rights), instrumental or substantive (e.g., improving research quality), and process (e.g., having to do with research conduct)” (Kendall et al. 2018). However, further investigation is needed into the impact of patient engagement in research, and in particular how it affects health researchers’ own understanding of their research activities, exploration of which has so far been limited (Staley 2015; 2017). This paper proposes a phenomenological approach, in which patient engagement is seen as a transformation of research. We suggest that patient engagement in research can function as an epoché or even a type of reduction, by challenging researchers’ assumptions about the process of research. As with the life-world reduction, this can be seen as a way of resituating health research in the life-world, so as to expand and deepen its meaning and significance.
BIOS:
Michael Fitzgerald, Research Associate, Bruyère Research Institute, Ottawa, Canada, is a social phenomenologist with expertise in the phenomenology of international development. He works on projects on patient engagement, intersectionality and social accountability.
Esther Shoemaker, Postdoctoral Fellow, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, and Affiliated Scientist, Bruyère Research Institute, is a medical sociologist and early career researcher with sex- and gender-based mixed methods expertise in health services delivery for marginalized populations.
Lisa Boucher, PhD candidate in Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Ottawa, has expertise in participatory research approaches and both quantitative and qualitative methods. Her projects focus on highly marginalized populations, especially people who use illicit drugs.
Claire Kendall, a primary care physician and Clinical Scientist, Bruyère Research Institute and Associate Professor, University of Ottawa, where she is also Assistant Dean, Social Accountability, has expertise in health services research, cohort and administrative data linkages, systematic reviews, participatory approaches, qualitative research and practice-based interventions, with strong links to policy makers in primary care of marginalized populations.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Lucienne Spencer, University of Bristol. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: Fricker coined the term ‘hermeneutical injustice’ to highlight gaps in the interpretive framework where experiences of marginalised groups ought to be. Fricker illustrates hermeneutical injustice primarily through the victims of sexual harassment prior to the 1960s: without the term ‘sexual harassment’ at their disposal, the victim was not only incapable of discussing sexual harassment but also lacked the hermeneutical resources to fully make sense of the experience themselves. Fricker identifies a primary harm in hermeneutical injustice, through which the victim is undermined as a ‘knower’, and a secondary harm, through which the victim encounters practical disadvantages such as being unable to report sexual harassment. The purpose of this talk is to draw out a further, phenomenological harm that is overlooked in the literature. For Merleau-Ponty, speech expression is a manner of employing one’s body to engage with the world. Prior to expression, there lingers nothing in the mind but a ‘vague fever’. Only upon expression does this ‘vague fever’ transform into meaningful communication. As a gesture, speech expression does not signify meaning; rather words are saturated with meaning through their expression. Merleau-Ponty emphasises the role of speech expression as fundamental to the activity of projecting oneself toward the world. Hermeneutical resources are created and sustained by those who belong to privileged groups, and as such are designed to express their privileged experiences. Armed with speech expression, the hermeneutically advantaged move through the world with a pre-reflective openness. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that hermeneutical injustice causes a disruption of the patterns of embodiment in marginalised subjects, who are unable to engage with the world in the same way as their privileged counterparts. As speech expression is a fundamental aspect of embodiment, I will show that hermeneutical injustice constitutes a breakdown of the body-world synthesis for marginalised subjects.
BIO: I’m a third-year SWW-DTP funded PhD student at the University of Bristol under the supervision of Havi Carel (and co-supervised by Lisa El Refaie of Cardiff University). My research spans the areas of phenomenology, epistemic injustice and the philosophy of illness. Through my thesis, I hope to develop an account of the experience of psychiatric illness through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of speech expression. Given my interest in widening participation, I have been involved in the ‘Insights into Philosophy’ scheme targeted at state schools across Bristol and am the Postgraduate Representative for the Society for Women in Philosophy UK.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Lewis Coyne, University of Exeter.
ABSTRACT: In recent years the phenomenological approach to bioethics has been rejuvenated and reformulated by, amongst others, the Swedish philosopher Fredrik Svenaeus. Building on the now-relatively mainstream phenomenological approach to health and illness, Svenaeus has sought to bring phenomenological insights to bear on the bioethical enterprise, with a view to critiquing and refining the ‘philosophical anthropology’ presupposed by the latter. In this talk I will offer a critical but sympathetic analysis of Svenaeus’ efforts, focusing on both his conception of the aims of phenomenological bioethics and the broadly Heideggerian methods he employs. Doing so reveals certain problems with both. I argue that the main aim of phenomenological bioethics as set out by Svenaeus needs to be reformulated, and that there are important oversights in his Heideggerian approach to reaching this end. I will conclude by arguing that to overcome the latter problem we should draw on the works of Max Scheler and Hans Jonas in future research.
BIO: I am an associate lecturer and honorary research fellow in philosophy at the University of Exeter, working at the intersection of existential phenomenology, practical ethics, and philosophical anthropology. My overarching interests are in the phenomena of life and death, and the ethics of technologically appropriating (human and non-human) nature. My publications on these topics include being co-editor of Moral Enhancement: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and author of Hans Jonas: Life, Technology and the Horizons of Responsibility (Bloomsbury, 2020).
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Margaret Steele, University College Cork. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: Dolezal and Lyons (2017) have argued that shame may be an ‘affective determinant of health.’ They include weight as a potential site of such shame, and they recommend further research including, “Explore shame associated with different health problems and in different settings.” (2017, 262) In this paper, I take up that invitation, describing how shame might be a determinant of health for fat/obese people, due to its effects on their constitution of their own bodies as sites of “I can.” Weight-based shame can make people reluctant to engage in physical activity.This reluctance is partly explained by a desire to avoid the acute shame associated with, for example, a derisive comment about one’s body. This fear of how others might respond to one’s body could itself have a negative effect on health by directly reducing one’s movement. However, I argue that there is also a deeper problem: Weight-based shame, I suggest, affects how people constitute themselves not just as objects but as subjects. When we move less as a result of weight-based shame, we lose strength, endurance and agility. I argue this diminished capacity is directly given in experience. The body itself feels stiffer, more easily fatigued. The body’s correlates, spaces and terrains, feel inaccesible, even hostile. The body comes to feel like a burden instead of a site of agency. Thus weight-based shame not only reduces a person’s movement; it can also reduce both their perceived and their actual ability to move. Iris Marion Young said women in a sexist society are physically handicapped. I make a similar claim about fat/obese people in a fatphobic society. It seems cruelly ironic that fat/obese people are shamed for moving too little in a society that handicaps them in their efforts to move.
BIO: Dr Margaret Steele is a lecturer in philosophy at University College Cork. Her research interests include philosophy and phenomenology of health, particularly in relation to fatness, fitness and food. Her work in this area draws not only on scholarly resources but also on her direct experience of living as a fat person.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Pablo Andreu, University of Zaragoza (Spain).
ABSTRACT: George Canguilhem has affirmed that pathology, far from being a state of abnormality, should be considered as another way of life (Canguilhem, 1978, p. 45). According to Canguilhem, being healthy is not the same as being “normal”, what he considers to be an inapplicable concept to biology, but normative, this is, making of a way of life a norm. If accepted, such consideration not only affects what we take to be “pathological”, it also questions what the nature of medical practice is, and what this praxis should be to start. Specifically, if illness is not something that bursts into existence and interrupts it, but rather a new mode of existence properly speaking, then what role, if any, does a patient play in the understanding we have of their illness, and what importance should be attributed to this role during the medical treatment. To this aim, an approach to pathology and medical praxis from a phenomenological point of view seems promising. Martin Heidegger’s notion of care (Sorge) and Paul Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity could explain the existential shift on a patient’s existence. But tracing illness as a continuity rather than an interruption could be problematic, questioning our very understanding of recovery. In other words, to what extent would a phenomenological approach to medical practice entail a methodological and epistemological differentiation between medically treating a patient and healing a person, and, more importantly, would this demarcation be constructive for the patient’s wellbeing to begin with? The task, hence, is double: on the one hand, to state the benefits phenomenology can bring to medicine; on the other, its plausibility. The following article aims to do so by following the personal account of a cancer fighter, evaluating it through the lens of Heidegger’s notion of care and Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity.
BIO: Pablo Andreu is a PhD Student at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Mainly focused on phenomenology, and specifically the phenomenology of death, Pablo Andreu has also approached analytic philosophy through the Master’s program offered by the University of Barcelona.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Caroline Greenwood Dower, University of Durham. The paper is co-authored with Benedict Smith, University of Durham. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: Anxiety is the most common mental disorder in primary care and higher education counselling settings. Observations from clinical psychotherapy suggest a shift in reporting towards “I have anxiety”, an object-related sensation, rather than “I feel anxious”, a subject-related sensation. In anxious states individuals are typically highly vigilant, attentive to and at times preoccupied with the external world. The physical symptoms of anxiety – breathlessness, increased heart rate – draw attention back to the inner experience of the body, but as with anxious thoughts, they are often reported as ‘intrusive’. In response to the increase in help-seeking students a programme of workshops entitled ‘Calm to the Core’ was developed within a higher education counselling setting, as an applied phenomenological therapeutic alternative to individual counselling sessions. Group facilitated workshops help participants to explore and share the lived experience of anxiety, through a series of movement and breath-based enquiries. Our interest is whether these workshops increase body awareness and specifically awareness of how the individual experiences and organises their contact with the world. A helpful way to understand the benefit of this approach is by utilizing Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment, particularly how an enhanced sense of embodied agency can help mitigate the effects of previously ‘intrusive’, passively-experienced, anxious symptoms. This paper addresses the practical application of phenomenology to common mental disorders for therapeutic benefit. Some modalities of psychotherapy have a rich tradition of employing phenomenological methods within a talking therapy. Here, movement is central to the approach, combined with an emphasis on the group verbal sharing of first-person lived experiences. Diagnoses of anxiety, particularly in young adults, are increasingly becoming part of how such people regard their identity. An increased understanding of anxiety is thus urgent. To this end this paper will present pilot research findings from the workshops and set-out areas for future research.
BIOS:
Caroline Dower is a psychotherapist and Head of the Counselling Service at Durham University. Caroline has a long-standing interest in the integration of body-based methods into talking therapies and is beginning a study of the experience and conceptualisation of student anxiety in the ecology of the university setting.
Dr Benedict Smith is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Durham University. His research interests include phenomenology, philosophy of psychiatry, Wittgenstein and Hume. Dr Smith’s research has focused on narratives of depression and the value of lived-experience in an interpersonal setting. His current research uses related phenomenological insights to address experiences of anxiety.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Joe Smeeton, University of Sheffield.
ABSTRACT: Social work theory often tears itself between sociological and psychological ways to understand the human condition and, as I will argue, is always therefore left missing important ways to think about what is happening for people. This paper will draw upon phenomenology to make the case that social work should focus first of all on the lived experience of the people who use its services and to prioritise the meanings they make of their experiences prior to applying external theoretical 'professional' meanings. Theorists such as Merleau-Ponty offer a theoretical framework that sees the human condition as embodied in the social world and therefore consisting of plural accounts of experience that don't easily lend themselves to oversimplified ontical descriptions of the social or psychological realms that claim to explain the commonalities of 'humanity'. Social work is therefore able to work within a more ethical mode of practice and Levinas adds a richness to current ethical frameworks to support a questioning about social work practice.
BIO: Joe Smeeton has practiced, taught and researched social work within the UK for the last 30 years. He has focused much of this work within child protection social work and with looked after children. He is particularly interested in the knowledge bases that inform social worker's decision-making and especially how the risk paradigm has impacted upon organisational and individual decisions. More recently Joe is exploring the use of phenomenology as a way of understanding and theorising about social work. Joe has taught at the Universities of Sheffield, Salford, East Anglia and Nottingham Trent. He has developed qualifying and post-qualifying programmes and has also acted as external examiner at a number of other programmes.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Maja Berseneva, Freie Universitaet Berlin. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: Being vulnerable is a conditio humana. This condition represents characteristics, key events and situations which compose the essentials of human existence. One definition of vulnerability is the general human capacity to being exposed. As such, it can make a subject a victim (when violence is inflicted), but it also represents the capability to being open to the world with its unpredictable events, and to others. Furthermore, vulnerability structures the subject’s experience of the world and makes transformation possible. The concepts of ‘limit situations’ (Jaspers) and ‘transformative events’ (Heidegger), are helpful for the understanding of how we experience ourselves as vulnerable. Encountering a transformative event as the current pandemic crisis, we are forced to realize that our safety and the foundations of our being can be instantly undone. Limit situations touch us in our core values, reminding us of the fragility of everyday life, relationships, and health. While it is possible to respond to vulnerability that shows in a limit situation through avoidance, denial, and rationalization, Jaspers advises to not hastily try to make it vanish. On the contrary, the demand and challenge lie in endurance of the unknown, of the ambiguity that this situation brings. I will argue with Butler’s critical claim that vulnerability can (and must!) be turned into strength, into a resource, since the experience of vulnerability and dependence can move us beyond and against the vocation of the paranoid victim. Acknowledging that I am vulnerable and enduring it brings a choice for encountering the other without violence: it means having space for showing consideration and attention for the other. The chance of self-improvement lies in vulnerability as permitted openness, and in waiver of protection. In compelling me to deal with my fears and vulnerabilities as part of who I am, lay the transforming power of vulnerability.
BIO: Maja Berseneva is a translator and language teacher, currently living and working in Athens, Greece. Currently graduate student of Philosophy at Freie Universitaet Berlin. Writing Master Thesis on the Vulnerable self and the ‘ethics of the welcome’ in Levinas’ work. Research interests: Philosophy of Mind, Affectivity, Self-experience, Empathy, Personhood, No-self doctrines, phenomenology, alterity, ethics of embodiment, Vulnerability and the human condition, intentionality, philosophy of medicine and mental health, nature of grief. politics in the feminine, philosophy of sexual difference, embodied female subjectivity, violence, feminist life.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Jan Halák and Petr Kříž as co-authors and co-presenters. Halák is from Palacky University Olomouc, Czech Republic, and Kříž is from Charles University, Prague, and Palacky University Olomouc, Czech Republic.
ABSTRACT: This paper clarifies the significance of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of the body for physiotherapeutic practice. Physiotherapists are trained to approach the functioning of the body from an objectivist perspective, but their therapeutic interaction with patients is not limited to an application of natural-scientific explanations. Analogically, they often perceive mechanistic models of bodily functioning as insufficient, yet they generally lack an appropriate theoretical framework to formalize and systematically describe their experience. We argue that physiotherapists’ practice well corresponds to Merleau-Ponty’s theorization of the body as the bearer of an original bodily intentionality and makes it possible to elaborate it further. On the one hand, the practice of physiotherapy corroborates Merleau-Ponty’s critical arguments against objectivist interpretations of the body. For example, norms of optimal corporeal functioning are highly individual and variable, and thus do not depend on generic physiological structures in a direct way; correspondingly, objectively measurable physical deviations rarely correspond to specific subjective difficulties; and similarly, a patient’s reflexive insight into his or her motor deficiencies does not necessarily produce significant motor improvements. Physiotherapeutic procedures can therefore be understood neither as an expert mechanical manipulation with a patient’s machine-like body nor as a process of instructing the patient’s consciousness to manipulate it in that way. On the other hand, physiotherapeutic practice can draw on Merleau-Ponty’s positive suggestion to understand motor disorders as modifications of bodily intentionality. Conceived in this way, physiotherapy approaches motor disorders as bodily mis-understandings or failures to optimally deal with motor requirements of a situation. Correspondingly, the therapeutical process itself becomes an inter-corporeal dialogue or bodily empathy. In the course of this process, a richer motor intentionality of the therapist takes up the patient’s limited, less adaptable, and more laborious intentionality, and guides it to discovering better ways of grasping a situation as meaningful through particular postures and movements.
BIOS:
Jan Halák, Ph.D., works as assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy, Palacky University Olomouc, Czech Republic. His scientific interests are in phenomenology, enactivism, and philosophy of embodiment. He has published several papers on Merleau-Ponty, with a special focus on Merleau-Ponty’s Collège de France period, his interpretation of the concept of body schema, and the corporeal infrastructure of higher cognitive processes. Jan Halák also published several translations of Merleau-Ponty’s works into Czech language (e.g. Resumés de cours). Dr. Halák is now working on a monograph on Merleau-Ponty’s ontology based on the concept of flesh.
Petr Kříž is a physiotherapist, doctoral student of philosophy at Charles University, Prague, and research associate at Palacky University Olomouc, Czech Republic. His thesis aims to develop a new theoretical framework for physiotherapy on the basis of a phenomenological interpretation of bodily intentionality. His scientific interests are in motor intentionality and its pathologies, differentiation of body schema, bodily empathy, and the expressivity of the body. Apart from several papers written in Czech, Petr Kříž has recently published an English paper on “Merleau-Ponty’s Discovery of the Pre-objective Body and Its Consequences for Body-Oriented Disciplines” (Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 2019).
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Miriam Ambrosino, New York University. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: In her essay, “The Difference of Feminist Phenomenology: The Case of Shame,” Bonnie Mann (2018) contends that feminist scholarship in all areas of philosophy is up against “an affective problem, not a cognitive one.” Mann calls attention to the “problem of reverence” that prevents philosophy—especially feminist phenomenology—from considering new methods of theorizing and interpreting. Following Mann's claims and Alia Al-Saji’s (2014) work on affective hesitation, I investigate how contemporary thinkers can attend to and thus reconfigure their affective commitments of reverence towards the white male canon in phenomenology. I argue that part of this project involves using one’s affects as a mode of critique. For phenomenology to open up to cross-disciplinary dialogue, it must recognize that critique is sufficient at the level of self reflection and transformation of habitual modes of feeling and perceiving. I read Aimé Césaire epic poem, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, as a case study that demonstrates my methodology of using affect in critical phenomenological practice. I explicate how the rhetoric of disgust in this poem can catalyze a critical and ethically responsive phenomenological reduction for myself, a white reader. I claim that this experience of disgust in reading resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) account of wonder, vis-à-vis Eugen Fink, as “perhaps the best formulation of the reduction,” a reflection that “reveals the world as strange and paradoxical.” Guiding this methodology is Louise Rosenblatt’s (1969) transactional theory of literary criticism, inspired by John Dewey’s pragmatism. Through my case study I clarify how this theory provides a framework for engaging phenomenology with lived aesthetic experience to facilitate transformative affective work on one’s affective commitments.
BIO: I am a masters student at NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. My individualized course of study examines affects-broadly including sentiments, feelings, sensations- as they are theorized across disciplines such as in philosophy and literature. I build from my undergraduate degree in philosophy at Fordham University in which I began studying philosophy of emotions and contemporary French philosophy. Though my central discipline is in philosophy, I develop my research on affect studies and critical phenomenology through my graduate coursework in literary criticism and critical race and gender theory.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Jamie Murphy, University College Cork, Ireland.
ABSTRACT: According to a widespread assumption in contemporary literature on the philosophy of emotions, it is possible for a subject to elicit anger for no reason (Nussbaum 2016, Huebner 2018, Cherry 2018, Callard 2018). This talk aims to reject this claim by arguing for the opposite idea: it is impossible for an agent to get angry for no reason.
The talk is organized in three parts. Part 1 gives a brief outline of how anger is viewed in contemporary literature, and presents the assumption that anger can occur for no reason. Part 2 rejects this claim: anger must come about from a reason. First, I distinguish between a reason and a cause for an emotion by showing that a reason can be either justified or unjustified, whereas a cause either exists or not. A cause will always become a justified reason for the angry subject. The reason has the potential to be unjustified when it is presented to the angry subject’s peers. I build on this by introducing warranted anger and vindicated anger. Warranted anger is anger which has a justified reason. Vindicated anger is anger which, if presented to the angry subject’s peers, would be seen as warranted anger. In part 3 I posit and explain the idea of “Vapid Anger”. Vapid Anger is anger the subject of which knows they shouldn’t feel, but feel it anyway. It is controlled by an agent’s mood and overall disposition to anger, thereby determining the likelihood they will get angry at something “vapid”. I introduce this concept as it is a response to potential attacks against my argument; it shows that one can still have a reason for being angry but are aware that, if their reason was presented to a group of their peers, would be seen as unjustified.
BIO: I attained my BA with a major in philosophy in 2016. I graduated with my MA in philosophy in 2018. My MA dissertation was focused on moral responsibility, specifically on compatibilist thought. Both of these degrees were attained in University College Cork (UCC). After 2 years away from academia I returned to begin my PhD in September 2019. My thesis is focused solely on anger as an emotion, in an attempt to give a full account of all types of anger.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Natalia Burakowska & Danielle Petherbridge. Dr. Petherbridge is Assistant Professor in the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin; and Burakowska is a PhD student in Philosophy at University College Dublin. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: Dementia is a complex disease that is most often framed in terms of diminished cognitive capacity or neurodegeneration, together with assumptions about the loss of personhood, memory and communication skills. As a consequence, forms of dementia assessment and care are often based on a cognitive account of personhood and framed in terms of cognitive and linguistic capacities. One of the central arguments of this paper is that such accounts of personhood are one-sided and neglect the important embodied dimensions of persons both as subjects in the world and in their interactions with others. More significantly, drawing specifically on phenomenology, the research constructs an embodied-cognitive account of dementia that offers new insights not only into the lived experience of persons with dementia but also alternative forms of care. The paper begins by examining the appropriateness of an account of empathy in encounter with persons with dementia before investigating the importance of dynamic engagement that can give rise to embodied and relational capabilities and forms of communication. This has significant ramifications for forms of interaction and care, as well as existing policies, medical attitudes and diagnosis of dementia. Our aim in this paper is to: (a) offer an embodied-cognitive approach to dementia drawing on a phenomenology; (b) provide an account of the lived experience of persons with dementia that in turn informs policy and care; (c) explore alternative forms of expressivity and personhood informed by a phenomenological approach. This research offers an important phenomenological alternative to current research on dementia with implications for the understanding of dementia, as well as diagnosis and methods of care.
BIOS:
Dr. Petherbridge is Assistant Professor in the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin and Deputy-Director of the UCD Centre for Ethics in Public Life. Previously Dr. Petherbridge was an IRC Marie-Curie fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York. Her primary research interests include the relation between perception, attention and affect; theories of intersubjectivity in phenomenology and social philosophy as well as embodied-cognitive approaches to illness. She is PI of a research project on embodied-cognitive accounts of dementia being undertaken in partnership with the Alzheimer Society of Ireland.
Natalia Burakowska is a PhD student in Philosophy at University College Dublin. She works in the areas of phenomenology, philosophy of mind and applied philosophy. Her doctoral work is focused on a phenomenological approach to dementia that conceptualizes it as both a cognitive and bodily condition, taking account of the lived experience of dementia, vulnerability and forms of ethical responsiveness and care.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast features presentations from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. In this episode we release one of our keynote talks, that of Professor Sophie Loidolt, who focuses upon phenomenological method in political and legal theory. Loidolt is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Practical Philosophy, Technische Universität Darmstadt / Technical University of Darmstadt.
ABSTRACT: The talk investigates phenomenology’s possibilities to describe, reflect and critically analyse political and legal orders. It presents a “toolbox” of methodological reflections, tools and topics, by relating to the classics of the tradition and to the emerging movement of “critical phenomenology,” as well as by touching upon current issues such as experiences of rightlessness, experiences in the digital lifeworld, and experiences of the public sphere. It is argued that phenomenology provides us with a dynamic methodological framework that emphasizes correlational, co-constitutional, and interrelational structures and thus pays attention to modes of givenness, the making and unmaking of “world,” and, thereby, the inter/subjective, affective, and bodily constitution of meaning. In the case of political and legal orders, questions of power, exclusion, and normativity are central issues. By looking at “best practice” models such as Hannah Arendt’s analyses, I will elaborate on an analytical tool and flexible framework I call “spaces of meaning,” which phenomenologists can use and modify as they go along. In the current debates on political and legal issues, I see the main task of phenomenology in reclaiming experience as world-building and world-opening, also in a normative sense, and in demonstrating how structures and orders are lived while they condition and form spaces of meaning. If we want to understand, criticize, act, or change something, this subjective and intersubjective perspective will remain indispensable.
BIO: Sophie Loidolt is professor of philosophy at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. She is a member of the “Young Academy” of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and “Recurrent Visiting Professor” at CFS Copenhagen. During her time and education at University of Vienna (PhD, habilitation, assistant professor), she was a visiting researcher at the Husserl-Archives of KU Leuven and at The New School for Social Research in New York. Her work centers on issues in the fields of phenomenology, political and legal philosophy, and ethics, as well as transcendental philosophy and philosophy of mind. Her books include Anspruch und Rechtfertigung. Eine Theorie des rechtlichen Denkens im Anschluss an die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls (Springer 2009), Einführung in die Rechtsphänomenologie (Mohr Siebeck 2010), and Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity (Routledge 2017).
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast features presentations from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. In this episode, however, we present an interview given by Professor Sophie Loidolt, one of our keynotes from the event. Loidolt is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Practical Philosophy, Technische Universität Darmstadt / Technical University of Darmstadt. The interview was recorded in August of this year, and first released to conference attendees. The interviewers are Jessie Stanier and Hannah Berry from the event team.
In the interview Loidolt talks about reading groups, armchair philosophy, music, film and all things phenomenology. In the next episode we will release her paper from the event, ‘Order, Experience, and Critique: The Phenomenological Method in Political and Legal Theory’.
BIOS:
Sophie Loidolt is professor of philosophy at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. She is a member of the “Young Academy” of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and “Recurrent Visiting Professor” at CFS Copenhagen. During her time and education at University of Vienna (PhD, habilitation, assistant professor), she was a visiting researcher at the Husserl-Archives of KU Leuven and at The New School for Social Research in New York. Her work centers on issues in the fields of phenomenology, political and legal philosophy, and ethics, as well as transcendental philosophy and philosophy of mind. Her books include Anspruch und Rechtfertigung. Eine Theorie des rechtlichen Denkens im Anschluss an die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls (Springer 2009), Einführung in die Rechtsphänomenologie (Mohr Siebeck 2010), and Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity (Routledge 2017).
Jessie Stanier is a PhD student at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. She takes an engaged approach to her transdisciplinary research on phenomenology, ageing, and older age, collaborating with publics affected by the lived realities of ageing and caring. In her PhD thesis, she aims to shed new light on normative determinants of ageing and how they affect lived experiences and possibilities for older people. She is co-supervised by Dr Robin Durie, Dr Felicity Thomas, and Prof Luna Dolezal. She completed her MA in Philosophy at KU Leuven, Belgium, in 2018.
Hannah Berry has recently completed her Ph.D. on a linguistic and phenomenological analysis of empathy. She has had a lectureship at Liverpool Hope University in Sociolinguistics and has taught at various institutions such as the University of Liverpool and Manchester Metropolitan University. She is now working in the adult education sector.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Welcome to the 100th episode of the BSP Podcast. To celebrate this milestone we have a specially recorded interview with Professor Shaun Gallagher (University of Memphis, USA, and University of Wollongong, Australia). Gallagher is interviewed by Jessica Stanier (Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter) and Hannah Berry (BSP Secretary).
“I’m really happy we’ve reached 100 episodes!” – writes Dr Matt Barnard, founder and editor of the BSP Podcast. “I started the podcast because I wanted to amplify the voice of our delegates at conferences. Phenomenology is an important movement in thought, challenging us to listen harder, and engage with the world and human experiences. As such, I’m delighted that Shaun Gallagher, who has done so much to advocate for phenomenology and communicate it clearly, agreed to be interviewed for this special episode. I’m also super grateful to Jessica Stanier and Hannah Berry. They came up with really interesting questions, leading to a unique and open discussion that I really enjoyed editing. I am sure our listeners will enjoy it too.”
BIOS:
Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis, USA, and Professorial Fellow at the School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia. His research is interdisciplinary and focuses on embodied cognition and the phenomenology of self, action, intention, and social interaction, He held the Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Fellowship (2012-18). He has been Honorary Professor at Tromsø University (Norway), Durham University (UK) and the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He has held visiting research positions at MRC: Centre for Cognition and Brain Sciences, Cambridge University; Ecole Normale Supériure, Lyon; CREA and Ecole Normale Supériure, Paris; Humboldt University, Berlin; Keeble College, Oxford University; and Sapienza - University of Rome. His publications include Action and Interaction (Oxford 2020); The Phenomenological Mind -3rd ed (Routledge 2020); Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Oxford 2017); The Neuro-phenomenology of Awe and Wonder (Palgrave Macmillan 2015); Phenomenology (Palgrave Macmillan 2012; 2nd ed in 2021); How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford 2005); Hermeneutics and Education (SUNY Press 1992); and as editor, the Oxford Handbook of the Self (2011); and co-editor The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition (2018). He is editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. His books and articles have been translated into 14 different languages, and have been cited more than 29,000 times (Google Scholar). He served as principle investigator on grants from the European Science Foundation, Marie Curie Actions, the National Science Foundation, the Templeton Foundation; and has been co-PI on awards from the Australian Research Council, Marie Curie, Humboldt Foundation, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).
Hannah Berry has recently completed her doctoral thesis on empathy from the University of Liverpool. The thesis is called ‘The Shoe Never Fits: a phenomenological revision of empathy and intersubjectivity’ and offers a critical analysis of phenomenological, psychological and biological descriptions of empathy and proposes a development to Husserl’s theory of analogising apprehension in order to describe an interpersonal experience that takes into account sociability as well as the subjective experience of self and other. Her interests are in psycho- and socio-linguistics, forensic linguistics, pragmatics, phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Hannah is the current secretary for the British Society for Phenomenology and is the lead tutor of the WEA’s North West refugee education programme.
Jessie Stanier is a PhD student at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. She takes an engaged approach to her study of phenomenology, ageing, and older age by collaborating with various people affected by the lived realities of ageing and caring. In her PhD thesis, she aims to shed new light on normative determinants of ageing and how they affect lived experiences and possibilities for older people. She co-hosted this year’s BSP conference online, and she is currently co-editing a Special Issue of Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology on ‘Pandemic Politics & Phenomenology’.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
To close the first series of releases of season five of our podcast, we continue with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Hannah Berry (University of Liverpool). Hannah was one of the organisers of the 2020 annual conference, serves as Secretary of the BSP, and will be back next week for our 100th episode of the BSP Podcast conducting a special interview to celebrate the milestone. Before that, here is Hannah telling us why ‘We Need to Talk About Ted’.
ABSTRACT: There is an increasing fascination with serial killers, morbid crime and the general macabre within popular culture and contemporary society. It has often been argued that our enjoyment of sad films; the act of slowing down when driving to view a crash site; looking at a dead animal in the park; listening to interviews with serial killers, and even; eating meat are “survivalist” tendencies, as well as a means of reinforcing pro-social values (Burkeman, 2012). We indulge these curiosities and watch highly rated television programs such as Making a Murderer, Unabomber, Mindhunter, Criminal Minds, The Fall, True Detective, etc. These fictional and non-fictional narratives examine the intricate details of the crime, the history, the criminal investigation and the prosecution of serial killers and are often supplemented with a clinical psychologist’s reflection of why the perpetrator acted in this way. Bonn claims that there appears to be an innate human tendency to identify or empathise with all things –whether good or bad –including serial killers (2014), and this may be why we are fascinated with them.
I will present a corpus analysis and critical discourse analysis of interviews with two serial killers: Ted Bundy (an American serial killer who kidnapped, raped and murdered women during the 1970s) and Ted Kaczynski (also known as the Unabomber: an American domestic terrorist and anarchist who killed 3 people in the late 1970s and 80s). I will analyse the linguistics devices the criminals used when: referring to the victims; the use of agency in descriptions of the crimes, and; present a phenomenological description that aids my linguistic analysis in order to track the awareness of the embodied other and the level of consciousness of the others’ subjectivity throughout the interviews. I will include a social commentary on how the criminals were presented to the public and how the language used to describe them shaped the popular conception of “serial killer”.
BIO: Hannah Berry has recently completed her doctoral thesis on empathy from the University of Liverpool. The thesis is called 'The Shoe Never Fits: a phenomenological revision of empathy and intersubjectivity' and offers a critical analysis of phenomenological, psychological and biological descriptions of empathy and proposes a development to Husserl's theory of analogising apprehension in order to describe an interpersonal experience that takes into account sociability as well as the subjective experience of self and other. Her interests are in psycho- and socio-linguistics, forensic linguistics, pragmatics, phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Hannah is the current secretary for the British Society for Phenomenology and is the lead tutor of the WEA's North West refugee education programme.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
To begin to close the first series of releases of season five of our podcast, we continue with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Nicole Miglio (San Raffaele University) and Jessica Stanier (Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter). Jessie was one of the organisers of the 2020 annual conference, set the theme of ‘Engaged Phenomenology’, and will be back next week for our 100th episode of the BSP Podcast conducting a special interview to celebrate the milestone. Before that, here are Jessie and Nicole exploring ‘Painful experience and constitution of the intersubjective self’.
ABSTRACT: Pain is ordinary and integral to our experiential topography; a ‘background texture’ of pain characterises our whole lives. I flinch away from a hot pan as it brushes against my arm at the stove. I absent-mindedly rub my shoulder, relieving the dull ache from sitting at my desk too long. If we consider these routine and mundane ways in which pain features in everyday experience, it becomes clear that - far from presenting only through unusual and excruciating events - pain is familiar and, in many ways, vital for navigating the world. Pain draws our attention to our bodies as they pertain to our surroundings. And while everyday pain is often a far cry from the overwhelming agony of extreme injury, it is nonetheless recognisable as pain across these various contexts.
Pain relief and treatment is a huge global pharmaceutical industry, based on a medical conception of pain as a set of quantifiable and calculable conditions in a physiological body. This notion of pain fails to account for social and political contexts which constitute subjects in pain, as they are alternately marginalised, disbelieved, prioritised, or cared for; the status of their painful experience garners significance in this relational intersubjective context.
By taking a critical-phenomenological approach, this paper seeks to critique and further reductionistic conceptions of pain by better accounting for the complex contextual and intersubjective variation of painful experiences. We articulate how painful experience involves several phenomenological levels – from the hyletic to the intersubjective – differentially affected by the subject’s social, political, and cultural situation. We suggest that this critical-phenomenological account might be integrated into lifeworld-based approaches to care and treatment of pain, through social and political engagement, as well as raising some critical points of investigation for phenomenology in itself.
This presentation is based on a book chapter due to be published soon in Phenomenology of Bioethics and Technoethics; ed. S. Ferrarello (Springer).
BIOS:
Nicole Miglio is a PhD Student at San Raffaele University (Milan). She’s carrying her doctoral research in several institutions, in the U.S. (George Washington University and The University of San Francisco), in the UK (University of Exeter), and in Israel (University of Haifa). Her background is in theoretical philosophy and aesthetics, but she is working especially in the field of Feminist phenomenology. She is currently writing her PhD dissertation, which is exploring the many philosophical facets of the gestating subjectivity, considering both the classical accounts (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Beauvoir) and the contemporary ways to think the experiential complexity of the gestational relationship. She is co-supervised by Prof. Chiara Cappelletto (Aesthetics), prof. Francesca de Vecchi (Phenomenology and Social ontology), and Prof. Marjolein Oele (Contemporary European Philosophy).
Jessie Stanier is a PhD student at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. She takes an engaged approach to her study of phenomenology, ageing, and older age by collaborating with various people affected by the lived realities of ageing and caring. In her PhD thesis, she aims to shed new light on normative determinants of ageing and how they affect lived experiences and possibilities for older people. She co-hosted this year’s BSP conference online, and she is currently co-editing a Special Issue of Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology on ‘Pandemic Politics & Phenomenology’.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Filipa Melo Lopes, from the Philosophy Department of the University of Edinburgh. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: At the end of 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s short story, Cat Person, went viral. Published at the height of the #MeToo movement, it depicted a ‘toxic date’ and a disturbing sexual encounter between Margot, a college student, and Robert, an older man she meets at work. The story was widely viewed as a relatable denunciation of women’s powerlessness and routine victimization. In this paper, I push against this common reading. I suggest that it fails to capture the disturbing and ‘skin-crawling’ quality of the story because it fails to engage with its rich phenomenological description. I propose an alternative feminist interpretation of Cat Person through the lens of Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism. For Beauvoir, narcissism is a particular form of alienation that consists in making oneself both the subject and the ultimate project of one’s life. Framing Margot as a modern-day narcissist casts her as engaging, not in subtly coerced, undesired sex, but rather in sex that is desired in a tragically alienated way. I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism is an important tool for feminists today –well beyond the interpretation of Cat Person. It presses us to see systematic subordination not just as something done to women, but also as something women do to themselves. This in turn highlights the neglected role of self-transformation as a key aspect of feminist political resistance.
BIO: Filipa Melo Lopes is a Lecturer in Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy, in 2019, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests include Social Theory, Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy of Disability and Philosophy of Sexuality.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Kata Dóra Kiss, University of Pécs, Hungary.
ABSTRACT: Intersubjectivity had become one of the key concepts for the relational school of psychoanalysis. Although for most psy-sciences the importance of relations in the constitution of the self is out of the debate, there is much less consensus on how decisive this relation is. Furthermore, the question of intersubjectivity in psychology drives us to one of the ultimate question of the psychology of the present: human beings are more biologically determined, than socially or vice versa? Nowadays, natural scientific discourse is the mainstream scientific frame for western psy-sciences, although, there has never been one coherent and fully consensual one in psychology. This frame prefers biological explanations over the socio-cultural account. The fundamental unit of examination in this approach is the individuality and its implicit assumption is that the psychic structure is a closed system where mental processes are taking place. Western clinical practices mainly rely on this paradigm, as it could produce a testable and comprehensive empirical framework. This framework, however, implicitly formulate a generalized and normative ideal. In cognitive sciences or universal diagnostic systems, there is an implicit notion on how our cognition or psyche has to function. It raises the risk of normalization, in which therapy is a tool for the modification of the patient’s self to approach a “neurotypical” ideal. However, the notion of normality is a protean category that is culturally determined and very changeable in time and space. The presentation would like to argues that those therapeutic forms that are based on the intersubjectivitist approach could easier avoid the menace of normalization. These concepts are prioritized the complex cultural, social and family matrix in which human experiences are formed. It implies that our self, traits, and attitudes are unfolding through our connections and bonds from early childhood. The relational school of psychoanalysis does not accept the myth of the isolated mind, but it emphasizes our embeddedness in the web of social relations. Budapest School, British object-relations theory, intersubjective psychoanalysis or relational psychoanalysis are assuming that psychotherapy is first and foremost an interpersonal event between two people. In the field of therapy, the analysand’s psychic structure could never be independent of its objects, in this case, from the therapist. This intersubjective relation is the central element of the healing process. It assumes that psychological events are never just a function of inner structures and forces but are always derivate of interaction with others. Consequently, therapeutic space is also an open-ended plane of transactions. Transference and counter-transference, occur in the therapy, create a dialectical field where past emotions and traumas are re-enacted and embodied in the two-person context. Memories from the past, specific associations cannot spring automatically but because of the presence of the other person. This phenomenological approach would be helpful for professionals to understand in-depth the importance of embodied emotions that could only raise by the physical contact. The two main topics of the presentation are the connection between the phenomenological intersubjectivity and the relational approaches of psychoanalysis and the importance of intersubjectivist approaches in psychological healing.
BIO: I am a second-year student of the Theoretical Psychoanalysis Ph.D. program at the University of Pécs, Hungary. My doctoral research focuses on the importance of intersubjective relations in the field of psychological therapy. By this, I would like to point out that a more humanistic approach, that intersubjectivity could offer, could help professionals to avoid the process of normalization and the reproduction of social imbalances through psychological treatment. Before my Ph.D., I completed my Masters in Philosophy and Critical Gender Studies at the Central European University in Budapest. These fields help me to see this question not only from an insider, psychological approach but from a more critical and social scientific perspective.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Rachel Elliott, assistant professor of Philosophy at Brandon University. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.
ABSTRACT: Is sharing time what underpins the experience of belonging to a higher-order unity or group? In this paper, I consider the extent to which music produces collective belonging using Alfred Schütz’s idea of a tuning-in relationship among participants in a musical event. I claim that Schütz’s Husserlian account of that relationship relies too much on the idea of active synthesis, whereas the notion can be better articulated using Merleau-Ponty's conception of time as transition synthesis, derived from his idea of the habit body. This Merleau-Pontian version of the tuning-in relationship, however, foregrounds questions about musical genre, particularly in the distinction between improvised and non-improvised musics, in constituting the tuning-in relationship characteristic of what Schütz calls a ‘we’ experience. By examining this transition-synthesis in more depth, we see that it is through the projecting of compatible futures, perceived gesturally in one another, that any sort of ‘tuning-in’ relationship can occur. This raises the question about the ability of musics whose futures are distinctly unspecified, such as improvised musics, to produce the shared experience of time that underlies this variety of ‘we’ experience.
BIO: Rachel Elliott is currently an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Brandon University in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada. Her research focus is the phenomenology of groups at the level of embodiment with a special interest in temporality. Her current research centers on music, particularly improvised music, as an entry point for understanding the nature of co-perception. Her future research will address questions of temporality in relation to neurodiversity, seeking to map out the limits and possibilities of group consolidation when taking neurodiversity into account.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Francesca Brencio who was one of three speakers (along with Prisca Bauer and Valeria Bizzari and Francesca Brencio) on the preconstituted panel “Engaging phenomenology in the neurosciences”. Bauer and Bizzari’s presentations feature in episodes #92 and #93 of the BSP Podcast respectively. Brencio, from the University of Seville, concludes this triad of papers.
ABSTRACT: In the history of neurosciences, phenomenology arrived pretty late as a method able to enhance the understanding of neurological conditions. While psychiatry and psychology recognised the contribution of the phenomenological method at the beginning of XX century, other branches of neurosciences (neurology, neuropsychology, etc.) are still not including this approach, affirming that the investigation of the brain’s neuronal states can be understood only through third-person perspectives and that the subject’s experience is not necessary in order to understand clinical conditions and psychopathological phenomena, since memory, behaviour, perception and consciousness can be explained through a purely biological approach. This paper aims to propose a paradigm shift and to challenge neurosciences to bridge the gap between brain and experience. This contribution is articulated in two parts: in the first one, I will briefly rebuild the origin of this methodological gap in order to show how the implications of this approach affect contemporary understanding and treatment of neurological conditions and neurodiversity. Techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and Electroencephalogram (EEG) measure brain activity in response to sensorimotor, cognitive, affective or social stimuli or tasks, and many have tried to find brain correlates of neuropsychological conditions. However, recent findings show that causes or risks of mental disorders may operate at many levels, including genetic and neural elements of course, but also individual, family and social environments, that can be grouped under the item “experience”. In the second part, I will propose how to bridge the gap with an interpretative hypothesis aimed to show how the brain is part of a more complex system of elements in which human being is situated, involved and embedded. The 4E approach, as the most recent result of phenomenological adjustment to neurosciences, and the systemic approach stress the need of understanding the mental life of people and their life circumstances in a non-reductionist view. We will see how there is a bidirectional way to understand the link between brain and experience: mental disorders cannot be reduced only to brain dysfunctions and brain disorders cannot be caused by abnormal mental experience.
BIO: Francesca Brencio is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Seville, Convener and Instructor at the Pheno-Lab, a theoretical laboratory on Philosophy and Mental Health at the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine at the University Hospital in Freiburg and Member of The Phenomenology and Mental Health Network, The Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice in Health and Social Care, Catherine’s College, University of Oxford (UK). Her field of research is mainly related to Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Philosophy of Psychiatry and Philosophy of religion.
This presentation is part of a preconstituted panel with Prisca Bauer, Valeria Bizzari, and Francesca Brencio. “Engaging phenomenology in the neurosciences”: Before becoming a subject of study in philosophy classes, phenomenology is the method that underpins all of science. Husserl conceived phenomenology as an a priori science of essences, but it has developed through other important authors during the beginning and first half of XX century (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012; Moran, 2000; Zahavi, 2003). Engaging phenomenology in the contemporary scenario means embracing the legacy of the classics and also exploring its potential for different fields of knowledge, such as politics, public space, health. Phenomenology is a methodical effort to describe the basic structures inherent to conscious experience, such as embodiment, spatiality, temporality, intentionality, intersubjectivity, and to analyse their possible deviations and derailments (Fuchs, 2002). In recent years phenomenological approaches contributed to psychiatry and psychopathology by providing novel theoretical frameworks (Sass, Parnas, & Zahavi, 2011) and defining the subjective essence of experience more clearly. The aim of this panel is to explore how the phenomenological method can contribute to neurosciences through three different areas of research: to bridge the gap between the brain and lived experience allowing to understand mental disorders as not merely reducible to brain dysfunctions and brain disorders as consequence of abnormal mental experience; to offer a multidisciplinary account of autism, linking the role of the body and intercorporeality with recent findings in philosophy of neuroscience under the predictive brain hypothesis; and to improve care in people with epilepsy by implementing the neurophenomenological paradigm through systematic interviews, which allow people with epilepsy to recognise subjective seizure “warning signs”. The aim of the panel is to present findings already recognised by the scientific and academic community, and to go a step further by showing the necessity of a paradigm shift capable of improving the understanding and treatment of neurological conditions and neurodiversity.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of the BSP Podcast features Valeria Bizzari from the Clinic University of Heidelberg, Department of Psychiatry. The presentation is from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. Bizzari was one of three speakers (along with Prisca Bauer and Francesca Brencio) on the preconstituted panel “Engaging phenomenology in the neurosciences”. Bauer’s presentation can be found in episode #92, and Brencio’s presentation will be released next week. In this episode, Bizzari talks on ‘A multidisciplinary analysis of autism’.
ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to offer a multidisciplinary account of autism, linking the role of the body and intercorporeality with recent findings in philosophy of neuroscience under the predictive brain hypothesis. Firstly, I will show some coherences between the predictive engagement hypothesis and the phenomenological approach (with a particular emphasis on the notions of motor intentionality and habit body). Within the three approaches to predictive model (predictive coding, predictive processing and predictive engagement), in fact, for predictive engagement, active inference is more action than inference; it’s an enactive adjustment, a loop that also navigates through the body and environment and forms a whole (Gallagher and Allan 2016: 9). This seems to be coherent with the phenomenological account, according to which cognition is dynamically incorporated and located in the environment. In fact, the living body seems to entertain a dialogical and enactive relationship with the surrounding context, as well as with neural circuits actively responding to external stimuli. Accordingly, in the second part I will analyze the HIPPEA (High, Inflexible Precision of Predictions Errors in Autism) theory on autism and I will show how, phenomenologically speaking, this theory argues for an impairment of the habit body. In this view, autism itself seems to be a complex disorder which needs an interdisciplinary analysis that considers it: (1) A neurobiological disturbance (the mechanisms which seem to be responsible for HIPPEA are a deficient neural mechanism for precision and a deficient meta-learning system); (2) An intercorporeal deficit; (3) A lack of motor ability and an impairment of the attitude of being engaged with the world. Predictive engagement approach can integrate phenomenology in a mutually informed manner, enabling a description of the subject not as an “I think” but as an “I move”.
BIO: Valeria Bizzari is a Thyssen postdoctoral researcher at the Clinic University of Heidelberg, section Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy. Her research involves intersubjective disorders, with a special focus on autism spectrum disorder and Asperger’s syndrome.
This presentation is part of a preconstituted panel with Prisca Bauer, Valeria Bizzari, and Francesca Brencio. “Engaging phenomenology in the neurosciences”: Before becoming a subject of study in philosophy classes, phenomenology is the method that underpins all of science. Husserl conceived phenomenology as an a priori science of essences, but it has developed through other important authors during the beginning and first half of XX century (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012; Moran, 2000; Zahavi, 2003). Engaging phenomenology in the contemporary scenario means embracing the legacy of the classics and also exploring its potential for different fields of knowledge, such as politics, public space, health. Phenomenology is a methodical effort to describe the basic structures inherent to conscious experience, such as embodiment, spatiality, temporality, intentionality, intersubjectivity, and to analyse their possible deviations and derailments (Fuchs, 2002). In recent years phenomenological approaches contributed to psychiatry and psychopathology by providing novel theoretical frameworks (Sass, Parnas, & Zahavi, 2011) and defining the subjective essence of experience more clearly. The aim of this panel is to explore how the phenomenological method can contribute to neurosciences through three different areas of research: to bridge the gap between the brain and lived experience allowing to understand mental disorders as not merely reducible to brain dysfunctions and brain disorders as consequence of abnormal mental experience; to offer a multidisciplinary account of autism, linking the role of the body and intercorporeality with recent findings in philosophy of neuroscience under the predictive brain hypothesis; and to improve care in people with epilepsy by implementing the neurophenomenological paradigm through systematic interviews, which allow people with epilepsy to recognise subjective seizure “warning signs”. The aim of the panel is to present findings already recognised by the scientific and academic community, and to go a step further by showing the necessity of a paradigm shift capable of improving the understanding and treatment of neurological conditions and neurodiversity.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast continues with a panel presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Prisca Bauer who was one of three speakers (along with Valeria Bizzari and Francesca Brencio) on the preconstituted panel “Engaging phenomenology in the neurosciences”. Bizzari and Brencio’s presentations will be released in the next two episodes of the BSP Podcast. To begin, here is Bauer from the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy University Medical Center, Freiburg Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg.
ABSTRACT: The burden of neurological conditions is enormous and steadily increasing. When including stroke, neurological conditions are the main cause of disability-adjusted life-years. Modern medicine is based on a strict division between body and mind. As a consequence, neurological conditions are reduced to conditions of the brain, yet they have a profound impact on the experience of people affected by them. Phenomenological accounts are not routinely considered in the diagnostic or therapeutic processes in neurology. I will show the potential of using a systematic phenomenological approach to improve care in people with neurological conditions by taking epilepsy as an example. The main symptom of epilepsy, a condition affecting 1% of the population, is unpredictable seizures, which severely impact people’s lives. Our hypothesis is that through systematic interviews, people with epilepsy can learn to recognise subjective seizure “warning signs”. The recognition of these may help people to increase their safety around seizures, and to regain a sense of control over their unpredictability. I will present preliminary data from phenomenological interviews with people with epilepsy, and explorative analyses of the neural correlates of these subjective seizure “warning signs”. The combination of phenomenological and neural data has the potential to help to improve data-based seizure prediction algorhythms. This study is the first clinical implementation of the neurophenomenological paradigm first proposed by Francisco Varela. It shows how phenomenological and biological data can be used complementarily, and have the potential to greatly advance our understanding and management of neurological conditions, bridging the gap between the brain and experience.
BIO: Prisca Bauer is a physician (M.D) and scientist (PhD) at the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy of the University Medical Center Freiburg. Her main research interests are in neurological conditions, especially epilepsy, and in combining phenomenological and biological approaches.
This presentation is part of a preconstituted panel with Prisca Bauer, Valeria Bizzari, and Francesca Brencio. “Engaging phenomenology in the neurosciences”: Before becoming a subject of study in philosophy classes, phenomenology is the method that underpins all of science. Husserl conceived phenomenology as an a priori science of essences, but it has developed through other important authors during the beginning and first half of XX century (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012; Moran, 2000; Zahavi, 2003). Engaging phenomenology in the contemporary scenario means embracing the legacy of the classics and also exploring its potential for different fields of knowledge, such as politics, public space, health. Phenomenology is a methodical effort to describe the basic structures inherent to conscious experience, such as embodiment, spatiality, temporality, intentionality, intersubjectivity, and to analyse their possible deviations and derailments (Fuchs, 2002). In recent years phenomenological approaches contributed to psychiatry and psychopathology by providing novel theoretical frameworks (Sass, Parnas, & Zahavi, 2011) and defining the subjective essence of experience more clearly. The aim of this panel is to explore how the phenomenological method can contribute to neurosciences through three different areas of research: to bridge the gap between the brain and lived experience allowing to understand mental disorders as not merely reducible to brain dysfunctions and brain disorders as consequence of abnormal mental experience; to offer a multidisciplinary account of autism, linking the role of the body and intercorporeality with recent findings in philosophy of neuroscience under the predictive brain hypothesis; and to improve care in people with epilepsy by implementing the neurophenomenological paradigm through systematic interviews, which allow people with epilepsy to recognise subjective seizure “warning signs”. The aim of the panel is to present findings already recognised by the scientific and academic community, and to go a step further by showing the necessity of a paradigm shift capable of improving the understanding and treatment of neurological conditions and neurodiversity.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season five of our podcast features presentations from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. In this episode we release one of our keynote talks, that of Professor Dan Zahavi. Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy, University of Copenhagen, Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford, and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research (CFS).
ABSTRACT: At its core, phenomenology is a philosophical endeavour. Given its distinctly philosophical nature, one might reasonably wonder whether it can offer anything of value to positive science. Can it at all inform empirical work? There can, however, be no doubt about the answer to these questions. For more than a century, phenomenology has provided crucial inputs to a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, including psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Within the last few decades, phenomenology has also been an important source of inspiration, not only for theoretical debates within qualitative research but also for ongoing research within the cognitive sciences. But what is the best way to practice, use and apply phenomenology in a non‐philosophical context? How deeply rooted in phenomenological philosophy must the empirical research be in order to qualify as phenomenological? How many of the core commitments of phenomenology must it accept? In my talk, I will discuss and assess some different answers to these questions.
BIO: Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy at University of Copenhagen and University of Oxford, and director of the Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen. In addition to a number of scholarly works on the phenomenology of Husserl, Zahavi has mainly written on the nature of selfhood, self-consciousness, intersubjectivity, and social cognition. His most important publications include Self-awareness and Alterity (1999), Husserl’s Phenomenology (2003), Subjectivity and Selfhood (2005), The Phenomenological Mind (together with Shaun Gallagher) (2008/2012), Self and Other (2014), Husserl’s Legacy (2017), and Phenomenology: The Basics (2019). Zahavi also serves as the co-editor in chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Welcome back to the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast. Season five features presentations from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. We begin, however, with an interview given by Professor Luna Dolezal, the host of the event. Dolezal is associate professor in Philosophy and Medical Humanities in the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. The interview was recorded in August of this year, and first released to conference attendees. The interviewers are Jessie Stanier and Hannah Berry from the event team.
In the interview Dolezal talks about what the theme of ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ means to her, as well as how she got into phenomenology and her research interests, her love of yoga, and how phenomenology can inform activism. Performance artist Marina Abramović also gets a look in.
BIOS:
Professor Luna Dolezal is associate professor in philosophy and medical humanities, the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter. Her research is primarily in the areas of applied phenomenology, philosophy of embodiment, philosophy of medicine and medical humanities; and is driven by an interest in understanding lived experience and embodiment, and how these intersect with, are co-determined by, the socio-political and technological frameworks in which we are enmeshed. Her publications include the books New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment (with C. Fischer); Body / Self / Other: the Phenomenology of Social Encounters (with D. Petherbridge); and The Body and Shame Phenomenology, Feminism, and the Socially Shaped Body.
Jessie Stanier is a PhD student at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. She takes an engaged approach to her transdisciplinary research on phenomenology, ageing, and older age, collaborating with publics affected by the lived realities of ageing and caring. In her PhD thesis, she aims to shed new light on normative determinants of ageing and how they affect lived experiences and possibilities for older people. She is co-supervised by Dr Robin Durie, Dr Felicity Thomas, and Prof Luna Dolezal. She completed her MA in Philosophy at KU Leuven, Belgium, in 2018.
Hannah Berry has recently completed her Ph.D. on a linguistic and phenomenological analysis of empathy. She has had a lectureship at Liverpool Hope University in Sociolinguistics and has taught at various institutions such as the University of Liverpool and Manchester Metropolitan University. She is now working in the adult education sector.
This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season Four of British Society for Phenomenology Podcast concludes with one of the keynotes from our 2019 Annual Conference. Keith Crome is Principal Lecturer in Philosophy, and Education Lead for the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University; as well as the BSP Impact Director.
ABSTRACT: While schooling is a serious business, and education requires discipline, we are often told by educationalists, and also by our students, to make learning fun. There is an obvious extrinsic justification for doing this. As John Dewey noted a century ago in Democracy and Education (1916), experience has shown that allowing pupils to play makes going to school a joy — or at least provides relief from the tedium and strain of regular school work — and management less of a burden. Nevertheless, the link between education and play, familiar to us all (who hasn’t learnt by playing?), is fundamental. The aim of this talk is to explore this connection and its implications for a radical conception of education. I will begin with the contention that the originary co-belonging of play and education has been obscured by the rise of homo faber and the animal laborans, and the attendant overpowering of homo ludens. I will argue that a failure to recognise this vitiates Dewey’s celebrated pragmatist account of education. I will attempt to suggest that it is possible to think beyond the horizon of Dewey’s work by following Eugen Fink in conceiving the phenomenon of play as a mode of activity irreducible to either praxis and poiesis. Such a conception permits us to return to and rethink the originary correspondence between education and play as it was recognised by the Ancient Greeks.
BIO: Dr Keith Crome is Principal Lecturer in Philosophy and Education Lead for the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. He served as President of the British Society for Phenomenology from 2014 - 2018, and is currently a member of the editorial collective of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology and Impact Director for the society. He has published widely on 20th century French Philosophy and he is the author of Lyotard and Greek Thought (Palgrave, 2004) and co-editor of The Lyotard Reader and Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2006). His current research focuses on the history of character. He is working with the Cooperative College on a project examining the role that character plays in ideas and practices of cooperation.
The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season four of the BSP Podcast continues with a paper from Hannah Berry, University of Liverpool. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: When considering and reflecting on language, do we empathise with the interlocutor by simulating thoughts, feelings and actions? Do we project ourselves into the narrator’s shoes via simulation? Does this, then, create a boundary between the listener’s understanding, the person’s actual experience and their communication of the experience?
This paper will steer away from traditional literary-linguistic themes of stylistic analysis and will approach interdisciplinary narratives from phenomenological descriptions of experience and empathy. Lay understanding of the term ‘empathy’ suggests that you “put yourself in someone else’s shoes” when considering another person’s experience. However, no-one else’s “shoes” fit in the same way and this creates a border between narratives. The traditional approach to empathy in narrative is an analytic simulation theory. An alternative to this approach, meanwhile, is Gallagher’s ‘empathy informed by narrative practice’ (2012). I argue that this theory is also problematic, and propose another alternative.
I reject the concept of empathy as a fundamental part of human experience. Rather, understanding someone else’s experience involves an understanding that another person experiences in the same way that I do, that a ‘self’ has consciousness of an object. This description arises from the phenomenological reduction, but we need to be aware that anything other than this description is context, and so cannot be experienced by anyone else. Consequently, narratives are simultaneously borderless (as everyone fundamentally experiences in the same way), and with borders (that experience is isolating and cannot be shared in its entirety with anyone else through communication, regardless of context). To understand a narrative is to negotiate this dichotomy. I will apply a phenomenological understanding of interpersonal experience onto a narrative from a recent court case in order to argue the instability of the lay understanding of empathy as well as the debatable application in a judicial context.
BIO: Hannah has recently submitted her Ph.D. thesis ‘The shoe never fits: a phenomenological rejection of the lay concept of empathy’ and is currently working on interdisciplinary applications of phenomenological methodology and lectures in the English department at the University of Liverpool.
The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
The BSP Podcast turns to a paper from Francesca Brencio, University of Seville, Spain. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: Phenomenology has recently contributed to illuminate medicine and in setting up different theoretical frameworks. The scope of applying phenomenology to healthcare is not to select symptoms in view of a nosographical diagnosis, rather is to recover the underlying characteristic modification that keeps the manifold of phenomena meaningfully interconnected in the life-world of the person.
This contribution intends to show how the phenomenological method applied to psychiatry implies a new understanding of psychopathological phenomena, conceived as a coherent way of being in the world, and its peculiarities lie in recovering the underlying characteristic modification that keeps the manifold of phenomena meaningfully interconnected in the life-world of the person, in describing and understanding the inner experience of a human being, of its suffering and also the limitation of its freedom. In doing so, what is required is a radical move away from an “objective” body-orientated psychiatry which is grounded on the idea of fixing something broken instead of understanding why existence itself can collapse and loose its meanings. Advances in philosophy and neuroscience have suggested that mental symptoms are not ‘things’, rather they have a wider, deeper, personal, and cultural sense and a fluidity that may not be reduced to the taxonomy used in relation to the organic dimensions of disorders. Patient’s existence (as well as clinicians’ one) is embodied (physically) and embedded (socially and culturally) and psychopathological phenomena are specific ways of this embodiment and embeddedness. This means that we cannot simply classify them as something that happen to an objective body, a purely physiological condition that is explainable entirely in causal or mechanistic terms.
A phenomenologically-informed psychiatry can “fill the gap” between clinical meanings and existential ones and can overcome evidence-based approaches by finding a common language in which words can show relations and not merely signify objects.
BIO: Francesca Brencio (PhD) is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Seville, and Member of the Phenomenology and Mental Health Network at the St Catherine’s College (University of Oxford). Her field of research is mainly related to Heidegger Studies, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy of Psychiatry and Philosophy of Religion. She has published in Italian, English, German and Spanish on a wide range of topics, in several collaborative book projects and philosophical and medical journals. She is one of the invited contributors to the The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology (OUP, 2019).
The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season four of the BSP Podcast continues with a paper from William Large, University of Gloucestershire. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: This paper offers a broad historical analysis of atheism and a new conceptual definition. It describes three kinds of atheism: atheism of being, atheism of the idea, and atheism of the word. The first is an atheism of a metaphysical order and science; the second an atheism of morality; and the third an atheism of the community and the word. Each atheism comes in an historical sequence but are conceptually distinct. In terms of the traditional divisions of philosophy, the first atheism is ontology, the second is ethical, and the third is aesthetic and political. This historical sequence is not a necessary one, but contingent, and because each atheism is conceptually distinct, they can emerge at any time. Cutting across this horizontal historical series of atheism, is a vertical distinction between essence and existence. Theism responds to atheism through the passion of religion which sets the next form in motion. When, philosophy says, ‘God is being’, religion responds, ‘God is a hidden’. If philosophy replies, ‘God is an idea’, then religion responds again, ‘faith is the passion of a life’. Only in the last form is the dialogue between philosophy and religion reversed. Religion says, ‘faith is the word’, but philosophy responds, ‘the word is spoken by no-one’. The last atheism has a political consequence. What binds a community without a word?
BIO: William Large is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham. He is the author of Maurice Blanchot [co-authored] (Routledge, 2001), Ethics and the Ambiguity of Writing: Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot (Clinamen, 2005), Heidegger’s Being and Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), Levinas ’Totality and Infinity: A Reader’s Guide (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), and numerous articles in continental philosophy. He was president of the British Society of Phenomenology from 2010-14.
The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Our podcast turns to a paper from Pablo Andreu, University of Zaragoza, Spain, and University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland.. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: The following paper aims to open the reader to a comprehension of death from a phenomenological and hermeneutical point of view. Set against the background work of Max Scheler and Martini Heidegger’s analysis of the phenomenon, we adopt Paul Louis Landsberg’s interpretation of death as an “ontological infidelity”. Such definition of death deals with a fundamental and original predisposition to believe, which we recognize as faith. This faith, which stand as a complete openness to the other, is an essential constituent of human existence, without which we cannot understand Heidegger’s Angst. As such, we postulate that this faith is ontologically prior to Heidegger’s anxiety. As Landsberg says, “the anguish of death, and not only the pain of dying, would be incomprehensible of the fundamental structure of our being did not include the existential postulate of something beyond” (Landsberg, 2009, p. 25). We defend that by the braking of the connections entangled through this essential openness, the person is striped from the meaning of her existence and therefore thrown to a state of dead. This implies that there is no possible understanding of the phenomenon of death without a comprehension of our relation with and to the other. As a result, first, we aim to give a specific reading on the phenomenon of death, that is not to be confused with our mortal condition – so in Scheler and Heidegger – and, second, shed some light unto the actual medical debate concerning the state of being of patients in situations that cannot be clearly determined neither as alive nor dead.
BIO: Pablo Ilian Toso Andreu is a PhD Student at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, currently staying at University College Dublin (UCD) in Ireland. Mainly focused on phenomenology, and specifically the phenomenology of death, Mr. Andreu has also approached analytic philosophy through the Master’s program offered by the University of Barcelona.
The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Our podcast turns to a paper from Marco Di Feo, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University of Milan. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: All people, to the extent that they wish, have the right to be fully integrated into the social world in which they live, regardless of their institutional status (citizen, immigrant, refugee, etc.). The integration is a very complex process, which includes at least three essential levels of the social life: the community one, that is, the level of interpersonal bonds (i.e. sentimental, friendship, etc.); the territorial one, that is, the level of social interactions (i.e those that depend on a social role, or a profession, etc.); and the political one, that is, the possibility of taking part in the collective political life (expressing opinions, voting, etc.). The phenomenological analysis of the essential forms of social interaction shows the peculiarity of each different level of integration. The crucial point on which I intend to pay attention is the following: each democratic country that welcomes an immigrant must create the conditions for her/his fully successful social integration. The hospitality of the immigrants is intrinsically connected to the duty of making them members of the society, at all three levels of the social life. I specifically intend to deal the theme of family reunifications within this conceptual horizon. Since family ties are the central nucleus of the community weaving, and since every person has the right to live in relation to her own reference community context, then the family reunification must be considered an inalienable right of every person who is welcomed in a new country. This right cannot be subordinated to any other type of evaluation, of economic, bureaucratic or political nature, because it is a human right. Only by guaranteeing a family context of belonging, institutions can avoid situations of social degradation, which are linked to conditions of loneliness and social isolation.
BIO: I was born in Milan, Italy, 46 years ago. Philosophy has always been my passion, but before dedicating myself to it, I felt the need to grow. I worked in a bank; then I changed radically my life, going to work in a social farm. Ten years ago I moved to Switzerland to work as social worker. During these years I achieved my degree with a thesis on the collective subjects from a phenomenological perspective. Actually I am working with young refugees and ending my second year of PhD. In my life path work and study are linked and grow together.
The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season four of the BSP Podcast continues with a paper from Botsa Katara, Durham University. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: The term “super-crip” can be construed as a misleading twist on the derogatory term crippled. The latter signifies the dire condition of human frailty, limitations of embodiment, and a life without possibilities, while the latter is emblematic of overcoming those limitations to such a preposterous extent that not only demonises, and annihilates the experience of living with physical disabilities but also heralds an insidious discourse of superlative athletic vigour, and prowess. This paper aims to demonstrate that to reduce the body into a functional machinery which might be repaired and augmented is to disavow the intricate mechanisms of the body-mind connect that are orientated towards intentionality, affectivity, attunement, proprioception, and kinesthesis. Under the theoretical lens of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, Gallagher’s How the Body Shapes the Mind, and Carel’s Phenomenology of Illness, this paper shall analyse of the depiction of physical impairments in literary fiction, and memoirs. Following Carel’s conception of “epistemic injustice” it shall delineate the exigent need to incorporate felt experiences of disability in the wider cultural domain, thereby promulgating an informed and empathetic approach towards disability that adheres neither to the derogatory conception of the crippled nor the superhuman creation of the super-crip.
BIO: My name is Botsa Katara, second year PhD in English literature and Medical Humanities, from Durham University. My research focuses on the depiction of impaired movement in the literary works Beckett, Coetzee, and Kelmann. I am also looking at graphic memoirs, and life writings of amputees, and prosthetics that serve as counter narratives to the contemporary culture of the ‘super-crip’. I hold a Master’s degree in Modernity and Literature from the University of Edinburgh where my thesis focussed on identity conflict, desire, and domination in cancer patients. I have worked as a trainee at a prosthesis centre in New Delhi, India, where my work centered on closely observing young amputee rehabilitation.
The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Our podcast turns to a paper from Pablo Fernandez Velasco, Institut Jean Nicod, Département d’études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL; and University College London. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: The present paper explores the phenomenology of disorientation and its relationship with self-consciousness. Section 1 discusses previous literature on the links between self-location and self-consciousness and proposes a distinction between minimal self-location (which requires only an ego-centric frame of reference) and integrated self-location (which requires the integration of egocentric and allocentric frames of reference). The double aim of the paper is, on the one hand, to use this distinction (between minimal and integrated self-location) to deepen our understanding of spatial disorientation and, on the other, to use the phenomenology of disorientation to elucidate the role that self-location plays in shaping self-consciousness. Section 2 starts by looking at the experience of being “turned around”, which is a common experience of disorientation, and then expands to disorientation episodes related to the other two egocentric axes: experiences of being “left-right reversed”, and of being “turned upside-down”. This leads to the conclusion that integrated self-location is transmodal and depends on all three egocentric axes, and that disorientation destabilizes this integrated self-location. Section 3 explores a corpus of reports of disorientation episodes and highlights four key characteristics of these experiences (anxiety, vulnerability, confusion and diminishment) and their links to self-consciousness, focusing on the transformations in both the lived body and the experience of space. This phenomenological analysis reveals that during disorientation, the body-space shrinks, and the horizon of experience becomes more uncertain, leading to anxiety and a feeling of unfamiliarity. The central thesis of this paper is that during disorientation a destabilization of integrated self-location results in a diminished form of self-consciousness. Section 4 concludes with a summary of the key points of the paper and points to future directions of research.
BIO: The central aim of my current research is to explore the varieties and different dimensions of disorientation from the subjective side, in order to produce a characterisation of the phenomenon that is compatible with both empirical data and data about the subjective experience of disorientation, and to use disorientation as a vantage point to understand some of the complexities of spatial cognition and of the human mind at large.
The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season four of the BSP Podcast continues with a paper from Andreas Sandner, Department of Philosophy at University of Koblenz-Landau. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: It is widely held in analytic philosophy of mind and cognition that olfactory perception – first and foremost – represents odours if it represents anything at all. Despite some controversies on the very nature of those odours we encounter in olfactory perceptual experience, the vast majority of today’s philosophers hold that the intentional objects of olfactory perception are the odorous emanations of so-called source objects – ordinary concrete things. So, broadly speaking, most discussants account for some version of the principle of ‘olfactory austerity’: When we smell we perceive nothing but odours, and never do we (directly) smell particular objects. After depicting the main reasons for adopting such a view especially within a chiefly representationalist framework, I will examine one of the alleged benefits a bit more carefully. Namely I will address the anti-visuocentricism in austere theories of olfactory objects. It has been argued frequently that the view of olfactory austerity reveals our visuocentric biases and guides us to overcome them in theorising perception. In short, the idea goes pretty much as follows: Those who think that we could smell ordinary objects in olfactory experience just like we can see these objects in visual experience simply disregard the missing aspects of objecthood in what is really smelled there, particularly the missing spatial structure. To attribute such aspects to pure olfactory experience then would mean to fall for the supremacy of vision and to only infer the particular source object by the smelled odour from memory or recollection. The main goal of my talk will come down to contrasting the so reproached visuocentricism of a source-object-theory of olfactory objects with the visuocentricism within the view of olfactory austerity itself, as it is still at work at the very core of this approach in that the criteria of ‘objecthood’ are obviously stipulated by means of the ordinary objects in visual perception. What is at stake in this comparison is to extrapolate visuocentricism as a crucial structure of perceptual consciousness – at least for the sighted – and hence accounting for the supremacy of vision as a fact instead of a fallacious bias.
BIO: From 2007 to 2015 I studied philosophy, sociology and communication science at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. I received a bachelor's degree in 2011 with a thesis on the theory of causes in Plato's Phaedo and a master's degree in 2015 with a thesis on Kant's criticism of Berkeley's immaterialism. Since 2016 I have been a research assistant at the Institute of Philosophy in Landau where I hold seminars and am writing a dissertation on the phenomenology of olfactory perception. In this context, I also organized a small international conference on perception and the senses in continental and analytic philosophy last year.
The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
The BSP Podcast turns to a paper from Matteo Valdarchi, who has studied philosophy at the Pontificial Gregorian University and at the University of Roma Tre. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: Since his early stages, the young Heidegger embraced with fervour the Husserlian phenomenological method (at least the one contained in the Logische Untersuchungen), although he immediately kept his distance from it, introducing a new way of doing phenomenology, independent and more fundamental. Not surprisingly, the phenomenological project that arises from his early works is called «Ursprungswissenschaft». But where can we find the seeds of this “science”? Usually, those can be identified in the course of the Kriegsontsemester (1919). The aim of this paper is to show that the very beginning of this project is, instead, in his post-doctoral dissertation, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus. The Habilitationsschrift unfolds a movement that starts from the exclusion of the Aristotelian-scholastics “metaphysics” from the question of categories (namely, of being), in favour of the immanence of the subjectivity in the judgement. With this first movement, the meaning of ‘being’ is radically transformed, changing from “being that actually exists” to “being that’s valid” [gilt] of the copula. The second movement (or counter-move) shows the intentional disposition of the logical setting, enlightening the material principle that determines logical forms: the categories of meaning that weave the sphere of language. It is at this level that the young Heidegger, although adopting the teaching of the IV research, already allows the origin of the logic to emerge from a more fundamental field, that is language, in which ‘being’ neither it’s a “is” nor it is valid, but it means. However here the language isn’t entangled in the theoretical (“circular” in 1919) subjectivity’s tangles, but it opens the way to a new understanding of the subjectivity, of the «historischer Geist». In conclusion, Heidegger’s original appropriation of the phenomenological method lies in understanding of the essence of language, as field of the subjectivity’s historically living movement.
BIO: Matteo Valdarchi studied philosophy at the Pontificial Gregorian University (until 2016) and at the University of Roma Tre (until 2018). His research area includes phenomenology and hermeneutics, particularly Heidegger's thinking. He has taken part in two national conferences, at the 62° and at the 63° Convegno di Ricerca Filosofica organized by Centro Studi Filosofici di Gallarate.
The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season four of the BSP Podcast continues with a paper from Katherine Burn, Manchester Metropolitan University. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: Contemporary British fiction is situated within a moment of flux, ‘made from a different fabric and holds a different elasticity’ (Boxall, 2013). Recent advancements in shame studies address the philosophical turn towards a phenomenological understanding of the emotion as ‘everyday life feels increasingly uncanny’ (Hinton and Willemsen, 2018). The intersection between shame and contemporary fiction connects within the nascent field of metamodernism in which we can identify ‘a structure of feeling that emerges from, and reacts to, the postmodern’ (Van den Akker and Vermeulen, 2017). We are living in shameless times wherein it is possible to feel a second-hand shame towards those whose politics shamelessly exploit us as subjects of late capitalism, impacting our impression of everyday life and reconstructing our sense of the authentic. Yet, this space of the shame of shamelessness has largely remained ‘invisible’ (Weiss, 2018) within contemporary literary studies even though our actions ‘inevitably reverberate beyond ourselves affecting not only others but also the larger society in which we live’ (Weiss, 2018). To fully understand this ontological position, we must utilise Heidegger’s fundamental ontology to reorient our understanding of the everyday nature of autonomous shame and its representation within Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Eley Williams’ Attrib. Reflecting on Rudi Visker’s claim that, ‘shame can thus be seen to occupy a structurally similar place – a topos – to anxiety in Heidegger’s ontology’ (Visker, 2004), this paper seeks to explore a Heideggerian notion of shame as disclosive mechanism between ‘unowned existence’ (Stolorow, 2011) and authentic individuation. Twenty-first century British fiction thus reveals the reconstructive force within moments of self-evaluation accompanying autonomous shame as radical witnesses against the shameless composition of the contemporary moment, fortifying the alignment between phenomenology and literary theory.
BIO: Katherine Burn is in the second year of her AHRC funded PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on the intersection between shame and metamodernism, utilising traditional phenomenology to investigate the reconstructive force of shame in terms of form and periodisation of the novel. Katherine has continuously presented as part of the AHRC Metamodernism network and has recently been appointed postgraduate representative of the national English Shared Futures conference due to take place in 2020.
The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Welcome back to the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast. Season four now continues with recordings from our 2019 Annual Conference. To kick off, here is a recording of one of our keynotes, Dylan Trigg, FWF Lise Meitner Senior Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna
ABSTRACT: In this talk, I attempt a phenomenological analysis of childbirth as a strange event using Merleau-Ponty’s concept of anonymity. The concept of anonymity in Merleau-Ponty refers to how our bodily existence is constituted by a Nature outside of ourselves. Such a formulation allows him to explain how perception is both general and singular in the same measure, how temporality can be contemporaneous and immemorial, and how the body is both one’s own while at the same time marking a prehistory that is never entirely my own. My point of departure for thinking through the issue of birth and anonymity begins from the conviction that Merleau-Ponty’s account of anonymity tends to privilege themes of integrity and synthesis while neglecting how anonymity can serve as a threat or rupture to the unity of selfhood, especially in the context of limit-experiences, not least childbirth. I contend that the concept of anonymity helps us to understand how childbirth is an irreducibly strange event. This is evident in at least two claims that tend to populate accounts of childbirth. First, the strangeness accompanying the sense of leaving one’s body behind, or, otherwise letting the body do its own thing. Second, the sense of strangeness accompanying the first encounter with the baby upon successful delivery. I take both of these aspects of childbirth seriously, treating them here phenomenologically as being instructive not only of uniqueness of childbirth but also telling us something important about bodily life more generally, especially in terms of who the subject of perceptual life, and thus childbirth, is.
BIO: Dr Dylan Trigg is an FWF Lise Meitner Senior Fellow at University of Vienna, Department of Philosophy. He has previously held research and teaching positions at the University of Memphis, University College Dublin, and Husserl Archives, École Normale Supérieure. He earned is PhD at the University of Sussex (2009), MA at the University of Sussex (2005), and BA at the University of London, Birkbeck College (2004). Trigg is the author of several books, including: Topophobia: a Phenomenology of Anxiety (2016); The Thing: a Phenomenology of Horror (2014); and The Memory of Place: a Phenomenology of the Uncanny (2012). With Dorothée Legrand, he is co-editor of Unconsciousness Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis (2017). His research concerns phenomenology and existentialism; philosophies of subjectivity and embodiment; aesthetics and philosophies of art; and philosophies of space and place.
The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/
You can check out our forthcoming events here:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Here is the final of our recordings from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’. The paper comes from Prabhsharanbir Singh (University of British Columbia & University of the Fraser Valley).
ABSTRACT: “Dear Bill,” Edward Said once said to William Spanos, “you’re a good critic, but why do you weaken your originative criticism by Heideggerianizing it?” And Spanos responded, “Edward, I think you’re a good critic, too, but why do you limit possibilities by not attending to Heidegger’s destructive ontology?” This exchange shows that an Auseinandersetzung between Heidegger’s thinking and colonialism is still waiting to happen. This paper will be a modest step toward such confrontation. Auseinandersetzung as an onto-poetic confrontation with the other is not reducible to mere conflict. It is an originary strife with roots in Heraclitus’ thinking of polemos, the source for the origin of “history”. Colonialism, understood in Heideggerian terms, is a progressive ‘darkening of the earth’ by modern technology. The essence of this technology is Enframing, which converts everything that exists into standing-reserve, a resource waiting to be exploited. The conversion of Eastern spiritualities into New Age mysticism is one example of this process. Heidegger understood the planetary domination of modern technology in the form of Western imperialism as an ontological event in the History of Being. Consequently, he also understood the futility of programmatic responses to such an event. Everything that is programmable remains within the realm of calculative reason, the driving force behind modern technology. Perhaps that is why, in his later writings, especially the Contributions and the Black Notebooks, Heidegger constructs a philosophical theology, which dwells upon the Other Beginning and the Last God. I argue that Heidegger’s philosophical-theological project failed because he was oblivious toward other beginnings, beginnings lying outside the pale of ‘Western Humankind,’ he was so (obsessively) concerned with. He writes in the Black Notebooks, “Our thinking does not need to be “international” or even European; but it must indeed be Western and metaphysical if it is to fathom more originarily the ground of our history out of the essence of beyng, i.e., out of the “between” of the encounter of gods and humans.” His insistence that the Other Beginning must arise from within the West is problematic. However, I do not believe that other cultures, cultures colonized by the West, have this Other Beginning, for it is not something that any culture can possess as a definite quality. But I do believe that this Other Beginning, in the aftermath of the colonial event, might lie somewhere in the encounter, in the interstices of the Auseinandersetzung with the non-Western Other that Heidegger, unfortunately, missed. My own being, as a post-colonial ‘subject,’ is a battleground between Sikh spirituality and the drive towards Enframing by modern technology. The other beginning, if it is possible at all, might emerge out of crevices that this strife has created. This paper is an attempt to initiate an Auseinandersetzung between Heidegger’s History of Being and the still unEnframed remnants of Sikh spirituality.
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Prabhsharanbir Singh’s paper, as well as others presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference, has been reworked and published as an essay in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of our podcast is a paper from Salvatore Spina (University of Messina). This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: Taking Heidegger’s Black Notebooks as a starting point and moving beyond it, the aim of my paper is to show that the question of sacrifice has in Heidegger’s philosophy an ontological meaning. At the beginning we will start analyzing the religious and political meanings of the concept ‘sacrifice’ and try to show how they represent in Heidegger’s thought only a preliminary characterization. The first part of my work will demonstrate how Heidegger, despite his religious education, releases the interpretation of sacrifice from its Christian characterization. In his own words: “Opfer freilich klingt prahlerisch und christlich. Anderes ist gemeint” (GA 94, p. 373). At the time of his rectorate at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger uses the word sacrifice in a political meaning: it names the way to think a university’s renewal. In the Black Notebooks he writes: “Die neue Universität kommt nur, wenn wir uns für sie opfern” (GA 94, p. 111). After the resignation from the rectorate of Freiburg university and his progressively more critical stance to the Nazi Party, and in conjunction with the ontologization of Heidegger’s thought, the concept of sacrifice assumes a new characterization, thereby losing its political meaning. Now it has an ontological meaning and names the way of the relationship between the human being (Dasein) and Being (Sein). Sacrifice is the name used by Heidegger to indicate one of the moods (Stimmungen) of the human being in relation to Being and its Event (Ereignis des Seins). In this paper I will try to show the development of the concept of sacrifice in Heidegger’s philosophy and to underline its ontological characterization.
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Other papers presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference have been reworked and published as essays in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
We continue season four of the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast with a paper from Lin Ma (Renmin University). This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: In one of his Ponderings, Heidegger remarks, “the courage for philosophy is the knowledge of the necessary going-under (Untergang) of Da-sein.” Although the ponderings on going-under remain rather cryptic and fragmentary, one can discern a thematization of going-under throughout Heidegger’s six non-public meditations on the history of Beyng from 1936-1942. In the Contributions [1936-1938], going-under primarily bespeaks of the proper disposition or attunement the human being should have in order to be appropriated by Beyng, instead of remaining content with beings. The going-under is also the most intimate proximity to the refusal in which the appropriating event (Ereignis) bestows itself on the human being. In his Ponderings, Heidegger also speaks of the going-under as “the transition into the other inception.” This is the second role of the going-under for, or rather, from out of the history of Beyng. This aspect receives lengthy treatments in Heidegger’s other non-public writings composed after the Contributions. In Mindfulness [1938/1939], Heidegger points out that phusis in its essence entails going-under, which is not the end but rather is the “rounding of the beginning.” It is in On the Inception [1941] that Heidegger fully articulates the Beyng-historical significance of going-under. Here going under is “identified” with Heidegger’s most fundamental Beyng-historical notions, such as the appropriating event and inception. My paper is devoted to an examination of the multiple senses of going-under, in particular its double role in the history of Beyng.
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Other papers presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference have been reworked and published as essays in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
This episode of our podcast is a paper from Matthew Kruger-Ross (West Chester University of Pennsylvania). This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: Martin Heidegger, a remarkable philosopher who turned phenomenology upside down, was also a committed teacher for almost six decades. An extended reflection on teaching as a manner and way of inspiring further philosophical reflection remains an unattended narrative within philosophical scholarship. To be sure, in addition to our treatises and manuscripts, our livelihood as philosophers depend on our ability to inspire future philosophers via our lectures and pedagogical conversations and relations in our professional capacities as teachers. How often do we allow others to explore our innermost thoughts and planning document as we craft our thinking and teaching? The Schwarze Hefte provide a unique portal into Heidegger the teacher between 1931 and 1943, based on the existing published notebooks into English. Heidegger’s reflections on education, teaching, learning, students, and instruction are chronicled in this proposed manuscript devoted to extending existing scholarships into Heidegger and the philosophical study of education. Such work promises to extend existing analyses relevant to Heidegger’s thinking of meditative thinking (as a contrast to calculative thinking), historiological ways of thinking and philosophizing, and the role of education in learning to think. Who is the “elementary school teacher” that Heidegger references so often in the Notebooks to provide a counterweight to his philosophical arguments related to thinking? This presentation and paper propose to address this exact gap in the conversation surrounding Heidegger and teaching, learning, and education, broadly considered.
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Other papers presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference have been reworked and published as essays in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
We continue season four of the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast with a paper from Gülben Salman (Ankara University). This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: Following the period when the first Black Notebooks were written (1931-1941), Heidegger delivers a class on Parmenides and Heraclitus at the University of Freiburg (1942-1943). The lecture notes of this class were later published under the title Parmenides. In his Black Notebooks one can see that he had been contemplating common concepts like beginning, truth, concealment/unconcealment, mythos/logos, oblivion, science, etc. It seems rewarding to consider as complementary his lecture notes on Parmenides and his Ponderings in order to understand thoroughly the question of the history of being. It is important because he claims that “philosophy creates the concealment” and tries to “keep itself hard to the wind of its own storm”. This is visible in the class of 1942, when Heidegger makes a distinction between pseudos and its misleading Roman translation as falsum. For him, these are two different ways of understanding what does not belong to the realm of truth. He later indicates that the polis is the realm of aletheia/pseudos, while on the other hand the veritas/falsum distinction is a part of a Roman imperial mindset. This presentation will elaborate Heidegger’s ideas about the Greek and Roman way of thinking “wrong” in accordance with his Ponderings. There is a change in the essence of truth, and this can be made visible in the order of the polis and the imperial organization of the Roman political milieu as res publica. Heidegger is quite interested in the confrontation with antiquity, “the beginning” in a different nuance than its modern version. This chasm clarifies the transformation in the History of Being.
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Other papers presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference have been reworked and published as essays in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Season four of the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast continues with a paper from Niall Keane. This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: This paper will trace the theme of the naturalisation of the world from Heidegger’s early lectures up until and including the Black Notebooks. It will take the theme of Heidegger’s critique of the naturalization of the world as its starting point and show how the problem of naturalism and its forgetting of the phenomenon of the world is a guiding thread when it comes to understanding the intensification of the same critique in his later analysis of the darkening of the world as the increasingly impeded ability to interrogate the question of the history of beyng.
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Other papers presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference have been reworked and published as essays in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
We continue season four of the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast with a keynote presentation from Babette Babich (Fordham University and University of Winchester). This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: One of the outcomes of the publication of the Black Notebooks has been to invite scholars to rethink their understanding of Heidegger’s thinking, including what is named Heidegger’s ‘world-historical anti-Semitism’, his relation to war and politics, via Schmitt and Jünger, as well as Heidegger’s thinking on machination/motorisation/calculation. Other possibilities include the university (education) in addition to Heidegger’s anxieties regarding the reception of Being and Time in the framework of the history of Beyng/Seyn. Echoing Heidegger’s lecture courses, we read that Nietzsche adumbrates “the end of metaphysics” yet remains nonetheless entangled in metaphysics. Heidegger’s reflections on the beginning of Western thought with Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides are matched here with his insistence that it is a “fable that Nietzsche rediscovered ‘pre-Platonic philosophy’”, destined one day “to be revealed in all its fabulosity [Fabelhaftigkeit]”. For Heidegger, “Nietzsche thinks purely in the Roman way” whereby Nietzsche’s “own metaphysics could never grasp the Greek beginning of Western thinking”. Inasmuch as Nietzsche “plays out the essence of being to a combat of power positions and power relations”, as Heidegger invokes typically bellicose interpretations of will to power, this powerplay consummates the “abandonment of beings by being, the abandonment that gained sovereignty in the history of metaphysics”. Given the contrast between historiology and history in Nietzsche’s meditation on history (apt and inapt) for life, as this bears on Machenschaft and the whole of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Heidegger’s opposition to Nietzsche’s putative ‘re-discovery of Pre-platonic philosophy’ yields a further question: “in what single sense is Nietzsche a transition, i.e., a preparation for another beginning of the history of beyng?”
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Babich’s paper, as well as others presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference, has been reworked and published as an essay in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Welcome back to the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast. We kick off season four with recordings from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019). This conference was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’. To begin, here is the opening paper from Ullrich Haase, who was editor of the journal from 2005 to 2019, standing down in the wake of this conference and the publication hitting its landmark year.
ABSTRACT: This talk will introduce a broad array of questions arising from Heidegger’s turn towards the question for the history of being. While also introducing some of the strands of questioning that will arise in the other contributions to the conference, it will take its lead from the claim in the Call for Papers, namely that the works bound together by the title of the question for the history of being belong to the most promising that philosophy has to offer itself and that the shape of this thought can find a clearer definition in the Black Notebooks. The talk will thus try to give some preliminary answers as to what Heidegger has to say about four of the most pressing questions of our times, namely that for the destruction of the world through Global Warming, the question for the destruction of civil society in the movement of Globalization, about Nietzsche’s question of European Nihilism and, last but not least, about Merleau-Ponty’s Nightmare from which there is no awakening.
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Haase’s paper, as well as others presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference, has been reworked and published as an essay in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Here is the last of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Zeigam Azizov’s paper is titled ‘Without Origins: Husserl’s “temporal objects” in the light of nonessentialist thinking’.
Abstract: “I will talk about Husserl’s initial search for the ‘essence’ in his earlier work and his realising the persistence of culture as a non-determinate entity towards the latest period of his philosophical activities. In his lecture given at the Vienna Kulturbund in May 1935 Husserl spoke of “the crisis as a pathological sickness of which the dominant characteristic is a fall into passivity (Passivitat)”. In both cases Husserl wanted to find an answer to the question of the lost contact of people with the sense of their activities, of their mode of knowledge.
By taking Husserl’s initial understanding of ‘a temporal object’ and his later critique of ‘passivity’ I would like to reactivate this question for the world of full of objects like ours. ‘Passivity’ of subjects inhabiting the “Lebenswelt” is connected to the world consisting of fuzzy objects. This is the reason why even without having no proper education of numbers and words anyone who is attracted to new media can learn how to become a hacker. It may be explained as in a sensual human activity-knowledge translated from the brain and extended to other senses. The recognition of ‘a natural attitude’ in a particular reality takes place in this manner on the grounds of intersubjectivity. Objective idealities transcend s to subjects and potentially perceivable as without origins.
I claim that ‘re-activating’ of the lost contact is possible through the understanding of objects of the world as they are non-essential . Any object has a quality of the quasi-object and therefore in the state of fuzziness. In order to problematize this inquiry further and to provide a novel understanding of Husserl’ work I will reflect on the theory of ‘fuzzy logic’ by the Azeri-American computer scientist Lotfi Zadeh and its development for my own understanding of non-essential existence of objects.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Tingwen Li is from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, and the paper is titled ‘What If We Exclude Ready-mades from the Artworld?’
Abstract: “Ready-mades had formed a significant challenge to the tradition of art. While analytic aestheticians have been devoted to solving the problem of ready-mades, phenomenological aesthetics had paid little attention to this issue before the 1990s. John Barnett Brough, an American Husserlian philosopher, is among the earliest phenomenologists who were to combat the question of ready-mades. In his early discussion, unlike most of the phenomenological aestheticians who attend to art through aesthetic experience, Brough’s concern is more with the “classificatory” sense of art by interpreting Dickie’s and Danto’s institutional formulations from the perspective of late Husserl’s “Cultural World,” claiming that “a work of art is an artifact created against the horizon of the artworld and presented to an artworld public for its contemplation.” However, in the work published three years later, Brough seemed to change his idea of the analytic approaches by pointing out what they have to sacrifice for accommodating ready-mades in the artworld: Dickie would have to make a difficult choice between the artifactuality of artworks and “unaided” ready-mades, whereas Danto would pay the full cost of losing the whole classic world of art, which is also argued by James Foster who contrasts Gadamer to Danto in terms of their justifications for modern works of art. As a result, Brough is about to save the artworld by abandoning the ready-mades, albeit there is also expense of excluding them: not only of becoming philosophically disreputable, but also of thrusting a potential risk onto the artworld that has already been. For one, it refers to how we tolerate, involve, or assimilate a subverted event that has already been admitted by a tradition. For another, it is related to the flaws of Husserl’s views of historical sedimentation upon which Brough builds his phenomenology of artworld.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Tarjej Larsen is from the University of Stavanger, Norway, and the paper is titled ‘Husserl's Circularity Argument for the Epoché’.
Abstract: “According to Husserl, epistemology is possible only as phenomenology. In my paper, I assess one of his arguments for a crucial part of the considerations he offers in support of this claim.
Husserl takes the central problem of epistemology to be “the problem of transcendence”, or the problem of the possibility of transcendent cognition – very roughly, justified judgements about objects that do not form part of the judging subject’s consciousness. And he argues that any form of cognition by means of which this problem – and, by extension, any other genuine epistemological problem – can be solved must satisfy a number of methodological requirements, which, he maintains, only phenomenological cognition satisfies.
Chief among these is that any attempt to solve the problem of transcendence must involve the performance of an “epistemological epoché”, by which Husserl means a general refraining from making cognitive use of transcendent cognition. He offers different arguments for this requirement, the arguably most important of which is that attempting to solve the problem of the possibility of transcendent cognition by means of transcendent cognition would be viciously circular.
Despite its significance for Husserlian metaepistemology, this argument has not really been assessed by commentators, who, to the extent that they have considered it, have tended merely to reiterate it. Seeking to remedy this, I claim that there is strong reason to believe that the argument fails.
Acknowledging that employing transcendent cognition to solve the problem of transcendence would be circular, I argue that it’s far from clear that it would be viciously so, if account is taken of the fact that, as Husserl insists, the problem at issue is how transcendent cognition is possible, not whether it is possible. I end by briefly considering the consequences that the failure of the circularity argument would hold for Husserl’s conception of epistemology.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Rona Cohen is from Tel-Aviv University, and the paper is titled ‘“Taking Flesh” in Heidegger: On Dasein’s Bodying Forth’.
Abstract: “In discussing the phenomenology of the body in the Zollikon seminars, Heidegger draws a distinction between the spatiality of Dasein and its body. According to Heidegger, Dasein is not spatial because it is embodied. Rather, “its bodiliness is possible only because Dasein is spatial”. Here, Heidegger puts into service the distinction between spatiality and embodiment to draw a distinction between the ontological and the ontic: the spatiality of Dasein is prior to Dasein’s embodiment, which is to say, Dasein is ontologically spatial and ontically embodied. In another of the Zollikon seminars, Heidegger addresses the phenomenology of the body by invoking Husserl’s distinction between Korper [“the corporeal thing”] and Leib [“the body”]. However, Heidegger gives this distinction a spatial interpretation. He claims that the corporeal thing stops with the skin, nevertheless noting that, “phenomenologically, Dasein always exceeds the corporeal limit […] when pointing with my finger toward the crossbar of the window over there, I [as body] do not end at my fingertips”. According to Heidegger, the bodily phenomenological limit extends beyond the corporeal spatial limit. Owing to this, he explains, the two “limits” do not coincide. How, then, is this argument compatible with Heidegger’s former claim that Dasein’s spatiality is its mode of being and the body is “ontic”? In this lecture, I present this dilemma in Heidegger’s text vis-à-vis Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between body and flesh in The Visible and Invisible. I suggest that Heidegger’s (little-known) notion of bodying forth [Leiben] introduced in this seminar could supply a solution to this dilemma.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Rhoda Ellis’ paper is titled ‘Being, the Gallery and Virtual Reality: An Artist’s Take on Building Immersive Artworks’.
Abstract: “Dreyfus was right when he told computer scientists they were wrong during the first wave of virtual reality (VR). While technology companies continue to turn to cold, hard, objective, neuroscience to ‘trick’ the body into a sense of immersion, the recent resurgence of VR has also seen a wider acknowledgment of the body and the increased prevalence of phenomenology in discussions about VR. We may no longer be dreaming that extropian dream in quite the same way anymore, but we’re making artworks in and for virtual reality with a-whole-new approach.
Through practice-led research into the making, and recreating, of sculptural artworks, I have found it more meaningful to draw on the aesthetic tradition and art theory – from Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin, up to contemporary thinkers like Noë and Paterson. As a sculptor I work in 3D space, rather than as a 2D image maker, and have found aesthetics that relies too heavily on the visual has left me questioning. Here I focus on two of my artworks that were made with movement, touch and atmosphere very much in mind. Both were designed to be experienced in an art gallery setting, within all the traditions that entails, by interacting via the HTC Vive headset and moving within the artwork at life-scale. The mixed reality piece Being-in-the-Gallery explored embodiment of the immersive experience and the aura of the virtual art object – with the viewer-participant invited to touch an original sculpture while seeing it veiled in a virtual copy. In Virtual Halls I was commissioned to remake an artwork by the late video artist David Hall in VR, leading to questions of authenticity in the methodology, preservation and experience. The line of my argument shows the passage of my engagement with a number of philosophers and how they continue to influence my practise.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Philip Tovey is from Canterbury Christ Church University, and the paper is titled ‘Temporal range, future mandate and strategic shaping; the existential and cognitive phenomenological ethics of preventative policing’.
Abstract: “Since the inception of modern policing, its founding strategic instruction was to ‘prevent crime’. Historically, policing strategy approached prevention through a geospatial predisposition in order to deter criminality. However recent years have seen a shift away from this area-based effect to an individual-centric model of tactical prioritisation, of which one's vulnerability to a given threat forms a transcendentally subjective centre of gravity. This paper will propose two fundamental challenges for UK policing operating a threat-based, preventative and individual-centric strategy; (1) prevention requires accurate prediction of and morally justifiable ingress into the subjective future and (2) there is no conceptual definition of what constitutes legitimate future reach in order to prevent crime. By firstly grounding strategy in an existential framing of 'the threat of meaninglessness', a cognitive phenomenological analysis of 'future-states' is conducted to expose issues of future mandate, temporal range and strategic shaping; providing a contemporary insight into, and an empirical reading of some of phenomenologies most challenging concepts such as time and more specifically, future-consciousness. Through the examination of some of policing's more divisive operational developments, such as para-militarization, early infant intervention programmes and advanced predictive analytics, the issue of futures and their disputably distinctive qualitative character, surfaces underlying strategic fallibilities in preventative, individual-centric approaches to policing within a paradigm of vulnerability”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Rajan Nathan and Peter Wilson are from CWP NHS Foundation Trust & Universities of Liverpool and Chester, and the paper – presented by Wilson – is titled ‘Phenomenology and causal entities in psychiatry’.
Abstract: “Psychiatric training emphasises the need to make sense of the patient’s experience at the symptom and diagnostic level of abstraction. In so far as attention is given to obtaining a representation of mental phenomena, this is a means to satisfy rules that define symptoms and diagnoses. In view of the questionable historical and empirical provenance of these rules, it is not surprising that underlying causal entities have proved elusive.
The authors will draw on their clinical practice and the relevant academic literature to make the case for phenomenological analysis, not only to elucidate psychiatric experiences (in line with the tradition of Jaspers), but also as a process to generate data to explain these disturbances (i.e. extending beyond the limits of Jaspers’ notion of ‘static’ understanding).
In this paper, the authors will demonstrate that neurobiological and phenomenological disciplines can complement each other in explaining troubling psychic events. However, using solely the language of brain structure, chemistry and circuits does not allow description of either what is troubling or psychic. Therefore, a neurobiological account in itself will never be sufficient for understanding.
Additionally, the authors will make the case for identifying causal entities through phenomenological inquiry. The advantage of phenomenology over the traditional symptom enquiry approach will be illustrated by case examples of different types of psychopathology. The authors propose a two-step process comprising (i) phenomenological inquiry to produce a representation of the patient’s experiences without interference from preconceptions, and (ii) an analysis of this representation to identify an explanatory entity using principles emerging from the empirical literature in relation to mental mechanisms. Unlike the common use of existing psychological models in clinical practice, in the second step the psychiatrist must refrain from applying mechanisms that are generally associated with certain experiences and confine his/herself to the data elicited in that case.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Marcel Dubovec’s paper is titled ‘The Inner Structure of Heidegger’s Concept of Freedom’.
Abstract: “The purpose of this paper is to present Heidegger's concept of freedom between 1927 and 1930. It puts emphasis on the difference between the fundamental-ontological and the transcendental concept of freedom. The elaboration of this difference is founded on the transformation of the ontological difference in its three forms: the difference of the being of beings (existential approach), the difference of the being and beings (transcendental/metontological) and the cosmological difference as a difference between the thing and the world (phenomenological metaphysics). The central manifestation of the difference is the possibility of a deeper understanding of freedom beyond its existential structures (Being and time) that focus on authenticity. The transcendental concept of freedom is the essence of the ground in the context of transcendence and the world and as such it is also the ground for existentially conceived freedom. In order to show this hierarchy in particular, Heidegger's debate on Kant's concept of freedom as spontaneity will be explained. Spontaneity is a specific form of causality and as such it is also grounded in transcendental freedom. The limits of a hierarchical way of thinking illustrate themselves in the significance of freedom for the essence of truth. This refers to the inner transformation of Heidegger's philosophy into the thinking of being from itself. In this context, the importance of a possibility to evolve the concept of freedom in its metontological turn is emphasised. On this metontological way of Heidegger's thinking, Hungarian philosopher László Tengelyi follows with his concept of phenomenological metaphysics that is placed beyond the onto-theological constitution of metaphysics. Tengelyi's concept of freedom as a partial causality is of particular significance to this subject.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Lorenzo Girardi is from Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, and the paper is titled ‘The Constitution of the One World: Faith in Husserl’s Philosophy’.
Abstract: “Edmund Husserl’s philosophy is characterized by an eminently rationalist outlook. It contains some of the key features of the Enlightenment-project: a focus on the spirit of reason, a rational teleology, and universalism. It is perhaps the most critical version imaginable of this project, allowing for no justification that cannot be found in intuitive experience. This paper will point out a tension between this methodological limitation of Husserl’s phenomenology and the scope of his philosophy as a whole. It will do so by looking into the way Husserl conceives of the possibility of the constitution of one world for all of humankind.
While Husserl can experientially justify the process of universalization based on the horizonal nature of experience, he cannot justify the outcome of this process. That is, he cannot provide experiential justification for the idea that this process of universalization necessarily culminates in the same world for everyone who engages in this process. The possibility of a single rational world for all is more of a deeply entrenched assumption than a possibility that is properly justified.
After showing that recourse to experience is insufficient to justify the possibility of such a world, it will be shown that in the end Husserl backs up this speculative possibility through an act of faith. Showing the role of faith in Husserl’s account of the constitution of the one world puts the explicit references to faith in the Crisis in a new light. They might be more than rhetorical devices, revealing something about the nature of the crisis and Husserl’s solution to it, as well as providing a useful heuristic to distinguish Husserl’s thought from that of later phenomenologists. In doing so, the deep practical or even existential concern that forms the backbone of Husserl’s thinking, but that is not always acknowledged, is highlighted.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Julio Andrade is from the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, and the paper is titled ‘Normative provisionality as a means to navigate Levinasian infinite responsibility’.
Abstract: “The core of Emmanuel Levinas’s (1969) argument in Totality and Infinity is that because the other cannot be faithfully represented without reducing his/her alterity, I cannot discharge my responsibilities to him/her. As such, my responsibility to the other is infinite. Infinite responsibility is at the centre of Levinasian ethics, however, it is also the most problematic. If I am infinitely responsible for the other, what of my, and all the other others, needs and desires? Levinas responds by positing a third party to the face-to face encounter with the other. Levinas argues that justice (or the political) is “an incessant correction of the asymmetry of proximity” (1998; 158 emphasis added), i.e. justice or politics must constantly efface the alterity of the other in order to render the other representable, and thus comparable with the third.
However, what such a politics entails in practice is not something that Levinas develops in any depth. He remarks that “[m]y task does not consist in constructing ethics; I only try to find its meaning” (1985; 90). However, his follow-up to this remark hints at an endorsement of just such an enterprise: “one can without doubt construct an ethics in function of what I have just said, but this is not my own theme” (ibid).
It is by expanding on the above ‘incessant correction’ of justice that I hope to offer a way to ‘operationalise’ Levinasian ethics. In order to achieve this, I enlist Woermann and Cilliers’ (2012) ‘provisional imperative’. Pared to its essence, the provisional imperative reads as follows: “When acting, always remain cognisant of other ways of acting” (ibid; 451).I reinscribe this into Levinasian terms – ‘when representing the other, always be cognisant of other ways of representing the other.’ Then, by understanding responsibility as an ability to respond to the demands of the other, a response-ability, I argue that the other as infinity (Levinas takes the idea of infinity as the model for the other), should be understood as the other representing itself in an infinite number of ways, rather than a representation of itself as infinity.
The provisional imperative, I conclude, drives this incessant, and infinite revision of the representation of the other, and concomitantly my responsibility to the other. The provisional imperative operationalises Levinasian ethics such that infinite responsibility to the other is not rendered quixotic even as it is confirmed as the limit of our responsibility.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. James Rakoczi is from King's College London, and the paper is titled ‘Moving without movement: Merleau-Ponty’s “I can” in cases of global paralysis’.
Abstract: “In this paper, I aim to demonstrate how memoirs written by people who live with, or have experienced, global paralysis can illuminate and complicate Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s claim in Phenomenology of Perception that embodied movement is a necessary condition for a transcendental self. I argue that the kinds of movement these texts articulate shares an affinity with the kind of movement instantiated by Merleau-Ponty’s intentional arc: a ceaseless and adaptive movement, or a “therapeutic” movement, which constantly “recovers” from an incapacity to move. In short, Merleau-Ponty’s “I can” emerges ceaselessly from an “I cannot”. I shall make particular reference to two texts. First, I shall consider how any philosophy attempting to centre the importance of bodies-in-movement might align with the claims made in Kate Allatt’s memoir Running Free (2011), a text in which Allatt attributes an interior ‘running psyche’ as imperative to her miraculous recovery from locked-in syndrome. Second, I will read Jean-Dominique Bauby’s locked-in syndrome memoir The Diving-Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon, 1997) through the lens of Merleau-Ponty’s account of anosognosia, arguing that the text conceals its laborious method of production in the very process of describing that method. I will conclude by reflecting on the influence Merleau-Ponty has had on embodied therapies and textual accounts of lived illness experience, and indicate how understanding the ways in which embodied movement, textuality and therapeutics overlap has significance for our understanding of Merleau-Ponty’s claims.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Jack Price is from Cardiff University / the University of Exeter, and the paper is titled ‘Adorno and Scheler on Action and Experience’.
Abstract: “T.W Adorno’s work includes sustained critical engagement with phenomenology. While sympathetic to the attempt to engage with the ‘heterogenous’ and with the world of objects, Adorno argues that traditional phenomenology ultimately fails: Husserl relies too much on constitutive subjectivity and is unable to break from idealism. Perhaps as a result, Adorno tends to pass over much of the work of Max Scheler. Despite this, this paper argues that Scheler’s materialist phenomenology could engage with Adorno’s critical theory to mutual benefit.
Adorno’s work speaks to phenomenological attempts to understand experience. Emphasising the limitations of concepts, the primacy of the object and the value of embodied affective experience, Adorno builds a broad social critique emphasising mediation and the need for moving beyond traditional conceptual thought. But Adorno’s methodological negativity means that his account of the role of embodied subjectivity tends to be laconic, working more as a counterblast to transcendental idealism than as an articulated alternative.
Scheler’s model of the human being is drawn from a twofold distinction between ‘life’ and ‘spirit’, in which ‘life’ represents pre-rational and instinctual drives and behaviours and ‘spirit’ the rational and self-reflective element. The human being is thus not a singular entity ruled by reason, but a creature of conflicting drives, passions, and interests of which reason is a late and by no means omnipotent part. This model of the human being, however, is situated at times quite abstractly. Scheler lacks the critical resources needed to thoroughly interrogate the role of subjectivity under contemporary social conditions.
Dialogue between the two could therefore be very productive. While tensions undeniably exist, Max Scheler’s work, when brought together with Adorno’s critique of constitutive subjectivity and contemporary society, could present a plausible and phenomenologically-minded account of human action and experience under the current social order.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Erin Plunkett is from the University of Chichester, and the paper is titled ‘Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology’.
Abstract: “The return to the ‘object’ or ‘thing’ in contemporary Continental Philosophy is in part a reaction to the past sins of what Husserl calls Cartesian philosophy—a philosophy in which truth hinges on subjective consciousness and in which the res cogitans and res extensa are thought as radically separate. The environmentally disastrous consequences of such a position are hard to deny and are diagnosed by Husserl himself in his Crisis. Yet, today Phenomenology is often lumped together with this tradition (in part because of Husserl’s own emphasis on consciousness) and, so, implicated in these consequences.
Czech phenomenologist Jan Patočka, one of Husserl’s last students, was already thinking through the problem of subjectivism in phenomenology in the 1930s, and in 1971 wrote the essay ‘Husserl’s Subjectivism and the Call for an Asubjective Philosophy’, in which he argues that phenomena are not the mere ‘correlate of subjective processes’, nor the ‘accomplishment of subjective constitution’; rather, phenomena as such are primary. As for the subject, it is itself a phenomenon allowed by things, rather than the basis for the appearance of things. It is ‘not we but phenomenal being itself that indicates for us what possibilities there are for our own being’.
This conception, I argue, is an advance on Husserl on the one hand and contemporary philosophies of the object on the other. It avoids the consequences of Cartesianism while providing a more coherent account of subjectivity (as a no-thing) and retaining the idea of Being over against beings or things. With these considerations in the background, I present Patočka’s asubjective phenomenology as a viable and relevant philosophical methodology.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Bhaswar Malick is from the University of Cincinnati, and his paper is titled ‘Paradise on Earth: Tomb of Akbar at Sikandrabad’.
Abstract: “Globalization’s dissolution of boundaries parallels a resurgent identity politics, exacerbated by religious invocations. Evidently, the Islamic heritage of India is being repositioned as foreign and incongruent to the nation-state’s cultural legacy. A prime case in point is the recent exclusion of the Taj Mahal from the state government’s tourism booklet– this iconic heritage having been labelled as the architectural flagbearer of Islamic rule in India. But this exclusion is also symptomatic of the primacy of classifications: architecture’s ‘scientific method’ – a work identified by its style and age, its origin and author, and an objectified list of its features. This paper presents an alternative, rooted in the discourses of phenomenology, that can illuminate the nature of situated human interactions more holistically, and hermeneutics, that can reveal the continuing relationships between works of the distant past with the always new present. To account for the booklet’s missed opportunity, this paper will dwell not on the Taj Mahal, but on the tomb of the most powerful Mughal Emperor Akbar, at Sikandrabad. Ignored and attracting far fewer tourists, this monument recedes into relative obscurity, although located within the same city. This paper argues that the tomb remains relevant to modern India because it incites questions of life and death, of living and dying; it claims legitimacy as a work of art – a meaningful and on-going, ever-present human experience. The work works best by transforming a sense of being with the deceased in a place after death, to become a respite in mortal life for soulful contemplation; realised for heightened sensitivity, activated by bodily engagement, and explored within spatial sequences, all encompassed as a holistic architectural experience. In introspection, it provides insight into what Islam, and the human experience in general, are for you and me today, beyond yet through constructions of a defined past.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Arthur Rose is from Durham University, and his paper is titled ‘Reorienting Breathlessness: A Case against Symptom Discordance’.
Abstract: “In Phenomenology of Illness, Havi Carel identifies a ‘Janus-faced duality’ to breathlessness: ‘it is so real and overwhelming to the person experiencing it and yet so invisible to those around her’ (Carel 2016: 109). The discrepancy between external appearance and internal reality replicates a further discrepancy, known as symptom discordance, between the person’s perception of breathlessness (‘subjective experience’) and the oxygen saturation of their blood (‘objective measurement’). Not only is the breathless person challenged by another’s failure to recognize their experience, their own interoceptive ability may not match what they feel to what medicalised testing shows. Carel usefully relates this mismatch to Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between the objective and the lived body. The affordances of the objective body come to define new limits on the bodily habits that determine the lived body’s engagement with the world. To emphasize the reshaping of world that faces the person with breathlessness, Carel uses geographical metaphors or articulations that demonstrate both forms of discordance. But, Carel does not devote much attention to extremes of symptom discordance: either where a person has objectively low levels of oxygen saturation but does not complain of breathlessness or, conversely, where a person does complain of breathlessness but has no measurable oxygen deficiency.
This paper seeks to draw on Carel’s account of breathlessness to consider how it responds to the problems symptom discordance presents for ‘external’ verification, by either casual or medical perception. By shifting the terms of the account, from concordance-discordance to orientation-disorientation, it reframes a continued reliance on the subjective-objective distinction as a matter of cognitive direction. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s engagement with Merleau-Ponty’s account of orientation, it argues that the experience of breathlessness can be usefully thought of as a series of orientations: to the world, the sensations of breathlessness and their scientific measurement.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Aoife McInerney is from the University of Limerick, and her paper is titled ‘Phenomenology of Solidarity’.
Abstract: “The term plurality is somewhat in vogue of late; yet, arguably its implications were not taken seriously until Hannah Arendt. Arendt displays a genuine engagement with what plurality actually means and what it has to offer. The consequences of this, on the one hand, call for a theoretical reframing of the conditions of political action and interaction. On the other, they force us to rethink the nature of pluralistic co-existence. While plurality may present challenges, such as how does one truly participate at the political level and how does the notion of solidarity fare against the reality of difference and uniqueness contained in everyday communal life and practice, a phenomenological investigation of plurality provides a compelling approach to today’s most vexing social-political problems. In order to extract the full potential from Arendt’s notion of plurality, this paper will begin at the conceptual level and systematically iron out the theoretical implications of plurality and the methodological challenges it presents. Subsequently, it will further explore what plurality has to offer in the political domain and how it is actualized, that is to say, how a theory of solidarity becomes practice. Finally, in terms of my own contribution, this paper will analyze these pluralistic implications in light of forming solidaristic relations which the notion of plurality could be seen to undermine. The notion of plurality that Arendt tries to capture is one which, in spite of a seeming conceptual contradiction, -- different but equal, separate but unified -- remains faithful to the phenomenon of political life with others, that is to say, the lived experience of intersubjectivity. Ultimately, Arendt’s contributions culminate in an innovative ethics of participative plurality which has far-reaching implications for current social policy, such as fostering solidaristic understanding and cooperation, and managing international mobility.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. James Forrest is from the University of Copenhagen, and his paper is titled ‘The World from the Enactive Approach: Degrees of Transcendentalism’.
Abstract: “Enactivism and embodied cognition movements at large are gaining influence in diverse fields ranging from cognitive science to philosophy, psychology, artificial intelligence, and anthropology (Hutto 2017, p.378). As Francisco Varela’s dream of extending and expanding Merleau-Ponty’s work intertwining empirical research with phenomenological investigations comes further to fruition, it’s pertinent to pause and ask the question: what do different branches of enactivism have to say about the status of the world we inhabit? This paper proposes a conceptual taxonomy of varieties of enactivism with respect to their metaphysical claims of mind-(in)dependence of the physical world. This taxonomy would be orthogonal yet compatible with others such as Ward, Silverman, and David’s differentiation of autopoietic, sensorimotor, and radical enactivisms (2017, p.369). Consider that one finds explicitly transcendental and anti-foundationalist perspectives on the existence of world in texts like The Embodied Mind (Varela et al, 1991), echoing what some have called the correlationist metaphysics of the later Husserl (Beck 1928; Zahavi 2017, p.114). In these cases, what’s being enacted is the real world itself. An alternative possible reading of some texts, e.g. Mind in Life, suggest that what’s enacted is a ‘selection’ or ‘interpretation’ of an environing world to create a phenomenal world (Thompson 2007). Other branches, for instance O’Regan’s work, lend themselves to objective realist interpretations, where sensorimotor activity is taken to offer objective determinations of enacted phenomenal qualia (O’Regan 2012, p.180). Still others more or less explicitly bracket metaphysical commitments altogether (cf. Gallagher). I propose to call these four kinds of enactivism, respectively; (1) correlationist, (2) phenomenal, (3) objective, and (4) bracketed. Using this heuristic outline I will further raise the question of how naturalism and transcendentalism, or realism and anti-realism, are taken to combine coherently in versions 1-3.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the second of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Dr Niall Keane was a keynote speaker at the conference, and his paper is titled ‘Metaphysics and Nihilism’.
Niall Keane is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. He has published widely in the areas of phenomenology and hermeneutics and is the co-author of The Gadamer Dictionary (Continuum 2012) and co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics (Wiley-Blackwell 2016). In addition to his publications on Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Michel Henry, and in the field of ancient philosophy, he is Treasurer of the Irish Phenomenological Circle, and cofounder and coordinator of the Irish Centre for Transnational Studies. His current research project focuses on the transformed nature of the self in Heidegger’s thought.
Abstract: “This talk will examine the interconnected issues of metaphysics and nihilism in the works of Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger. Exploring the issues of metaphysics and nihilism through the lens of their respective analyses of being and nothing, it will assess Heidegger’s interpretation of Jünger’s position as modern and metaphysical in that it remains trapped within the Gestalt of the human being as the subject that sets in place and produces the world and by doing so secures further production possibilities for itself. However, in Heidegger’s dialogue with Jünger one can detect deep structural affinities, especially in Jünger’s description of nihilism and his attempt to reconceive the ontological question. It is the aim of this talk to explore the points of convergence and divergence and to argue for the necessity of reading Heidegger with Jünger and with metaphysics as opposed to understanding Heidegger’s thought as anti-metaphysical through and through. This talk will address whether Heidegger’s re-conception of being and nothing as one and the same, albeit not identical, is not itself a real expression of metaphysical orientation, that is, whether the cunning of metaphysics is not already operative in Heidegger’s attempts to sketch the contours of another way of thinking about the human being’s relation to the question of being. Taking Heidegger at his word, when he claims that there is no such thing as a last word, especially when it comes to the question of being, it is my contention that his thought is metaphysical to the core and that this becomes clear in his response to Jünger and in what he took from Jünger. If it is true, as Heidegger claimed, that metaphysics is nihilism proper, then surely his goal must be to confront metaphysics from within metaphysics and not to overcome it. In the end, the paper will argue that there is a problematic tension in Heidegger’s interpretation of the history of metaphysics and nihilism, such that Heidegger vacillates between not wanting to belong to the metaphysical tradition and recognizing that all thought must necessarily belong to this tradition.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the first of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Dr Luna Dolezal was a keynote speaker at the conference, and her paper is titled ‘Phenomenology and Intercorporeality in the Case of Commercial Surrogacy’.
Luna Dolezal is a Lecturer in Medical Humanities and Philosophy at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research is primarily in the areas of applied phenomenology, feminist philosophy, philosophy of embodiment, philosophy of medicine and medical humanities. She is the author of The Body and Shame: Phenomenology, Feminism and the Socially Shaped Body (Lexington Books, 2015) and the co-editor of Body/Self/Other: The Phenomenology of Social Encounters (SUNY Press, 2017) and New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment (Palgrave, 2018).
Abstract: “In this paper, I will attempt to put the maternal-foetal relation through pregnancy into the centre of the ethical questions that arise in the practice of commercial gestational surrogacy. I will proceed by drawing attention to the predominant logic regarding bodies, babies, pregnancy and motherhood that underpins most bioethical discussion regarding commercial surrogacy, making salient the dominant metaphoric and patriarchal landscapes which shape how we commonly understand pregnancy, surrogacy and parenthood in the present day. Following Emily Martin, I argue that key metaphors about the body and bodily events can shape one’s experience and the logic of the practices which surround those experiences. Through describing aspects of the metaphoric landscape within which the practices of commercial surrogacy are primarily thematized, I will demonstrate that a phenomenology of pregnancy, or a theorizing of pregnancy as a complex existential intercorporeal and lived experience, is most often omitted or effaced in bioethical discussions about commercial surrogacy. As such, I will suggest that what is missing in the discourse and bioethical literature on surrogacy is an adequate theorizing of pregnancy. In order to suggest how we might introduce a theory of pregnancy, I will turn to recent phenomenological ontological accounts of pregnancy and intercorporeality, using the insights of Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a conceptual ground. In doing so, I will describe the phenomenology of the affective maternal-foetal relationship, engaging with Iris Marion Young’s classical discussion of pregnant embodiment alongside recent accounts of the phenomenology of pregnancy from Jane Lymer and Sara Heinämaa. Ultimately I will argue that the role of the surrogate is phenomenologically and existentially significant in foetal development and in the creation of a new human subject through communicative intercorporeal relations. Overall, my aim is to put the maternal-foetal relation and pregnancy, as a complex life-generating and kinship-generating experience with substantial social, developmental and existential significance, at the centre of conversations about commercial gestational surrogacy and to disrupt the predominant logic that surrogate mothers are merely ‘human incubators,’ or a special type of container or vessel for the foetuses that they gestate.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
This is the final recording from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 workshop 'Embodied Subjects: Phenomenology, Literature, and the Health Humanities'. This paper is given by Ms Moujan Mirdamadi, a PhD Candidate working in the field of the philosophy of psychiatry, and associate lecturer at Lancaster University’s Department of Politics, Philosophy & Religion. Moujan’s paper is titled ‘Death-conscious culture and experiences of depression in Iran’. The workshop took place in Manchester, UK, during the summer of 2018, and gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners to discuss the significance of embodiment for the health humanities. More information about the workshop can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/embodied-subjects-workshop/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the fourth of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 workshop 'Embodied Subjects: Phenomenology, Literature, and the Health Humanities'. Dr Ullrich Haase is Principle Lecturer in the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University; and he is the editor of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology. His paper is titled ‘Understanding the Historical Body’. The workshop took place in Manchester, UK, during the summer of 2018, and gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners to discuss the significance of embodiment for the health humanities. More information about the workshop can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/embodied-subjects-workshop/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Patrick O’Connor is Senior Lecturer at the School of Arts & Humanities, Nottingham Trent University, UK. Pat teaches philosophy at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels, is the programme leader for the MA in Philosophy, and recently was voted in as the new acting-president of the British Society for Phenomenology (BSP). His paper ‘Knausgaard, Bodies and The Terrible Beauty of Brain Surgery’ is taken from the BSP’s workshop 'Embodied Subjects: Phenomenology, Literature, and the Health Humanities'. The workshop took place in Manchester, UK, during the summer of 2018, and gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners to discuss the significance of embodiment for the health humanities. More information about the workshop can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/embodied-subjects-workshop/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
Here is the second of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 workshop 'Embodied Subjects: Phenomenology, Literature, and the Health Humanities'. Dr Christopher Eagle is Senior Lecturer in Health Humanities, Emory University in the Druid Hills neighbourhood of the city of Atlanta, Georgia, United States. His paper is titled ‘Brain Stories: On the Limits of Neuro-Fiction’. The workshop took place in Manchester, UK, during the summer of 2018, and gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners to discuss the significance of embodiment for the health humanities. More information about the workshop can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/embodied-subjects-workshop/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/
This is a recording of a paper given from our 2018 workshop on the title 'Embodied Subjects: Phenomenology, Literature, and the Health Humanities'. This workshop gathered philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners to discuss the significance of embodiment for the health humanities. More information about the workshop can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/embodied-subjects-workshop/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast.
This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk
A careful reading and interpretation of Max Scheler’s work highlights a thinker concerned with the diversity and multiplicity of human life. As a vehement critic of reductionism, determinism and the focus of phenomenology on the individual subject, Scheler offers trenchant insights and arguments which retain their power today.
This paper begins by outlining Scheler’s conception of the human being, highlighting its distinction from a classical Husserlian model. For Scheler, it is wrong to conceive of the mind as reason alone. Instead, he offers a broadly tripartite division of mind into the drives and instincts common to the lowest forms of life, habitual and adaptive intelligent behaviours developed by higher animals, and finally self-reflective, rational spirit as the specifically human achievement. Perceptions, and especially intentions, operate on a pre-rational level. Pure experience, free of intentionality and interpretation, is therefore impossible: meanings are hardwired into any conscious experience and any attempt to bracket them away will fail.
Sympathy likewise works at a pre-rational level; it is, for Scheler, the means through which we come to know ourselves. We recognise the other as an individual, and it is through our interaction with them (in particular, through love) that we come to be an individual ourselves. ‘Our’ world is therefore not our own. It is given form and substance by our social–cultural environment and the interactions we have with others. The problem of other minds, which so plagued Husserl, is thereby dissolved. We have, for Scheler, simply got it the wrong way around.
Evaluating Scheler’s arguments, I conclude that it is important not only to see Scheler as a contributor to the grand phenomenological tradition, but to appreciate his role as an original and insightful critic of that tradition, with much to contribute to current problems.
This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk
Phenomenology entered the field of cognitive sciences in the early 90s of the 20th century (Varela 1993). Since then, several proposals for introducing phenomenology to the cognitive sciences have been produced e.g. front-loaded phenomenology (Gallagher 2003), formalization of phenomenological description (Marbach 2010), neurophenomenology (Lutz & Thompson 2003). In my paper, I would like to propose another approach, namely non-reductive theoretical integration with mechanistic explanations.
Mechanistic explanations are applied widely in life sciences especially in biology (e.g. Craver & Derden 2013). However, in recent years there have been attempts at introducing mechanistic thought to cognitive sciences (e.g. Bechtel 2008, Craver 2007) including an attempt to mechanistically explain consciousness (e.g. Oizumi et al. 2014). I will argue that this attempt is doomed to failure due to its phenomenological naivety. However, it can be improved by incorporating a phenomenological approach.
In my paper, firstly, I will discuss the background of practicing phenomenology in the cognitive sciences. Secondly, I will characterize mechanistic explanations and show why the mechanistic naturalization of consciousness will fail if it refuses to incorporate phenomenology. Then, in order to prove that phenomenology can be integrated with mechanistic explanations, I will argue for a new reading of Husserlian phenomenology, namely that it can be read as a kind of functionalism. The main objective of Husserlian phenomenology was to give adequate descriptions of the functions of consciousness. Furthermore, phenomenologically described functions of consciousness are congruent to some extent with a mechanistic approach - they are autonomous, multi-level, and decomposable. Finally, I will argue that phenomenological practice can be inspiring and deliver explananda to researchers working on mechanistic explanation of consciousness.
This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk
This paper reports on the practical application of phenomenology in exploring the experience of pre-service teachers during their school placement as part of their course of teacher education. Whilst there has been much written about teacher education as a whole, there is relatively little research focused specifically on the experience of pre-service teachers as they work through their time in school. For this study, individual interviews were carried out with eleven participants on three separate occasions as part of doctoral work into the development of their subject knowledge. The paper will begin with an overview of the context of school experience where individuals enter new environments, developing relationships with staff and pupils, get to grips with unfamiliar systems and routines as well as acquiring new knowle dge about their subject(s). The paper will then critique some of the existing ways of looking at placement such as community of practice, activity theory and social constructivism that all frame the experience within relatively pre-determined structures. This paper then highlights the value of phenomenology in bringing new insights about what takes place, and the experience of the individuals. It will also discuss the importance of making appropriate choices, based on value judgments about which phenomenological traditions and perspectives might prove fruitful. One of the most significant challenges for the study was in making choices about the processes of data explication given the various traditions within phenomenology and the significant figures such as Husserl and Heidegger who have come to represent seemingly different approaches. For researchers new to phenomenology it is necessary to develop a full understanding of this and the paper will highlight some of the challenges met. Finally the findings of the research study will be presented and ideas for further study discussed.
This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk
Phenomenology is often taken as a philosophy involving knowledge or representation of experience: a reflective, descriptive, scientific logos about structures of phenomena. But what if phenomenological discourse, just as such, could also be applied to life as a kind of ethics? What if phenomenology can be a hortatory discourse inviting us into a certain way of life?
For the reflective meaning of phenomenology presupposes a more concrete meaning signifying a form of lived experience itself: a phenomenon with a certain logos or form to it, within it, and as it, which can go on to be represented as knowledge. Here phenomenology is fundamentally and firstly a way of life: life is phenomenological when it goes in a certain way that flows from, stays with, and lives into the natural grain of spontaneous, immediate, embodied experience.
If life can be phenomenological, however, life can also not be. Life with the grain of experience can be dangerous and difficult, so human life rebels against it with a gamut of theoretical and practical fantasies that are all versions of “metaphysics.” Life with metaphysics is self-contradictory, is inauthentic, and vitiates experience, but it promises us simulacra of safety in purporting to distance us from the threats and challenges we fear in the plane of experience.
Hence phenomenology needs to be seen not only as descriptive but also as evocative of a way of being human. Through meditating on Wittgenstein’s notion of philosophy as “therapy” and Merleau-Ponty’s idea that phenomenology means “putting essences back into existence,” I hope to show how phenomenology can be much more than knowledge. Engaging Wittgentsein and Merleau-Ponty helps us see phenomenology as a therapeutic, evocative discourse, an art of living, an ethics, meant to reconnect us with phenomenological life—meant to invite us into phenomenology as a way of life.
This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk
In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger moves from the example of van Gogh’s painting of the peasant’s shoes to Meyer’s poem Roman Fountain. We are told that the painting is not merely a faithful representation of something present at hand but rather it reproduces the shoes in their essence. Next, Heidegger considers Meyer’s poem. He points out that although the poem is a fairly straightforward poetic description, it is not “a reproduction of the general essence of the Roman fountain.” It would seem that, in the poem, truth is set to work symbolically or metaphorically. However, for Heidegger, great poetry cannot be considered metaphoric because it transcends the sensuous/nonsensous dichotomy at the heart of Western metaphysics. Instead, we must say that the fountain in the poem ‘things’ or opens up the fourfold in a way that is different to the peasants shoes. Heidegger claims that in the technological age truth withdraws or things stop ‘thinging.’ Despite this, a good deal of contemporary poetry is preoccupied with things as metaphors, perhaps demonstrating Heidegger’s thesis that in the technological age the possibility of great art is threatened. This paper will show how Heidegger’s account can bring us towards a new understanding of contemporary poetry. This is worked out in terms of a pair of sunglasses as an example of a ‘thingless’ consumer object. If Heidegger’s account of technology warrants serious consideration, the question becomes do such objects have essences and if not how are contemporary poets to respond to them? The paper will consider the poem american sunglasses by Sam Riviere. It can be argued that sunglasses are enframed in the poem as there are no other options are open to the poet. In other words, what is the role of the poet in a time where essences withdraw?
This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk
The question regarding the pertinence of using Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein as a guide for empirical research arises from contemporary attempts to bring Heideggerian phenomenology and cognitive science together. I will focus on one of the main figures behind these attempts, Hubert Dreyfus. I will start by showing that Dreyfus argues in favour of the idea that Heideggerian phenomenology can be naturalized and made continuous with scientific research on the basis of two implicit premises: (a) the interpretation of the analytic of Dasein as a regional ontology; and (b) an account of the relation between phenomenology and science as a relation that holds between two disciplines of the same kind, but that stand at different levels. The aim of this paper is to show that it is not possible to defend these premises on Heideggerian grounds. I will do so by analysing Heidegger’s considerations regarding anthropology, psychology, and biology, and their difference with the analytic of Dasein. I will argue that the main difference can be found in Heidegger’s definition of phenomenological concepts (i.e. formal indications). Finally, I will argue that, although Dreyfus fails to take into account the nature of phenomenological concepts as a relevant methodological matter, his project of naturalization raises a valid concern regarding the possibility of taking Heidegger’s ontology back to a relation with the ontic sciences.
This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk
According to Earth sciences, the planet has entered a new geological epoch. This epoch, referred to as the Anthropocene, is characterised by a significant human impact on nature and its processes. While humans have not equally contributed to the destruction of the non-human world, the dominance of this species calls for questioning the contemporary human condition. What is (now) wrong with ‘us’? The on-going widespread damage caused to the natural world, including the humankind, dates back (at least) to Industrial Revolution. The 19th century transition to new manufacturing processes and its existential relevance is well captured in Heidegger’s critique of technology. Heidegger notes that, in its essence, modern technology is a mode of revealing (Gestell) that takes humans further away from being itself. Albeit successful in challenging the technological frame of the modern human, classic phenomenology, however, does not provide tangible alternatives to think about being in also ecological terms. This paper argues that in order to respond to the undesired anthropogenic changes in the Earth’s biosphere – e.g. rising greenhouse gas levels, ocean acidification, deforestation and biodiversity deterioration – phenomenology needs to go ‘green’. In the Anthropocene, investigations on the human condition cannot be separated from (the question of) nature and its non-human processes. Dasein is not only connected to nature but also embedded in it, as well as unfolding from it. In this paper, I will conjoin elements of (mainly late) Heidegger’s phenomenology with some key tenets of ecophilosophical thinking to reconsider the human place vis-à-vis the rest of nature. As a response to the problems of the Anthropocene, I will outline an ‘ecophenomenosophy’ that rejects human–nature dualism, challenges the idea of progress, and calls for a non-anthropocentric approach to phenomena in the age of humans.
This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk
In a 1988 interview Levinas describes deformalisation of the notion of time as the essential theme of his research. Commentators have usually interpreted this central Levinasian idea as a provision of a concrete experience in which the formal structure of time is realised. Although correct, this accepted definition is too general. As I will demonstrate in my paper, for Levinas, different concrete experiences not only realise time differently, but, more importantly, are able to impact on the formal structure of time-consciousness itself. In order to defend this thesis, I will argue that Levinas understands the form of time-consciousness as governed by a three-aspect internal tendency or ‘conatus’: a striving for the present; a horizontal synchronisation of the past, present, and future experiences; and a self-projection into the infinite future. I will then examine the deformalisation of time in the phenomena of responsibility, fecundity, and death, in order to show the three distinct ways in which these phenomena modify, or put into question, the conatus characteristic of the form of time-consciousness. I will claim that a) responsibility for another human being interrupts the striving for the present, b) fecundity, and the time of the child it promises, refuses horizontal synchronisation, and c) death renders impossible the futural self-projection. I will conclude by suggesting that it is responsibility which occupies a privileged position with regards to the other concrete experiences which allow for the deformalisation of the notion of time.
This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk
I compare how two leading French phenomenologists of the last century – Michel Henry and Henri Maldiney – interpret Kandinsky’s heritage. Henry’s phenomenology is based on a distinction between two main modes of manifestation – the ordinary one, that is, the manifestation of the world and the “manifestation of life”; for him Kandinsky’s work provides a paradigmatic example of the second, more original, mode of manifestation, which is free from all forms of self-alienation. This is why Kandinsky’s paintings do no show us anything, but rather provoke in us certain impressions, certain feelings; they should be experienced, lived through. Henry claims that this living-though of the work of art is transformative; it is a kind of ascetic practice or mystical experience that goes beyond the distinction of the subject and the object. Maldiney also recognises in Kandinsky’s work an attempt to provide an access to an a-cosmic and a-historic experience of one’s inner self; yet for Maldiney this is not a positive characteristic. For Maldiney, the key distinction is not between modes of phenomenalisation, but between two dimensions of meaning (sens): the ordinary one, that he calls “gnostic” (gnosique), and “pathic”. This pathic dimension of meaning can be reached only in a personal contact with the living-world in its nascent state. According to Maldiney, there is no radical self-transformation which is not a transformation of one’s being-in- the-world and one’s meaning of the world (and vice versa). My access to myself cannot bypass my relation to the world, and so Kandinsky’s paintings cannot induce a true transformation of self. The disagreement of Henry and Maldiney on Kandinsky doesn’t unfold on the level of the phenomenological description of the concrete aesthetic experience, but rather on the level of metaphysics.
This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk
Living with others is a key factor shaping our urban life. Their bodily presence scaffolds our social world and is involved in the way the built environment appears to us. In this article we highlight the influence of the embodied presence of other human beings on the constitution of a special type of urban architecture – the extraordinary architectural space such as museums, theaters, public libraries and central stations. Our analysis, which lies at the intersection between architecture, phenomenology and cognitive science, suggests that being in the direct presence of others constitutes this extraordinary architectural space in the sense that it transforms the built setting into a negotiated place and reveals for the subject some of its extraordinary properties. The architectural examples we discuss show that these intersubjective advantages are often embedded in and encouraged by the design of such built objects.
This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk
“A few seconds ago there was nothing. But now, here I am! There’s only one logical conclusion. I am God and this is my universe.” The opening line to Pneuma: Breath of Life sets the scene for a video game that attempts something very odd for a video game to make the theme of its main story: Descartes’ cogito ergo sum—“I think, therefore I am”. Yet, this is exactly what this puzzle game seems to do; going so far, as the opening line indicates, as to critique Descartes’ formulation to suggest that the Cogito would think itself to be God. To a seasoned philosopher this “conclusion” may seem questionable, indeed some of the meditations that Pneuma proceeds to make from its position of deity would strike us as absurd and philosophically unsophisticated. But, as this paper means to show, this would be the very point of the game’s philosophical exploration: to show the absurdity of the Cartesian Meditation itself. Once this point is recognised, Pneuma reveals itself not to be an exploration of the Cogito, but an exploration of the being of Dasein. As such, contained in the seemingly absurd meditations of Pneuma are novel reflections on Heidegger’s notions of being-toward-death, authenticity and the they-self.
This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk
I will look at the concept of ‘a temporal object’ coined by Edmund Husserl and to address its complex development in the philosophy of technology by the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler as the question of the ‘temporalisation of consciousness’ . Husserl coined the term ‘a temporal object’ in order to show that ‘the object of inquiry’ (the intention of the consciousness directed towards objects of the world) is a temporal state of the investigation itself. This temporal state creates the condition for the existence of a temporal object, which gives the ‘striking evidence’(‘schlagender Evidenz’) . A temporal object means that the object is not only in time, but it is constituted through time and its flux coincides with the flux of consciousness. A temporal object plays the role in the constitution of the subject since it is an object towards which the consciousness is directed. The temporal object is the part of the content that it translates (this content is the world) . The consciousness is also a part of the content, but there is a difference: the temporal object perceived as a result of the intention may be developed by the consciousness differently: the consciousness may accept this object but also may reject it. In both cases the ‘consciousness’ performs the evidence , whereas the temporal object makes evidence available. The consciousness is the intention of the subject; the temporal object is the intentionality of the world. This idea is developed by Stiegler, who applies the notion of temporal objects to his critique of the technical “industrial temporalisation of the consciousness under the pressure of hyperindustrialisation” . I would like to show how in this process a problem of a fatal separation between the object and the subject is created and continues to influence contemporary thought in relation to technics and memory.
This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk
This paper will review the potential reason for discrepancies in sentencing outcomes in magistrate’s courts in England. Other disciplines such as criminology, psychology and sociology, have tried to explain why sentencing disparities occur, but have resulted in superficial analysis which has failed to penetrate to the core of this particular issue. Through phenomenological inquiry, this paper will investigate how individuals involved in the criminal justice system could potentially be consciously and unconsciously influenced by innately determined types. Conscious and unconscious reliance on subjectively determined types could allow assumptions to inform decision making, particularly when they are used indiscriminately and un-reflexively. This paper will demonstrate how innately determined types could operate in practice in magistrate’s courts, and assess whether it is possible to interrupt these processes.