BSP Podcast

Season 8 concludes with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Emily Hughes   Abstract: In this paper I interpret the experience of boredom during the Covid 19 pandemic in light of Heidegger’s analysis of profound boredom, wherein time slows down and the world in its entirety becomes boring for one. For Heidegger, the experience of profound boredom is distressing, in that it involves a feeling of not being at home in the world. And yet it is also a revelatory experience, because it is disclosive of the structure of temporality and thereby new futural possibilities. Drawing on long-form questionnaire responses to the experience of social distancing during the pandemic, I will demonstrate that the experience of profound boredom during lockdown in many ways conforms to Heidegger’s account. I will argue, however, that in lockdown the revelatory capacity of profound boredom is constrained by an accelerated, technological conception of chronological time, which is imposed by the constantly shifting timelines for the easing of restrictions, the administration of the vaccine, the opening of borders, etc. As a result, I will argue, the revelatory capacity of profound boredom is undermined in lockdown such that, instead of disclosing new futural possibilities, it has resulted in the proliferation of alienation, despair and disillusionment.   Biography: Dr Emily Hughes is a postdoctoral research associate in philosophy at the University of York, working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience.’ She completed her PhD at the University of New South Wales. Her 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.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Alessandro Anzà   Abstract: Before becoming a subject in philosophical and political studies, transgenerationality is a genetic or generative approach that reflects upon the ‘process of becoming’ of phenomena and their constitutive systems, and conceives this as a process that occurs over the generations. This term refers to transgenerational inheritance of epigenetic markers from one organism to the next or the psychological term, which asserts that behaviours of trauma can be transferred in between generations. Questioning generative phenomenology in the contemporary scenario means embracing the legacy of the concept of ‘generation’ in the history of philosophy and also exploring its potential for different fields of knowledge, such as politics, ethics, education. The first meaningful occurrence of the concept is in Aristotle’s Περ γενσεως κα φϑορς (On Generation and Corruption), wherein γνεσις means that things come into being from not being through causes, or that everything is generated purely through alteration. In 1924, Heidegger claimed that in research into history we find unclarified phenomena, such as that of generations, of the connection between generations. As he wrote, the historicity of Dasein grounded in the possibility according to which any specific present understands how to be futural (GA 64). In the Heideggerian philosophy of time and in the Arendtian phenomenology, we find a connection between the project of education and the revolutionary power of the future (Hodge, 2015; Loidolt, 2018, Parekh, 2008). In recent years transgenerational approaches contributed to philosophy by providing ethical frameworks based on the analysis of the contemporary world as well as on the prediction about the future of the Earth and the fate of globalised humanity (Andina, 2020; Nixon, 2020). The aim of this paper is to present transgenerationality as the obligations to future generations, but also the call of present-day humanity has an historical challenge to education.   Biography: Alessandro Anzà (1992) earned a BA and MA in Philosophy with distinction from the University of Palermo. He is an Alumnus of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies in Naples, with a scholarship in Political Philosophy (2019), and an Alumnus of the Harvard Kennedy School, Executive Education in Social Sciences (2020). His field of specialisation is phenomenology, 4 hermeneutics, political theory, and interdisciplinary studies on education and social inequality. He is publishing his thesis on time and education in Heidegger’s work. Waiting for a PhD, his research is about fundamentals concepts, such as humanity, education, and freedom, in Heidegger and Arendt’s philosophical legacy.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Ileana Bortun   Abstract: I approach the theme of the future as a present concern from an ethico-political perspective, through an existential reading of Arendt’s account of judgment. From this perspective, “witnessing the future” is the human ability to envisage a possibility not yet fulfilled which, albeit rooted in the past, does not follow necessarily from it. There is an interplay between reproductive and productive imagination which opens up the space of freedom necessary for reflecting on future possibilities and choosing among them. I begin by showing why Arendt’s conception of political judgment is relevant for relating to the future beyond the passive expectation of the not-yet to happen. To assume the future as a present concern is to assume the responsibility for the future – not only for our personal future, but also for that of others and of the common world we share with them. Ontologically speaking, it is a responsibility that we always already have; ontically speaking, however, we can assume it or not. I argue that judging or what Arendt calls “representative thinking” is a way in which we can assume this responsibility: by looking at a particular situation or a possible course of action from the viewpoints of all involved in it or potentially affected by it, we can discriminate between right and wrong and thus choose how to act, taking as a reference point the potential agreement of others. Nevertheless, the ability of judging to guide future action is undermined by a widespread thesis that Arendt’s work would contain two different, even contradictory, models of judgment: one practical and future-oriented (involving the agent), one contemplative and past-oriented (involving “the spectator”). By connecting Arendt’s conception of judging to Heidegger’s interpretation of temporality, I argue that this separation is artificial, because the past and the future cannot be separated.   Biography: Dr Ileana Bortun received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Bucharest (in 2014), with the thesis “Shaping an Existential Ethics by Identifying the Connections between Metaphysics and Totalitarianism”, arguing for the possibility of developing an ethics starting from Heidegger’s 6 existential analytic, by taking the kinship between metaphysics (in Heidegger’s interpretation) and totalitarianism (in Arendt’s interpretation) as a negative reference point. In a post-doctoral project (2018-2020), she developed further this existential ethics through a phenomenological approach to political judgment (in Arendt’s conception). She is currently involved in the project “I was there. Laying the Foundations for a Comprehensive Phenomenology of Testimony”.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from David Deamer   Abstract: Luisa Rey is reading the letters of a dead man: ‘I’m trying to understand’, she says, why ‘we keep making the same mistakes over and over’. Somewhat abashed, Adam Ewing recites a question from 12 memory, ‘how do we know what we can change, and what things must remain sacred and inviolable?’ Sonmi-451 is in magnetic shackles facing the Archivist. Fabricants, she responds accusingly, ‘have just one possible future’. Zachry listens in dread to the Abbess; possessed, she warns him of the dangerous days ahead: ‘Bridge a broken, hide below. Hands a bleedin, can’t let go. Enemy’s sleepin, don’t slit that throat’. In a cheap hotel, Robert Frobisher signs a letter to his lover with ‘Yours Eternally’, then shoots himself with a stolen Luger. Timothy Cavendish beams. After all the awfulness of the last few days, yes, ‘tomorrow life can begin afresh, afresh, afresh!’ Cloud Atlas (Wachowskis, Tykwer | 2012) concerns six very different characters traversing very different times and very different spaces across the world over some 500 years. These vectors are a loop composed of a disjunctive mosaic of images rendering a complex narration of disparate genres and tones, where the life of each character is captured in the crisis of their present while synchronously effecting and affecting the future vector. Accordingly, I argue, Cloud Atlas has a narrative that sees futurity as polysemous – a perspectival simultaneity of stasis and flux; anticipation, destiny, and novelty; circularity, progress, revolution, and decay. To make this argument I employ Nietzsche, expressly Beyond Good and Evil (1886), sub-titled as it is Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Such resonance with the film, in turn, provides a lens on Nietzsche’s text, as staging the problems of the subject, society, drives, bodies and will in the present as a concern of a fundamental philosophy of the future: beyond brute oppositions of open or closed, static or dynamic, freedom or necessity (§2;§24).   Biography: Dr David Deamer is a free scholar whose research focuses upon cinema, culture, and the philosophy of Deleuze, Bergson, and Nietzsche. He is the author of two books on Deleuze (EUP 2016; Bloomsbury 2014). His most recent essay is ‘Deleuze’s Three Syntheses Go to Hollywood’ (2019), written for Film-Philosophy and shortlisted for the journal’s Annual Article Award 2020 (losing out to something far better). Deamer irregularly appears at conferences and invited seminars, tries to maintain a couple of blogs, and is co-presenter of the philoscifiz podcast (exploring on-screen sci-fi and philosophy). He has been working on a book on Nietzsche and cinema for some time.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from J. Reese Faust   Abstract: Frantz Fanon closes his two major works with appeals to alter the flesh of the social world: Black Skin, White Masks pleas for a “sloughing off” of one’s skin (« un dépouillement »), while The Wretched of the Earth calls for us to “make a new skin” (« faire peau neuve »). Despite the clear influence that his notion of the body schema had on Fanon, it is surprising that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the “flesh of the world” (« le chair du monde ») does not feature more frequently in scholarship—particularly so given Fanon’s sociogenic account of collective meaning-making. In this paper, I will read the diplopic ontology of Merleau-Ponty alongside the similarly deferred ontology that Fanon tacitly uses in Wretched of the Earth. I will argue that reading Fanonian sociogeny in terms of the flesh of the world renders his ethical and political demands all the more pressing, because it renders the future already pre-figured—although not totally determined—in the present. On this account, if the present quite literally consists in the socio-ontological grounding for any possible future, then embodied activity constructs and delimits those futures as part of the same ethico-ontological totality. In this sense, I argue that the future cannot be a “given,” since our embodied, intersubjective activity is what constitutes the horizons against which we act toward/in light of those futures. Since the ethical demands of the determinable future redound back onto those of the present, (in)capability is equivalent to futurity. I conclude by reflecting on how this reading alters Sylvia Wynter’s Fanonian call to (re)fashion the future of humanness, through (re)conceptualising “being human as praxis.”   Biography: J. Reese Faust is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at The University of Memphis. His primary areas of research are philosophy of law/critical legal theory and contemporary Continental philosophy, with interests in decolonial thought and social and political philosophy. He is currently writing a dissertation articulating a critical legal hermeneutic, using embodied phenomenology and Ronald Dworkin’s notion of dignity.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Isabel Rocamora   Abstract: My current moving image project, The Deep, focuses on Scotland’s rich and coveted natural resources to consider the impacts of human actions and technologies on the environment and local communities – groundwater contamination, air and sound pollution, the fracturing and depletion of the earth’s integrity – alongside the vitalising connection between human life and the forces of nature. The aim of this paper is to share concrete ways in which Heidegger’s mid-30s’ Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) and “The Origin of the Work of Art” inspire and inform the conceptual frame, structure and aesthetic principles guiding my creative process. I do this in three moves. I first place factual research findings in dialogue with a Heideggerian ‘Ethics of the Earth’, which I locate in the interplay (or strife) between the sense of “emergency” (Polt 2006) characterising our anthropogenic epoch (for Heidegger the “abandonment” of being and nature in “machination” and 39 surface experience) and the originary “emergence” of being, nature and world (Storey 2015). This oscillating event – thought by Heidegger as one of appropriation, ereignis – helps me imagine an artwork that, while remaining mindful of “the background” that makes our world meaningful, offers an open (because interruptive) site for the intensification of thinking and questioning, in realtime. For me, after Heidegger and in dialogue with Zabala (2017), this means summoning in the viewer “shock and diffidence” – trauma and awe, emergency and emergence – through visual treatments of scale, juxtaposition, rupture and temporality. I illustrate my process with photographic experiments that, placing the ancient geologies of the low-lying Outer Hebrydes alongside gigantic decommissioned North Sea oil rigs today berthed in Cromarty Firth, aim to plunge us into a sense of “deep time” (Wood 2019), attuning us to self and world in a present moment from which a sustainable future on Earth may be freshly envisaged.   Biography: Isabel Rocamora is a moving image artist and scholar working at the intersections of ethics, aesthetics and phenomenology. She received her AHRC-funded PhD on relations between experimental cinema and Heidegger’s early ontology from the University of Edinburgh (2019) and is presently a visiting scholar-artist at Pompeu Fabra University, Center for Vattimo’s Philosophy and Archives. Isabel’s multi-awarded moving image works have been widely exhibited, e.g.: Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; Koffler Gallery, Toronto; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; Austrian Cultural Forum, NYC; and Channel 4 UK. Recent publications include a practitioner essay in Cinematic Intermediality (EUP).   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Aanastasios Dimopoulos   Abstract: Among the various effects of the recent pandemic was the need to adapt the means of delivering mental healthcare in the community. The use of online platforms which were already there as possibilities to use sparingly, suddenly became the self-evident norm to adopt. Very soon it became clear that remote consultations will not be an interim measure, relegated for the period during the pandemic. The voices suggesting that they are the future of healthcare became dominant. Advantages such as “increased patient access” were illustrated as obvious benefits to maximise available resources. The language of resource is dominant in healthcare that considerations about what cannot be measured are neglected. This is not a wilful neglect but rather an emergent self-evident attitude that appropriated in its ontological presuppositions enframes its intentional horizon in a discourse aimed to identify resources and optimise their outcomes. If the premise is right, then what will be the impact in mental healthcare. The articulation of clinical judgement in psychiatry relies heavily in the expertise gained in the context of embodied encounters between patient and clinician. What Polanyi calls the demonstrative elements that give rise to an act of recognition of something as a particular case belong to a space of encounter that is constitutionally different. Furthermore, this “difference” is still in its infancy. Intuitively, this “difference” is grasped mostly as “absence of habit” that is supplemented by pre-existing embodied encounters and of an increased reliance on ready-made theoretical constructs. This act of “filling in” will likely fade away over time 13 because it will lose the ability to flexibly understand distinctions in the phenomena. New implicit rules will take their own form, not yet possible to capture theoretically. In the coming decades, this is likely the Event with the most transformative potential and happens with Care mostly silent.   Biography: Dr Anastasios Dimopoulos works as a Consultant Psychiatrist in the NHS and in the private sector. Currently, he is involved with the Community Transformation Project that aims to change the way mental health services are delivered in the community. He is trained in Daseinsanalysis and is a member of the International Federation of Daseinsanalysis. Furthermore, he holds an MA in Philosophy of Mental Health at UCL. His special interest is the introduction of philosophy to medical education in mental health, to address complexity and uncertainty. He has recently been elected chair of The Philosophy SIG of the Royal College of Psychiatry.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Tomás Lally   Abstract: In this paper I want to flip the conference theme and privilege the living present. The integratedness of temporal consciousness is such that this flipping is possible. The conference theme emphasises concerns about the future in the present moment but I want to emphasise how what is happening now will be a future concern. We cannot change the past but we can act in the present to effect change in what will be considered part of the past tomorrow. Right now in the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic previously unthinkable measures may be necessary, but that this does not invalidate critique. Humanity is experiencing a collective trauma, we are sacrificing our rights and freedoms for the sake of an uncertain future, a future in which we will experience to a greater or lesser extent what we might describe as COVID-lateral damage. This paper will show, drawing on Merleau-Ponty how in the present crisis the dialogue of touch has been undermined, we are virtually present but bodily absent, bodily present but distant, the face of the other is masked, an ethical demand (Levinas) muted, the other’s status as autonomous subject has been recast as potentially infectious object (the Sartrean other). This paper will argue on the basis of Arendt’s account of the gap between past and future that in the living present we have a duty to mitigate future regrets and future trauma. In privileging the present as a future concern we emphasize its existential possibility for responsible autonomous ethical action. This is a requirement lest we arrive in a post COVID future framing a retrospective narrative about powerlessness and lack of autonomy, proffering the Nuremberg defense. This thesis has application not only in the present but in every future present.   Biography: Tomás Lally completed degrees in Philosophy in the 1980's, B.A (NUIM), B.Ph. (Pont. Univ. Maynooth.) and M.A, (University of London). I returned to academia after an absence of 30 years in 2017 to commence a practice based PhD in English and Philosophy. He combines his interest in philosophy with his interest in creative writing. His PhD project consists of a Philosophy thesis exploring the origin and development of Self in an intersubjective context. He is also writing a Novel on the theme of new beginnings which explores how received narratives define character and the possibility of deconstructing these narratives.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Ruth Irwin   Abstract: Knowledge and memory are closely entwined. The advent of technologies such as the written word, clay tablets, paper, and the printing press, have transformed knowledge transmission from the oral tradition. Technologies have been highlighted as crucial to the formation of exosomatic memory and increasingly sophisticated human knowledge by Leroi-Gourhan, Derrida, Stiegler and others. Technologies interrupt the need for immediate experience or direct transmission from elders to youth. This positions technologies such as writing, art, and more recently, cinema, and computers at the forefront of cultural transmission, knowledge production, and education. Stiegler follows Leroi-Gourhan (1945) and Martin Heidegger (1927) to examine technology and exosomatic memory from the Palaeolithic to the modern. Heidegger’s critique of technology as the enframing of modern thought is at play. Heidegger argues that people have become alienated from the natural environment, as everything, from human subjectivity to the historical and ecological context are understood as consumable resources, waiting in standing reserve. The presumptions of technology as a moderator and catalyst of exosomatic memory has failed to understand how the natural environment was incorporated into indigenous modes of knowledge and epistemology as an exosomatic tool. Stiegler argues that technology is accelerating beyond the capacity of brain synapses to keep up. Consequently, the human mind has become passively receptive rather than dynamic and creative. Artificial Intelligence directs research pathways and creates community ‘bubbles’ where alternative viewpoints are uninteresting and excluded. With an increasing lack of exposure to alternative viewpoints, people are participating less in their wider community and this has impacts on democratic participation and the ability to forge compromise and new understanding. Diversity is still present but its exposure is less prolific. The apathy and passivity generated by the screen is cultivating an avoidance of engagement, like a late modern ‘opiate of the masses’ that allows the capitalist forces producing climate change to continue. Perhaps reevaluating how indigenous exosomatic memory engages with the environment rather than alienating it, may help us to creatively overcome the acceleration of technology and its consequences in consumerism.   Paper part of pre-constituted panel with Joff P.N. Bradley:   ‘Interrogating Stiegler on Determinism and the Anthropocene’ – Stiegler's work on technology and the Anthropocene takes in Heidegger's critical account of modern determinism, the enframing of epistemology as consumer demand. Stiegler follows Heidegger's lead by seeking a more originating approach to technology, in the earliest palaeolithic record, right up to the contemporary technology of quantum computing and robotics. Paleaolithic techne evolved devices such as cave art that shape knowledge with exosomatic memory. Stiegler's route traverses the thermodynamic economics of Georgescu-Roegen from which he develops his important concept of neganthropy. Stiegler's compelling work signals searching for a diluted 'phamakon' for emerging from the eschatological Anthropocene and forging a possible future. The enframing of the technological Gestell is maintained and exacerbated with accelerated technology. Both Kropotkin and Maori philosophy, in vastly different ways, create a foil to this determinism, throwing up alternatives that counter the modernist epistemological framework. Futures cannot abandon the savvy technological innovation of late modernity when there is 7.7 billion people to nourish, but indigenous and literary modes of knowing merge wild ecologies and anarchic concepts to global culture, opening up modernity beyond its consumerist framework.   Biography: Ruth Irwin is an Adjunct Professor at RMIT and writing climate change policy for local government in Sydney. She is working on a new book, called Economic Futures, which will come out with Routledge shortly. Her earlier books include Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, (2008) Bloomsbury, and Climate Change and Philosophy (2010), Bloomsbury, amongst others   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Daire Boyle   Abstract: In his 1913 work Ideas I, Edmund Husserl stated that “[c]ertainly an incorporeal and, paradoxical as it may sound, even an inanimate and non-personal consciousness is conceivable” (§54). This quote, understood in context, serves to underline the irreducibility of consciousness even after the world is “nullified” or “annihilated”. That this annihilation could happen is due to the phenomenological reduction; Husserl does not wish to deny the existence of the natural world, but simply wishes to consider the consequences of putting our naturalistic understanding of it out of play. In the context of artificial intelligence this assessment of consciousness is impossible to overlook; Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity, as outlined in Ideas I, describes what consciousness truly is like no other philosophical movement. Many thinkers use Husserl’s phenomenological understanding of consciousness as a roadblock for machine consciousness – how could machines, created by man, ever have access to the specifically non-naturalistic mechanism of consciousness? We argue that there is another way to interpret Husserl’s work, and support this by analysing strands of his argumentation that can be characterised as open to the possibility of artificial consciousness. We further argue that Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity, as method, must be broadened in assessing technologies arising out of a rapidly-changing world in order to prepare ourselves for the future of AI research and its potentialities. The philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler is suitable for this task, especially given Scheler’s appreciation of Husserl’s phenomenological project. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence research from computer science will continue at an exponential rate, therefore we must use the insights of Husserl and Scheler to presage this coming new epoch and deepen our understanding of what it means to be conscious.   Paper part of pre-constituted panel with Susan Gottlöber and Dave O'Brien:   ”The World as Technological Advancement” – Perspectives from Philosophical Anthropology and Phenomenology on Transhumanism, Consciousness, AI, and our future concerns’ This panel will assess three contemporary and future issues that are of serious imminent concern to philosophy; namely, transhumanism, machine/artificial consciousness, and consciousness in light of rapid technological advancements. Each panel member's paper shall address these concerns with reference to philosophical anthropology as foundational paradigm, while phenomenological methods shall be employed to better analyse and evaluate said concerns. The link between philosophical anthropology and phenomenology shall be emphasised and concepts from Max Scheler, in particular, will be examined in phenomenological terms.   Biography: Daire Boyle is a 3rd-year PhD candidate at Maynooth University and is currently studying in KU Leuven. He is also a graduate teaching assistant at Maynooth University, and has experience of guest lecturing. Daire completed a BSc in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Philosophy in 2017, and an MA in Philosophy in 2018, both at Maynooth University. His current work, and PhD thesis, 7 seeks to utilise Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology as an answer to modern debates on consciousness and machine consciousness. This is an interdisciplinary project and the thesis considers contemporary results from computer science in assessing the possibility for artificial consciousness.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Javier Moscoso Cala   Abstract: ‘A New Humanism? The Precarious Condition of the Human in Judith Butler’ To be qualified as human is a troubling matter after anti-humanistic critiques to humanness. Despite this, some thinkers such as Judith Butler have returned to using the term "the human" to refer to 30 something more than a universal whose production is exclusionary. In this paper I propose to deem the human in terms of a precarious condition intertwined in the midst of animal life and nature. This human life is persistently exposed to violence as derealisation of life and humanness. This refurbishment of the human allows us to think of it as a process open to the future. The movement of the human is characterised by a dynamic of catachresis, subversive reiteration and performative contradiction. The possibility of reiteration and performative contradiction is made possible when derealisation lives unexpectedly speak to the human on its own terms. This point refers to the instability of every form that the universal of the human takes, its attributes and its movement. Yet it is still possible to wonder about the condition of precariousness in which the universal of the human always takes place. The unstable relation of the human to the natural, the animal, life and technology leads to unstable limits of what is recognisable as human. The possibility of violence intrinsic to the human reveals its inevitable condition of vulnerability, whereby not only is any life exposed to injury but also to no longer being considered a human life. Judith Butler is an author who manages to restore the human by thinking on its condition and not on its attributes. The condition of crisis and precariousness of the human, made and unmade by language, its multiple relations and normativity, opens every figure of the human to a future that is yet to come.   Biography: Javier Moscoso Cala is a Postgraduate Researcher at University of Malaga. His interests are vulnerability and the human in contemporary philosophers Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler. He recently published "Apuntes para una política precaria del duelo en tiempos de covid-19", in Nacho Escutia, María Begoña Fleitas and Teresa Oñate (ed.) Pandemia, Globalización, Ecología, Madrid, Fénix-UNED, 2020, 85-94. He presented several papers in local and international conferences in Spain and is in charge of Derivas. Seminario Permanente de Estética at Complutense University of Madrid with three other colleagues.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Panos Theodorou   Abstract: Generally speaking, these naturalised renderings of Phenomenology aspire to show that intelligent behaviour in living beings is grounded in that they are embodied and embedded in a world that they enactively constitute. Intentionality of the mind and its meaning-giving essence are understood in such a context. Meaningfulness of cognition and behaviour, however, presuppose the organisation and the synthesis of sensory and other elements in a horizon of temporality. But how is the opening up of this horizon made possible in the living being? Quite a few ideas have been offered to this effect (Varela 1999, van Gelder 1999, Lloyd 2002, Grush 2006, 2017). They attempt to ‘transplant’ Husserl’s account of temporality into the neuronal substructure of the living organisms. These attempts, however, have notable defects. In our paper we develop a detailed but concise critique of the aforementioned views and proposals. We show that they wrongly assimilated Husserl’s analysis of inner time consciousness as one concerning timing rather than temporality (Varela, van Gelder, Lloyd) or as concerning prediction of hyletic data rather than temporal flow (Grush). We argue that either their ideas regarding the specific neuronal networks and functions that give rise to the opening up of the temporal horizon show toward irrelevant directions (Varela, van Gelder, Lloyd) or they lack any successful positive suggestion (Grush). We present and develop the novel idea that the lived-through temporal horizonality resides in the orectic (appetitive-desirative) character of basic functions of the living organism. We offer a classification of the orectic phenomena in the different levels of the living beings. We appeal to Panksepp’s behavioral neuro-ethological findings regarding the presence of a SEEKING system in interconnected dopaminergic circuits in the subcortical frontal brain. Finally, we interpret these results in a way that suggests how this system makes possible the opening up of the primordial temporal horizon. Paper co-authored by Anna-Irene Baka, Costas Pagondiotis, and Constantinos Picolas.   Biography: Panos Theodorou is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Crete (Greece). He is author of the books Perception and Theory as Practices (Kritiki, 2006; in Greek), Husserl and Heidegger on Reduction, Primordiality, and the Categorial (Springer, 2015), Introduction to the Philosophy of Values (Kallipos, 2016; in Greek). He has translated in Greek and commented the corpus of the texts written by Husserl and Heidegger for the ‘Britannica Artikel’ project (Kritiki, 2005) and Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (Parts I and II) (Nissos, 2012). Articles of his, on Phenomenology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of emotions and values, appear in international journals and volumes.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Cătălina Condruz   Abstract: The event of birth has been a topic of concern for the phenomenological tradition and remains up to date since birth represents our starting point in life, just like dead is generally considered the last point reached. However, it’s still an event which involve us, even if it does not happen to us (Marion). The birth event makes us vulnerable, totally overwhelmed by the extraordinary fact of being thrown in the world. In Marion’s terms, we are passive subjects (adonnés) receiving ourselves from the saturated phenomenon of the birth event. Unlike Marion, Claude Romano’s evenimential hermeneutics proposes a different account according to which birth is the original event that opens the advenant’s world and draws upon a temporality more original than the Heideggerian one. The present paper goes beyond the paths followed by both Jean-Luc Marion and Claude Romano, by dissecting the question of testimony and outlining as accurately as possible its fundamental role in framing the temporal dimension of the birth event. Firstly, my main objective will be to analyse in detail the two philosophical positions briefly mentioned above, namely the phenomenology of givenness of Marion and the evenimential hermeneutics of Romano. Secondly, in order to clarify my position, I will refer to the relation between analyst and analysed and I will show that it can be interpreted as an event featuring the birth of the one (the analysand) witnessed by the other (the analyst). This comparison will help me show that both events incapsulate the future, releasing it in degrees of givenness. Moreover, it will help me bring to the fore that the passive subject that I am in the moment of my birth is witnessing not only my factuality, but is witnessing also the future because is setting up a gaping fissure that will be always opened.   Biography: Cătălina Condruz is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, under the supervision of Dr. Lect. Cristian Ciocan. In her thesis, she is reconstructing the philosophical framework of intersubjectivity within Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, taking as point of departure the notion of counter-intentionality. During her second year of PhD, Cătălina was involved in Erasmus programme and spent a semester at University of Rouen (France), working under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Natalie Depraz.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Melissa Burchard   Abstract: If it is true, as Tribunella argues in Melancholia and Maturation, that US culture includes a belief that children must undergo certain forms of trauma in order to become “proper” adults, then at least one sense in which the future is a present concern is in the form of cultural machinations directed at the formation of future adults. The characteristics presented as desirable for “proper” adulthood align with the values of the dominant culture and consumer capitalism; for example, seriousness and productivity, as well as heteronormativity. Clearly, this conservative approach maintains the status quo, rather than inventing different future possibilities. The question can then be posed, is this picture of proper adulthood, and the future that it presumes, one that is actually desirable on moral and/or political/social grounds? Given, for example, how much the US has seen in the last year of renewed or revitalised racial and ethnic violence from whites, it seems arguable that our “program” for developing “proper” adults is either failing, or succeeding, but producing adults that should not be considered proper under current conditions of increasing diversity and our (at least rhetorical) commitment to equality. I will argue in this presentation that the belief that trauma is necessary for producing “proper” adulthood is deeply misguided in that it is re-producing an ongoing kind of “hazing” as initiation into adulthood, based on a “for your own good” mentality. I will introduce the possibility that if we were to change our picture of the necessity for trauma for developing proper adults, we might get a kind of adult that is more inclined toward open-mindedness, empathy and inclusivity, which would allow us to move toward a future of greater peace and equity.   Biography: Melissa Burchard is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina Asheville. She works in theoretical and applied ethics, and social and political philosophy. Her current research interests are primarily in the philosophy of trauma, especially in representations of trauma in children’s literature and popular culture. Recent publications include Philosophical Reflections on Mothering in Trauma and a special edition of Public Philosophy Journal, “Philosophical Engagements with Trauma”, co-edited with Courtney Miller and Hannah Bacon.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Siobhán Lenihan   Abstract: Recommendation engines, curated feeds, and personalisation systems of all kinds have long since become a domineering force in technologically-mediated spaces; the impetus to freely roam and to choose one's own path becoming increasingly rare as control is sold for convenience (Bozdag & van den Hoven, 2015; de Vries, 2010). The next logical leap for this optimising force is into an enmeshed digital and physical experience, as heralded by the advent of augmented reality technologies. In this omnipresent context, one's sense of self and place is altered and re-altered algorithmically, in a manner which may blur the line between implant and intent beyond recognition. While it has been suggested that a sister medium, virtual reality, may offer the conditions for a life-world that transcends spatial restraints (Metzinger, 2018), it is arguable that augmented reality poses a threat in the inverse – that the fracturing of perception across personalisation lines may impair the shared sense of living together within a collective consciousness. With such attention to the socially-oriented phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the question of how to address this alienation may be found in the adaptation of the notion of 'drifting' found in the theory of psychogeography. In extending rebellion against the practical intentions of the built environment to that of pervasive technologies, there emerges the potential to thwart one's artificial predictors and regain agency over both individuated and shared experience.   Biography: Siobhán Lenihan is a PhD candidate investigating practical ethics applications for extended reality technologies, supervised by Prof Heike Schmidt-Felzmann and funded by Science Foundation Ireland within the Research Training in Digitally-Enhanced Reality (D-REAL) programme. She holds a B.A. (Joint Honours) in Philosophy, Sociology & Political Science from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and a HDipSci in Web Technologies from the National College of Ireland. Previously, a bright-eyed graduate Content Strategist for the Central Statistics Office. They try to separate the critical segment of their life led online from the remaining recreational time, with middling success.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Roberto Wu   Abstract: The future is usually taken from the perspective of an absence, as a horizon that is continually projected from the present, but which is not already there. As present centered, this temporal relationship attempts to bridge the future fulfilling it with our expectations and accordingly subordinating it to us. However, a phenomenology of temporal responsibility challenges this dynamic. On the one hand, it does not consider the “absence” of the future as a sheer void to be fulfilled, for it is already meaningful to us. On the other hand, it does not take the future as something present-at-hand merely delivered by human actions, but rather, as an instance of time that resists to be determined by the present, a resistance that is related to the alterity of the future ones. Future events, as enacted by forms of alterity, are unpredictable and elude dominion and calculation. The inadequacy of conceiving future practices as mere extension of ours consists in the failure in recognising that our responsibility to contemporary others differs from that to futural others. Considering that the future presents distinct instances of world that will inevitably collide with structures, arrangements, values and meanings as employed today, and also that different communities and individuals will perform distinct courses of action, one may ask how phenomenological investigation may elaborate a temporal responsibility without making violence to the alterity of the futural ones. In order to develop these issues, this proposal focuses primarily on two subjects: first, the elaboration of phenomenological categories that render future people as meaningful in their alterity, and second, the suggestion of minimal conditions of achieving a temporal community based on the openness to distinct forms of alterity in time.   Biography: Roberto Wu is Professor of Philosophy, Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil), author of numerous paper and book chapters on Heidegger, Gadamer, Levinas, and phenomenology.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Spyridon Kaltsas   Abstract: The main aim of this paper is to explore the conceptual relations between hope and the concept of the future in the neo-pragmatism of Richard Rorty. My presentation is divided into two main sections. In order to establish my position, I will first undertake a reconstruction of Rorty’s thought with a focus on the concept of hope. Rorty’s neo-pragmatism centers on the need to rethink freedom after the collapse of foundationalism and seeks to understand the possibility of building a common future without accepting the absolutist and authoritatian pretensions of essentialist metaphysics. Rorty aims to substitute hope for knowledge and replace objective certainty with a new relation to the future of a better common world. In this respect, hope is not understood as an objective ideal, but is rather to be seen as a practical achievement. However, Rorty’s view on the relation between hope and the future is far from being without problems. In the second section of my paper, I will try to further elucidate my argument by turning to the contradiction between two different conceptions of the future in Rorty’s thought. The first one understands the future as the fulfillment of the potential of the present, while the second one regards the future as wholly different from the present, as an alternative to present constraints in knowledge and social practice. I conclude by arguing that these conceptions of the future are mutually exclusive and cannot be reconciled in Rorty’s argument.   Biography: Spyridon Kaltsas holds a PhD in Philosophy from the University of Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV). His main research interests are in the fields of moral philosophy, social theory, and the theory of communicative action. He is currently teaching social theory and epistemology at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Tris Hedges   Abstract: Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936) was arguably his most socio-politically influential work. Although this is mostly indebted to his conceptualisation of the Lebenswelt (life-world), Husserl also provided an important account of the epoché as a praxis rather than the more abstract conception outlined in Ideas I. In the Crisis, Husserl’s project is to show how ‘the total phenomenological attitude and the epoché […] are destined in essence to effect […] the greatest existential transformation which is assigned as a task to mankind.’ This paper aims to demonstrate how the epoché, as a habitual attitude, can be practically carried out in order to effect an existential transformation. I will argue that personal pronouns offer an avenue through which Husserl’s phenomenological reorientation can be demonstrated as a practical, methodological, blueprint for the future. Husserl’s ‘humanistic’ phenomenological project most likely had social categories such as nationality and religion in mind. However, this paper will employ the methodology provided in the Crisis to critically reflect on the taken-for-grantedness (Selbstverständlichkeit) of sex and gender.The paper will proceed by first outlining the task of Husserl’s Crisis and its concern for the objective sciences, before characterising the epoché as a habitual attitude in need of constant renewal. Following this, I will examine how cultural and scientific traditions, and the fixed typology of language fetter the subject to life in the naïve ‘natural attitude’. By showing that sex and gender are linguistically, culturally, and performatively determined ‘types’, their bracketing will be exposed as vital for a genuine phenomenological reorientation. Finally, to avoid the danger of what Husserl calls the ‘seduction of language’, I will show the reactivation and transformation of the personal pronoun ‘they/them’ to be exemplary of the radical praxis at the heart of the Crisis.   Biography: Tris Hedges is a philosopher based in Berlin working at the intersections of phenomenology, social ontology, affect studies, and queer feminist philosophy. Their work explores themes of sexuality, normalisation, affect, gender, and group identity, and has been published in numerous academic journals as well as literary and scientific magazines. They are currently working as a postdoctoral fellow between Freie Universität Berlin and the University of Copenhagen with a project on the politics and affects of doubt.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Lorenzo Buti.   Abstract: This paper reconceptualises the phenomenon of depoliticisation as the materially closing off of alternative future possibilities on the basis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Marxist-existentialist theory of human praxis. Traditionally, political theorists have defined depoliticisation as a symbolic mutation at the level of ‘the political’. In this account, a state of depoliticisation occurs when a contingent situation appears as immutable or the expression of a more foundational (theological, cultural, technocratic) logic. The future in any society is radically open, but this ontological fact is symbolically covered up. The task of political theory therefore is to show that a particular situation is politically instituted and that a society should acknowledge its own constitutive openness towards an undefined future. This paper criticises this exclusive emphasis on the symbolic conditions of futurity in the theorisation of depoliticisation. By turning to Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, it argues that next to a symbolic closure, the future can also be practically or materially closed. Practico-inert ensembles can impose a specific directionality on the future by formulating exigencies or imperatives that human praxes must fulfil. By reconstructing Sartre’s conceptual framework, this paper reformulates the phenomenon of depoliticisation as a future which cannot be transcended. In a word, a depoliticised society is one where the future becomes a fate which one cannot escape. This reformulation carries significant consequences for the critical analysis of contemporary 9 societies. It implies that depoliticisation can occur even in situations where there is a high level of political contestation (protests, riots, social polarisation) but where groups lack the practical capacity to redirect the imperatives that are imposed on society. Finally, it shows that confronting depoliticisation not only entails revealing the contingency of a specific situation, but also dismantling the exigencies that dominate our praxis.   Biography: Lorenzo Buti is a doctoral candidate at RIPPLE (Research Institute in Political Philosophy Leuven), KU Leuven. His research interests lie in continental political philosophy (Lefort, Balibar, Rancière) and the tradition of critical theory (Marx, the Frankfurt School and, somehow, Sartre). Lorenzo works on a research project that aims to rethink the character of democratic action along insurgent lines, in the face of material conditions that structure the stakes of the political stage.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Tanay Gandhi   Abstract: The future is often cast in terms of images of progress or ruin, but can we imagine a future that escapes such dichotomies? What does such a radically reimagined future look like? Crucially, how can we as subjects institute a shared world building on such an imagination? I develop an answer in two parts by arguing for an ontology of the future as precarious calling for cultivated modes of response that are distinctly democratic. I analyse connections between discourses that amplify the possibilities for thinking a precarious future. First, artistic practices among Bhil indigenous communities in India that reveal relations to a world of complexity. Second, a tradition of western philosophy moving through Nietzsche and Deleuze that highlights elements of uncertainty and play 16 in the world. Third, discourses that upend the “ontological priority of the human” in terms of an account of dispersed agency. Building on complementarities between these perspectives, I argue for an ontology of the future as inescapably precarious; uncertain, susceptible to uncanny twists and turns. A future that is Zarathustra’s dance floor; composed of multiple actants in relations of collusion and conflict that escape human ordering or control; a future that we must embrace precisely as precarious. In the second part, I argue that such a relation calls for cultivating a democratic sensibility. Following post-foundational perspectives, I identify democracy as an openness to heterogenous possibilities of instituting society; democracy as a recognition of ontological pluralism. This is not simply in terms of an openness to difference, but, I argue, also receptivity to subterranean modes of activity and agential forces. Activating political possibilities on the basis of an ontologically precarious future, therefore, calls for a democratic cultivation; modes of political enactment that express a sensitivity to the multiple sites of agency in a complex world.   Biography: Tanay Gandhi is a graduate in political theory, having recently completed a Master’s degree (MA) in Ideology and Discourse Analysis from the University of Essex in 2020. He is currently an independent researcher based out of Mumbai, India. His core research interests include radical democratic theory, philosophical aesthetics, and theories of populism, in particular the works of Laclau, Connolly, Deleuze, Adorno, Menke and Rancière. Previously, Tanay was a human rights lawyer in India, working on issues of forest land tenure rights, self-governance and traditional knowledge systems and cultural practices.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Martin Ritter   Abstract: From the perspective of the past, the future is now: tomorrow never comes – it is already here. Walter Benjamin draws attention to this fact and his late, politically engaged thought strives to do justice to it. In contrast to prevailing traditions of revolutionary theories oriented predominantly on the future (i.e. on changing the world for the sake of the future better one), Benjamin puts emphasis on human relation to the past. Whereas Heidegger identifies the forgetfulness of being as the source of our misery, Benjamin is worried about our forgetfulness of the barbaric side of the tradition we live in: about the suffering it was, and still is, built on. The past, with its suppressed hopes, is not simply gone: it reaches for the present, or, as Benjamin himself puts it, it “has a claim” on us. It is in this (uncomfortable) sense that, as Husserl would have it, both the future and the past are “parts” of the present. And we need to do justice to this experience not (only) out of respect for past generations but (primarily) because without our doing so everything threatens to remain the same, or as it has – traditionally – been. In other words, we are – and need to be – responsive to and responsible for the past not (only) for the sake of the past itself but for the future’s sake, or simply for the sake of the present. It is our relation to the past which makes us sensible, according to Benjamin, to the future in the present, calling us to break through the tradition and to reconstruct, or reimagine, its different future. This way, we save the future, not as something which will happen, but as a possibility in the present.   Biography: Martin Ritter is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. From 2007 to 2020, he taught continental philosophy at the Charles University in Prague. Currently, he realises a two-years research project at the University of Vienna (http://oskf.flu.cas.cz/technology-as-medium). Martin specializes in phenomenology and critical theory. He edited (and translated) three volumes of the Czech Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin. Recently, he has published two monographs: To liberate the future by an act of cognition. Walter Benjamin's theory of truth; Filosofia 2018, in Czech), and Into the World. The Movement of Patočka’s Phenomenology (Springer 2019).   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a presentation from Alexandra S. Ilieva     Abstract: If taking “the future as a present concern” is to generate tangible effects regarding our responsibilities towards the future— in light of the ecological and humanitarian crises facing the world today—it warrants utopian thinking. Such a claim emerges when we bring together the distinct socio-historical-cultural perspectives of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism and the Pragmatist Richard Rorty. Despite their temporal distance, both share pragmatically-oriented dialectical styles and complementary utopian visions—whether they be Rorty’s liberal utopia or the Buddhist soteriological aspiration to eliminate the suffering of all sentient beings—which together reveal that discussions of ‘the future’ are only relevant in their pragmatic relation to our specific economic and political goals and humanitarian visions for the future. Indeed, Buddhism is often accused of being world-renouncing, yet the Madhyamaka provide a useful example of how a utopian vision, even if “otherworldly”, can provide an ethically rigorous framework that can guide us to make changes in the here and now. It also suggests that discussions of the future and its relation to the present need not be underpinned by a linear model of time, as the Buddhist belief in the cyclical existence of the material world does not preclude them from offering a distinct utopian vision with direct, pragmatic implications for our present conduct. Indeed, on these intercultural planes, what emerges is that “the future is a present concern” means nothing more than “there are pragmatic steps we can take to get closer to the goal of eliminating cruelty and suffering across the globe”. The upshot of such an intercultural approach is that it can help guide discourse in both external (political, economic) directions, but also internal (ethical, spiritual) paths. How exactly to achieve this end is for further discussion, but I hope the present paper at least opens this conversational door.   Biography: Alexandra is a final year PhD candidate at the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. She received her BA from New York University in Philosophy and Psychology. Her MA '22 was in ‘Transcultural Studies’ at the University of Heidelberg, where she focused on early Buddhist philosophy. Her current research examines the intersections between Rortyan Pragmatism and Madhyamaka Buddhism in relation to their peculiar non-positions relative to philosophical dialectical spaces. She is interested in the promotion of ‘fusion’ philosophy, and is especially concerned with reconceptualising what ‘philosophy’ means in light of intercultural investigations and Pragmatist critiques.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a keynote presentation from Dr Alessandro Salice   Abstract: A spectre is haunting the phenomenological community—the spectre of phenomenological realism. All the powers of old phenomenology have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Sartre, post-structuralist radicals and analytic spies.   But what is phenomenological realism? The talk aims at answering this question in three steps.   In the first part, I give a brief historical overview of the Munich and Göttingen circles of phenomenology, while highlighting some methodological considerations on how to approach the study of this complex tradition of philosophy.   In the second part, I focus on phenomenological realism as a metaphysical position consistently embraced by the members of the two circles. I argue that phenomenological realism is characterized by (a specific form of) correlationism and by essentialism and I show how these two principles have informed some specific positions in phenomenological psychology and social phenomenology.   Finally, the last part rejects various attempts to assess realist phenomenology in relation to its convergence or divergence with the Husserlian project. Realist phenomenology, so the claim goes, deserves to be assessed in its own right because it is a unique, fertile, and autonomous form of phenomenology. Doing that—i.e., philosophically engaging with early phenomenologists, while historically uncovering their insights—promises to impact different strands of the current philosophical debate and to substantially enrich the received picture of the phenomenological movement.     Biography: Alessandro Salice is Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy of University College Cork and a Research Associate at the Center for Subjectivity Research (CFS) in Copenhagen. Previously, Alessandro held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Graz, Basel, Vienna, and at the CFS. He mainly works at the intersection of phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and moral psychology, by paying particular attention to the social capacities of the mind.   Alessandro has edited The Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality. History, Concepts, Problems (2016), together with Hans Bernhard Schmid. He is co-editor of Journal of Social Ontology and his papers have been published in several journals including: Emotion Review, European Journal of Philosophy, Frontiers in Psychology, Frontiers in Psychiatry, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences, Philosophical Psychology, and Synthese.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a keynote presentation from Prof. Sara Heinämaa     Abstract: In The Crisis, Husserl argues that transcendental phenomenology must be understood as a scientific vocation with radical philosophical aims. However, The Crisis also gives a curiously ambiguous characterization of the phenomenological vocation which emphasizes its similarities with other life vocations but, at the same time, problematizes this analogy. On the one hand, Husserl argues that we can conduct phenomenological inquiries in the same manner as we manage other projects, scientific and non-scientific. On the other hand, he also argues that phenomenology requires a radical and fundamental abandonment of all worldly interests – theoretical as well as practical, positive scientific as well as critical. If this holds, phenomenology cannot be practiced in the manner of any worldly projects (everyday, scientific or philosophical). So, we find a fundamental tension in Husserl’s characterization of his own philosophy: it seems that phenomenology must be understood as a dual vocation which, on the one hand, allows periodic practicing like worldly vocations but, on the other hand, demands a permanent abandonment of everything that is worldly. My presentation gives a novel account of Husserl’s understanding of the phenomenological vocation, one that helps us understand and alleviate this tension. I will argue that Husserl’s conceptualization of phenomenology as a scientific vocation must be understood in the light of his theory of the habituation and institution of intentional acts, and that special attention must be paid to the habituation of the conative acts of willing. For this purpose, I will offer explications of Husserl’s concepts of habituation and institution and introduce the main parameters of his analysis of the intentionality and temporality of volition.     Biography: Sara Heinämaa is Academy Professor (2017–2021 Academy of Finland) and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She specialises in phenomenology, existentialism, philosophy of mind and history of philosophy, and has published extensively in these fields, especially on normativity, emotions, embodiment, personhood, intersubjectivity and gender. She is an expert of Husserlian phenomenology but has also contributed broadly to our understanding of existential phenomenology and its methods, especially the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir and Sartre.   Heinämaa is co-author of Birth, Death, and Femininity (2010) and author of Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference (2003), and has co-edited several volumes, including Why Method Matters: Phenomenology as Critique (forthcoming 2021), Phenomenology and the Transcendental (2014), and Consciousness (2007)     Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a keynote presentation from Prof. Shaun Gallagher     Abstract: How should we act to address climate change, racism, sexism …? These are large important problems that call for serious actions on both individual and collective scales. To think about actions on these scales one needs to think about future or distal intentions – that is intention formation that involves deliberation, action planning and decision, much of which can involve communication with others. My aim is not to address these large questions – so I won’t be offering any advice about how we should address climate change, etc. My aim is rather to dig down into the phenomenology of the possibility of taking action, and indeed the possibility of deliberating, planning, decision-making and communicating – all of which are themselves actions. My analysis will address a version of what has been called the ‘scaling up’ problem.   I will argue that in regard to processes on the scale at which Husserl addresses time-consciousness – which I want to call intrinsic temporality, because it applies not just to consciousness, but to action and performance, and perhaps to life processes in general – the rule is not passivity, as a sort of waiting for the future to happen, but enaction. We enact the future on the most basic scale, and if this were not the case, we would not be able to take action, to deliberate, to decide, or to communicate, or solve any of the problems concerning climate, racism, or sexism. The latter processes involve a narrative scale. I’ll argue, however, that rather than ‘scaling up’ to narrative (understanding it as higher-order cognition), one should think of ‘scaling out’, and understanding narrative as a kind of performance. In this regard, although this kind of formal analysis does not give us any answers to these larger questions, it should tell us how it’s possible to act.     Biography: Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a Professorial Fellow at the School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong.  He was a Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Fellow (2012-18), and has held Honorary Professorships at Tromsø University (Norway); Durham (UK) and Copenhagen (DK), and visiting positions at Cambridge, Lyon, Paris, Berlin, Oxford and Rome.   His areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of mind, embodied cognition, social interaction, self/personal identity and hermeneutics. His publications include Action and Interaction (2020); Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (2017); A Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder (2015); Phenomenology (2012; new edition 2021); The Phenomenological Mind (with Dan Zahavi, 3 rd  edition 2021); How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005); editor: Oxford Handbook of the Self and Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a keynote presentation from Fiona Hallinan   Abstract: Ultimology refers to the study of endings, or that which is dead or dying. This presentation will propose darkness as one of a set of thematic concerns for the concept. An introduction to the background of the project of Ultimology will outline a set of contexts where the concept has been applied, and will illustrate some ways artistic research practice can be used to explore new models of record making, specifically looking at darkness as an affective tool. Darkness will be presented in this paper as a site of potential and transformative encounter through examples of its application in a number of contexts. The paper will be accompanied by a set of directions for listeners.     Biography: Fiona Hallinan is an Irish artist and artistic researcher undertaking a doctoral project at LUCA School of Arts KU Leuven, researching the performative coming-into-being of Ultimology, a concept that proposes the close examination of endings as a site for transformative encounter. In collaboration with curator Kate Strain, this project was previously in residence at CONNECT, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications.   She hosts On Death, an interdisciplinary reading group, recently co-wrote a BAI funded radio essay for RTE radio and is on residency at Kunstencentrum Vooruit looking at the worker's canteen as an endangered entity. Her work takes the form of writing, drawing, discursive events and rituals. She has exhibited at Grazer Kunstverein, Kerlin Gallery, IMMA, Parsons Paris and Brown University.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a keynote presentation from Prof. Rebecca Braun   Abstract: This lecture sets out how literary texts both engage with methods that are central to futures studies – notably forecasting and back-casting – and are themselves a method for linking past, present and future in new, socially-meaningful ways. Because narrative plots routinely upend any straightforward chronological understanding of causality, literature can itself be seen as a tool with practical application for work in social futures. Accordingly, I provide a broad survey of how canonical literary texts and genres have developed blueprints for different ways of living in the world that draw alternately on forecasting and back-casting methods, and then work through the specific example offered by one of the founding novels of the European canon, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605/1615). In so doing, I show how literary texts allow their readers to reposition themselves in relation to multiple possible worlds and sketch out distinct plans of action, for both themselves and others, that are informed by powerfully imagined lived experience. Literature provides valuable insight into the different kinds of agency and resilience that are needed to sustain such future-forming activity and which other, more technocratic models of scenario planning tend to overlook.     Biography: Rebecca Braun joined NUI Galway in 2021 to take up the position of Executive Dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences & Celtic Studies. Before then, she was Professor of Modern Languages & Creative Futures at Lancaster University in the UK, where she was also Co-Director of the Institute for Social Futures from 2017-2020. She has held further lectureships and research fellowships at the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester and Oxford in the UK and at the Freie Universität Berlin. She grew up in West Cork and Tipperary.   Rebecca's work explores how literary texts can drive new ways of thinking about the future, both as objects of analysis (traditional literary criticism) and as a co-creative process (practice-focused workshops using creative writing techniques). This futures work builds on a deep understanding of the power of people and stories, which she has traced in numerous books on authorship, world literature, transnationalism, and cultural value. Most recently, these include World Authorship, co-edited with Tobias Boes and Emily Spiers (Oxford: OUP, 2020) and Transnational German Studies, co-edited with Benedict Schofield (Liverpool: LUP, 2020).     Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 begins with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.   This episode features a keynote presentation from Prof. Andrew Benjamin, University of Technology, Sydney and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, Melbourne   Abstract: In Walter Benjamin’s review of Junger’s edited collection War and Warrior, Benjamin links the possibility of the future to the overcoming of myth and magic. He writes in relation to the essays comprising the book that, Until Germany has broken through (gesprengt hat) the entanglement of such Medusa- like beliefs that confront it in these essays, it cannot hope for a future (eine Zukunst erhoffen).   While the term ‘breaking through’ occurs in this passage, a similar strategy is at work in terms such as ‘divine violence’, ‘destruction’ and ‘caesura’. What is significant about them is that they define the future in terms of the openings created by the suspension of dominant logics. The aim of his paper is to investigate this particular conception of the future.     Biography: Andrew Benjamin is the Distinguished Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Technology, Sydney (and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, Melbourne).   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 7 concludes with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Matthew Menchaca of City University of New York, United States     Abstract: There are two sub-theses to the Embodied Mind’s (1991) core five theses which I contend Engaged Phenomenology needs to reconcile: phenomenology and autopoiesis. In particular, how is what is revealed in experience (phenomenology) connected to the neuro-immuno-cognitive-networks that make us living (autopoiesis)? In Evan Thompson’s 2007 book Mind in Life, he provides a history of autopoiesis and a genealogy of phenomenology which attempts to provide such an answer. In later work, Giovanni Colomobetti, in the book The Feeling Body (2013), views autopoiesis as too restricted a concept for the purposes of characterizing the features of a field she has invented (for the purposes of better understanding the intersubjective reality of emotions): Dynamic Affective Science. In this essay, I present the core features of autopoiesis, give examples of failed attempts to artificially generate such living structures, and situate the sub-concepts on the conditions of life and meaning of “adaptation” (according to autopoiesis) against evolutionary theory. In particular, I suggest that the autopoietic formulation of “adaptation” properly understood is what Colombetti describes in her genealogy of phenomenology (Chapter 2) as “primordial affectivity”. Thus an engaged phenomenology premised on shared life-worlds, in particular in their affective complexity, can rely on autopoietic criteria to ensure their phenomenology is of the living.     Biography: Matthew Menchaca is a 4th year Ph.d student in philosophy at City University of New York (CUNY). A pipeline mentor and himself of minority descent (Mexican and Native American), he most recently presented at Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science (DUCOG) 2021 Linguistic and Cognitive Foundations of Meaning, applying Devitt and Kripke’s causal theory of reference to the acquisition of “standard” arithmetic. Currently at the prospectus stage, he is looking forward to writing a dissertation at the intersection of phenomenology and cognitive science   Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Chu Ming Hon of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China   Abstract: The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to suggest that phenomenological studies of worldliness are crucial for dream research; second, to indicate that dream research can in return enrich our understanding of world-consciousness. Dreaming is a rare theme in the classics of phenomenology. It is not easy to determine the nature of dreaming in the light of other kinds of experience. As Jean Héring has neatly summarized, phenomenologists are divided by two opinions: dreaming is either perception or representation. However, as this paper aims to show, subsuming dreaming under either category is equally perplexing, for it will then become either a special case of perception, or a special case of representation. A solution is thereby proposed, according to which oneiric phenomenon should be studied in the light of its presumptive worldliness. Dreaming is special so long as it opens a field of experiences encompassing our being-there, to the extent that dream appears as if a reality. A phenomenology of dreaming therefore focuses on the borderline between dream and reality, in order to ascertain how far they can be confused. Such a study is preceded by controversies over the worldliness of dreams. For example, while Edmund Husserl and Theodor Conrad affirm that dreaming implies immersion in a dreamworld, for Jan Patočka and Jean-Paul Sartre dreams essentially involve the privation of worldly structure. Provided that worldliness is a minimal condition of the position of reality, determining whether dreams are worldly (welthaft) or worldless (weltlos) is decisive for determining how far dreams resemble reality. Phenomenological debates on the nature of dreaming will also prove crucial to dream research in general. Despite advanced methods of observation, pioneering dream researchers are still fundamentally divided regarding the experiential characters of dream. And a significant portion of their disagreement lies in the presumptive worldliness of dreams.   Biography: I am a doctor candidate in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. My research focuses on the motivations of phenomenological reduction, and extends to altered states of consciousness. In 2020, I have published a book on dreaming, titled Formen der Versunkenheit.     Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Wun Chung Yan of The University of Cologne, Germany   Abstract: In ordinary language, “common sense” is understood as certain “sense” that is taken for granted (selbstverständlich). However, is the “sense” of common sense an unquestioned feeling towards the world or is it rather certain common understanding of it? Through a phenomenological investigation of schizophrenia, I argue that the common sense does not only encompass both but also a third dimension, namely, the affective trust and familiarity (Vertrautheit) with the world constituted intersubjectively. In their study of schizophrenia, Blankenburg and Thomas Fuchs understand the common sense (Selbstverständlichkeit) lost in the schizophrenic patients principally as a kind of feeling or affectivity. Blankenburg terms it the Feingefühl and identifies it with the Heideggerian concept of Bewandtnis- and Verweisungszusammenhang, as distinguished from the objective apperception of things that remains unscathed. Fuchs, similarly, argues that it is the disorder and modification of the mood (Stimmung) into the Wahnstimmung that underlies the modification of lived-experiences of the patients characterized by their constant questioning (Infragestellung) of one’s existence and paranoiac delusions. Revisiting Heidegger’s account of Bewandtniszusammenhang as constituted by both understanding and attunement (Befindlichkeit), I contend with two concrete arguments that the basic sense of the world as Bewandtniszusammenhang is preserved by the patients. What is lacking in the patients is instead the “capacity” to devote oneself to (sich hingeben) the retained sense of world. Here I introduce Husserl’s distinction between the simple value-perception (schlichte Wertnehmung) of something as valuable/invaluable and the subject’s affective position-taking (Gemütsstellungnahme) towards those apperceived qualities. The dedication (Hingabe) requires the subject’s affective trust and familiarity with the world and others, which is established throughout one’s lived-experiences in the intersubjectively constituted life-world.  Once this essential sense of trust, or Urvertrauen, is destroyed (through e.g., traumatic experiences), the subject would no longer be able to truly embrace any kind of common sense as unquestioned.   Biography: Graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, I am now a PhD candidate of Prof. Thiemo Breyer and a DAAD-scholarship holder at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School from the University of Cologne. My research project is dedicated to the problematic of the unconscious, understood as the sedimentations in the Husserlian sense, and its relation to the normal as well as so-called pathological life of consciousness such as schizophrenia and borderline-personality disorder. Last year, I held a presentation titled “Der Urboden des Bewusstseins – die Stimmung und die Frage nach dem Unbewussten” in the colloquium organized by Prof. Thomas Fuchs in Jena.     Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Alexandra Jewell of University of British Columbia, Canada   Abstract: Anxiety disorders are the most common psychiatric disorders and are associated with a high burden of illness. Given the increasing reports of anxiety symptoms in the face of climate change, pandemics, and socio-political relations, anxiety disorders are due additional analysis that might aid our descriptions and explanations. I propose that a phenomenological approach to anxiety disorders can do just that. Specifically, we ought to examine the ways in which the self plays a role in anxiety disorders. While previous accounts have highlighted the importance of the self in the occurrence and maintenance of anxiety disorders, their dealing of the notion lacks the phenomenological richness to capture the multidimensionality of selfhood. Borrowing the notion of self-disorder from phenomenological pathology, I argue that anxiety disorders similarly exhibit an alteration to our most fundamental experience of a self-immersed-in-the-world via disordered/disrupted organization of self-specifying processes. To substantiate my claims, I refer to empirical work on anxiety from clinical psychology and cognitive science regarding disruptions in experience of selfhood, on the one hand, and corresponding alterations of worldly experience, on the other. Next, I consider and respond to reasons theorists might have excluded anxiety disorders from the class of self-disorders. I then propose that interoception, which plays a fundamental role in forming our basic sense of self, is a good place to start when looking for the disruption of self-specifying processes in anxiety disorder. After considering empirical evidence to support this hypothesis, I will suggest a possible, causal explanations for this disruption in interoception by drawing from emotion theory and recent work in neuroscience.   Biography: Alexandra Jewell is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Under the supervision of both Christopher Mole and Evan Thompson, Alexandra researches the intersection of philosophy of mind, phenomenology, cognitive science, and philosophy of psychiatry. She is interested in bringing the phenomenological approach into our understanding of psychiatric disorders in hopes to improve our descriptions and explanations within psychiatry. Having a background in Tibetan Buddhism, Alexandra also incorporates this worldview in her investigations of the subjective experience in cases of psychiatric disorder.     Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Maria Galkina of Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris, France   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.   Biography: Maria Galkina is a PhD student in Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris working on phenomenology of environmental shame and negative dialectic of human power. Her research interests cover Phenomenology of emotions and affects, Ethics and Metaphysics. Maria holds a B.A. in Creative writing from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute of Moscow and an M.A. in Contemporary Philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, which has focused on the dialectic of negativity and creativity of shame through analysis of works of Levinas, Agamben and Dostoevsky.     Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Niklas Noe-Steinmueller of University Hospital Heidelberg, Section for Phenomenology, Germany   Abstract: The concept of suffering is part of a new way of thinking about pain that tries to take patients’ individual perspective seriously instead of reducing their experiences to a biological mechanism (Ballantyne & Sullivan, 2015). I will briefly summarise the preliminary result of a systematic review of operationalisations of suffering (authors anonymised, in prep.), point out a fundamental disagreement within the literature, and then show what phenomenology can contribute to resolve it.   Suffering is usually defined as emotional distress related to a loss of identity and resulting from insufficient coping resources (Cassell, 1982; Chapman & Gavrin, 1999). However, some argue that suffering is a strictly individual experience only understandable from within a life narrative (Frank, 2001; Kleinman, 1988). Defining it is said to be futile and even harmful for the patients because it thrusts a foreign perspective on their illness upon them (Charmaz, 1983; Frank, 2001). To sum up, while most authors believe the concept of suffering to widen the scope of medicine, others warn against the danger of patronizing patients. I propose that phenomenology can solve this problem by analysing suffering in terms of (gradual) presence. In suffering, my lifeworld becomes less present to me, i.e. less forceful, less vivid – with one exception: That, which I suffer from, becomes more present to me. This is a particular form of presence that I call ‘pre-intentional’ (Bernet, 2014).  This analysis contributes to the reconceptualization of pain by offering a working hypothesis about the core of the suffering experience. By focussing on the structure of suffering rather than its content, it avoids patronising the sufferer and acknowledges that suffering is as heterogenous as the lifeworlds of the suffering subjects. I conclude by comparing my analysis to an insightful phenomenological account of suffering as an alienating mood by Frederick Svenaeus (2014).           Biography: PhD student at the Section for Phenomenology, University Hospital Heidelberg - starting in July 2022: Clinical psychologist at the Clinic for General Psychiatry, University of Heidelberg - 2020-2022 MSc Psychology at Heidelberg (thesis about the operationalisation of suffering in pain research, systematic review) - 2015-2020 BSc Psychology at Heidelberg - 2015-2019 MA Philosophy at Heidelberg (thesis about the phenomenology of pain and depression) - 2012-2015 BA Philosophy at Heidelberg and Oxford - born 10 December 1991 in Freiburg, Germany.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Kenneth Bruce of Fordham University, United States   Abstract: In philosophical considerations of disgust, one consistent problem has been how to define physical disgust and moral disgust in a way that does justice to their differences while also allowing them to occupy the same category of emotional reaction. Aurel Kolnai (2004) and Sara Heinämaa (2020) each give a phenomenological account of what this connection might be, and in doing so suggest that there is a way that we can pick out some formal object of disgust that we intentionally aim/are aimed at when feeling disgusted, either physically or morally. In this paper, I evaluate these decidedly non-derivative models of physical and moral disgust, specifically with respect to instances of disgust that are based in racial and/or ethnic prejudices. I first raise what I take to be problems with Heinämaa’s adverbial model of moral disgust. I’ll then take up Sara Ahmed’s (2015) writing on disgust as something that “spreads” via acts of reiteration to develop a derivative account of moral disgust that retains Kolnai and Heinämaa’s phenomenological insights even as it demonstrates that objects of disgust need not always share some formal object. I argue that there are good reasons for thinking that some objects of disgust are derived from previous ones, but that we need to be careful in mapping out this derivative relationship. Finally, I use this derivative model of disgust to analyze examples of both physical and moral disgust from the writings of Audre Lord (2007) and Alia Al-Saji (2008), respectively. This will allow us to understand such instances of disgust as 1) real instances of disgust that, nonetheless, do not not entail that the objects of disgust are inherently or essentially disgusting and 2) morally reprehensible and dangerous precisely because they do not involve a “mistake,” but accurately reflect the disgusted subjects' prejudices.   Biography: Ken Bruce is a PhD student at Fordham University in his second year. His main areas of interest are in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and critical phenomenology, especially as it overlaps with critical philosophy of race and feminist philosophy. His current research involves looking at phenomenological accounts of racialization as they occur at the aural register, both in addition to and in distinction from the visual register, and investigating what insights might be gained from centering such a perspective.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Denise Kelly of University College Dublin, Ireland   Abstract: According to Mariana Ortega (2016) humans occupy multiple worlds; following Martin Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as beings-in-the-world, she suggests that all of us are beings-in-worlds or beings-between-worlds. However, she suggests that this is especially the case for marginalized groups, who must travel between worlds in which they struggle to perform social norms pre-reflectively, engendering feelings of alienation.   This is analogous to the experience of the agoraphobe when they venture into public space. Despite being embedded in the surrounding culture, they too find themselves in a space where they cannot act pre-reflectively; instead, they are anxious, vigilant, and consumed by the fear of transgressing a social norm. This fear can result in the person abandoning their worlds and becoming housebound, as they seek out the comfort and safety of home against the panic-ensuing world   However, the relationship between the agoraphobe and the home is more complex when further considered. We must leave home to find home (Jacobson, 2011). Thus, it appears that while the agoraphobe is housebound (Davidson, 2000), she is also homeless, her home is always less than home. I suggest that this is because the house for the agoraphobe is more of a foxhole than a home; a place to recede to for temporary cover situated deep in the midst of a danger-zone. This is further suggested by the agoraphobe’s use of “shields” outside the home; objects which serve as a protection from the glare of the Other’s gaze (Davidson, 2000; Davidson, 2003). Surrounded by a battleground, the agoraphobe becomes a being-on-the-outskirts, with the uncanniness of the external world penetrating the walls of her fortress. Paralyzed by fear, she becomes snagged in the “imaginary” of a home (Ortega, 2016).   Biography: Denise Kelly is a doctoral student under the supervision of Dr. Danielle Petherbridge in Philosophy at University College Dublin, where she is researching the phenomenology of mental illness. Her Ph.D. research looks specifically at agoraphobia and social phobia, examining these disorders in relation to the themes of intersubjectivity, embodiment, and affectivity. Her interdisciplinary research draws not only from traditional and contemporary phenomenological work and methods, but also from sociological understandings of illness and clinical data.       Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Kathryn Body of University of Bristol, UK   Abstract: Co-authors: Havi Carel; Jamila Rodrigues   The Covid-19 pandemic has had far-reaching and life-changing consequences for many people, including the loss of loved ones, livelihoods, and life milestones. The risks associated with a potentially life-threatening virus such as Covid-19 have been widely discussed from an epidemiological or otherwise scientific perspective. Whilst this is vitally important for understanding how the virus transmits and behaves once inside the body, it cannot tell us how the pandemic has changed people’s lived experience of the world and of their bodies. In this paper, we use theoretical frameworks from social anthropology (Douglas 1966, 1970, 1992) and phenomenological philosophy (Carel, 2016, 2018) to analyse qualitative data drawn out of a large-scale anonymous survey focusing on adult populations in the UK, Japan, and Mexico. This study asks: How has the Covid-19 pandemic changed people’s experience of their bodies and the world? We unpack this further by asking the following sub-questions: What effect has the lockdown and other countermeasures against the virus had on the way people perceive their bodies and other people’s bodies? What cultural and symbolic meanings are attached to the body and if so, how did they change? To what extent do the risks associated with the Covid-19 virus threaten people’s sense of bodily security and safety? To address these issues, we present a conceptualisation of a pandemic body captured into five main themes, these are: Fear and Danger, Bodily Doubt and Hypervigilance, Risk and Trust, Adapting and Enduring, Changes in Perspective. These themes emerged from qualitative survey data and show how different aspects of the pandemic experience have been embodied through people’s narratives. Through a detailed analysis of these issues, we conclude that the pandemic has forced people to rethink their relationship with their bodies, other bodies, and the world around them.   Biography: Kathryn Body is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy, at the University of Bristol. She received her MA in Medical Ethics and Law from King’s College London, where she researched epistemic injustices toward people with disabilities through the lens of the Mental Capacity Act 2005. Her current research project combines theoretical frameworks from phenomenological philosophy and embodiment theory in anthropology to analyse qualitative survey data on people’s lived experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic. This research will help inform perspectives on how protective strategies, including national lockdowns and physical distancing, have affected people from different cultures and social groups.     Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Rachel Elliott of Brandon University, Canada   Abstract: This paper offers reflections about the possibilities and limits of online intercorporeality and empathy. During the Covid-19 pandemic I participated in two online community choirs: the Toronto Sacred Harp Singing Group and the Transnational Vocal Exploration Choir lead by Chris Tonelli of the University of Groningen. To my surprise, both choirs functioned successfully using standard-issue video conferencing software despite their need for substantive embodied reciprocity among vocalists, and between vocalists and the conductor(s). Using the phenomenological interview to supplement my own phenomenological descriptions, I collected data on the lived experiences of participants regarding intercorporeality and empathy during online choral gatherings. This paper will present my findings that suggest intercorporeality and empathy are, with caveats, genuinely enabled in musical interactions using simple online video interfaces.  With this finding I aim to enrich and re-direct trends in the human sciences that tend to regard online intersubjectivity as purely symbolic or representational. If these trends were to be correct, contra my assertions, then only extended or high-level empathy would be possible in such spaces: low-level or primary empathy - which relies on intercorporeality - would be incompatible. Marshalling evidence to the contrary, that intercorporeality can be enabled online (at lease while musicking interactively) will, I hope, spark new philosophical reflections on the nature of online collaboration and shared digital agency, as well as contribute to thinking about the social affordances engendered by community musick-making in particular.     Biography: Dr. Rachel Elliott works on social ontology at the level of intercorporeality and affect, particularly regarding improvised collective agency in art and politics. She has published on topics such as the transformation of the habit body in music, and the exclusionary tendencies of synchronization, in journals such as: the Journal for International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, and Punta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology. She is currently working on a manuscript titled Intercorporeality Online. Dr. Elliott received her PhD in 2019 from the University of Guelph, and is currently Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada.       Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Lucy Osler of University of Copenhagen, Denmark   Abstract: Online forms of social encounter are typically evaluated based on how well they might (or might not) act as a replacement for our face-to-face encounters (e.g., Dreyfus 2009; Turkle 2015, 2017; Chalmers 2022). I highlight three reasons why we should reject the false dichotomy presented by discussions of “offline vs. online” and move beyond considering the role of online forms of sociality within the framework of ‘replacement’. First, we should be wary of buying into the replacement dichotomy considering how each side of the debate is typically framed. On the side of the techno-optimists is a promise of technology yet to be developed, as such any argument for the success of ‘full digital replacement’ remains wishful and hypothetical. On the techno-pessimist side, critiques of digital communication tend to present an overly reified view of fully embodied offline sociality, seemingly forgetting that not all face-to-face encounters are smooth, positive, valuable, successful, or even respectful. Second, when comparing offline and online sociality, there is tendency to suppose that the participants are ‘neutral’ universal subjects and that face-to-face embodied social encounters are superior to mediated embodied social encounters. What this ignores is that there are many cases where an individual may experience supposedly ‘diminished’ or ‘altered’ embodiment as preferable, e.g., when online platforms provide a safe or less sensorially overwhelming social space. There is, then, a normative assumption baked into discussions of offline vs. online sociality. Third, by assessing online sociality in terms of its suitability as a substitute for physically co-present encounters, we both lose sight of, as well as impede, creative ways for us to encounter others online. Rejecting the notion of replacement allows us to conceive of online sociality beyond substitution; pushing us to demand and design digital tools that do not merely simulate offline forms of interaction but support novel ways of encountering each other.   Biography: Lucy Osler is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. She is interested in phenomenological approaches to intersubjectivity, online sociality, embodiment, perception, emotions, and psychopathology. She is currently writing on social inclusion and exclusion in the online world, online grief, feelings of belonging and community online, as well as the role social technologies play in mental health, well-being, and therapy.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Jeffrey Wasch of West Chester University of Pennsylvania, United States   Abstract: In a 2011 paper Merold Westphal argues that Gadamer and Ricoeur’s respective hermeneutical projects expose us to a dialectic between distanciation and belonging. Ricoeur shows us our distanciation by pointing out that when an author publishes a book, their text is open to interpretation by anyone who can read. Therefore, the text is distanced from its author. However, Gadamer says that both the reader and the author “belong” to the world of the text through “absorbtion”. Nonetheless, Westphal goes on to argue that we should not think of Ricoeur and Gadamer as “opposite poles” of hermeneutic thought, but that we should think of them as exposing us to an uncomfortable dialectic that the hermeneutical tradition exposes. In this paper, I will argue that there are at least two ways in which one's social media profile shows us this dialectical relationship in action. In the first case, the profile belongs to them since they are in control of what gets posted. But, on the opposite end of the dialectic there is a distanciation that occurs from the poster when they make a post. That is, in the same way the author of a novel puts something out in the world to be interpreted, so too does the poster when making a post. The second way this dialectic gets put on display is that a person belongs to their profile in the sense that it is a sort-of virtual representation of the self. The subject and their profile are inseparable, both belonging to each other. Yet, the profile is also distanciated because there is a distance between the subject and their profile. Put bluntly, the social media profile becomes a distanciated self.   Biography: Jeff Wasch graduated with an MA in philosophy from West Chester University of Pennsylvania. His interest are in phenomenology, epistemology and philosophy of mind, existentialism, and hermeneutics.     Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Mark Ornelas of University of Cincinnati, United States   Abstract: Husserlian phenomenology attempts to develop a theory of mind that suspends the major metaphysical questions about human experience. As a result, Husserl focuses on the world as given. Typically, the nature and essence of morality is metaethical question; in other words, determining the essence of morality, or the good, is a metaphysical question. The result is a strange position where the phenomenological method is somewhat unavailable to ask how the essence does of the good relate to experience. Essentially, Husserlian phenomenologists would be required to adopt an antirealist position. Metaethical antirealist could use the phenomenological method because they hold that the essential nature of moral facts are not objective, true, or universal facts or properties but are rather ones that are non-objective, conventional, and particularist judgements or states of affairs. Yet Husserl and other phenomeologist that follow such as Stein and Merleau-Ponty, are careful not to endorse such a position. Husserl clarifies his opposition to antirealism in his ethical lectures,  claiming that there is a ’unconditional objectivity of validity in ethics’ (Husserl, Husserliana XXXVII, 147). However, he wants to preserve the notion that affective states indicate moral facts, but cannot be the basis of them, a neo-sentimentalist position. The goal of this paper is to investigate this problem and propose a solution where objective moral facts are investigable in a Husserlian phenomenology. To do so, I will draw on Stein’s understanding of the primordial given. The primordial given, according to Stein is what is naturally given in the world as a part of the essence of the world. I will argue that morality is part of the primordially given resulting a naturalist moral reaslist position.   Biography: I am a current graduate student at the University of Cincinnati of Hispanic descent. My research focuses on morality and moral experience using interdisciplinary methods. My current project is using philosophical and psychological methods to develop a new method to study moral behavior. In addition, I am interested in understanding the nature of moral perception and moral action as it relates agent’s social experience and behavioral history.     Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Alessio Ruggiero of University of Verona, Italy   Abstract: Recently there has been a spate of interest in Max Scheler’s social phenomenology (Schloßberger, 2016; Szanto & Moran, 2016; Cusinato, 2018). In this paper I aim to show that his philosophical contribution on sociality has its focal point on the concepts of eccentricity (Exzentrizität), both on the individual level and on the collective-social one. The socio-philosophical discussion about these two different levels, according to Scheler, often generates a dangerous dualism between individuation process and emotional relationality (Scheler, 1923). My main hypothesis is that Scheler escapes from this dualism through the theorization of the idea of Exzentrizität (Scheler, 1928): an anthropo-phenomenological reading of eccentricity reveals a creative interpenetration (Ausgleich) between the ideas of freedom, uniqueness and individuality (eccentricity in the individual sense) and the ideas of alterity, open-mindedness and World-openness (Weltoffenheit) (eccentricity in the relational sense) (Scheler, 1923; Scheler, 1928). My idea is that, for Scheler, the essential condition of any attitude towards personal changes (Umkehr) have its center in the idea of personal co-execution (Mitvollzug) for the maturation and the growth of personal singularity (Personbildung) (Scheler, 1925; Scheler, 1927; Scheler, 1928). And this means the formation and the expression, in the eccentric perspective mentioned above, of one's own ethical singularity (An-sich-Gutes für mich) and of one's own vocations. The idea of eccentricity declined in terms of vocation is therefore strictly interdependent on the idea of Otherness-exemplar (Vorbild) and personal witnessing (Scheler, 1921). The latter, as a paradigm of existential improvement, feeding on diversity and inspiration (Cusinato, 2018). On this point, many studies have suggested that Scheler’s reflection on exemplariness is solely grounded on the moral level, and therefore on the emulation of the virtues of others (Russo, 2019). This carries the risk of homologation, rigidity, and fixity. In addition, the risk is to produce a qualitative levelling of individual, value, and cultural differences. A close examination of the ideas of vocation and witnessing reveals instead that they are founded on the exaltation of talents, plasticity, peculiarities, and specificities of the person (Bellini, 2021; Ruggiero, 2018; Ruggiero, 2020). The presence of Otherness-exemplars (in personal, social, cultural, and religious terms) can provide individual with a guide or mentor for his or her peculiar process of axiological growth and personal happiness. While existing studies have clearly demonstrated the centrality of the idea of eccentricity for Scheler’s phenomenology and personalism, they have not addressed the connection between sociality, solidarity, eccentricity and exemplarist theory of Bildung and Vorbildsmodelle all the way.   Biography: Alessio Ruggiero is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Verona. He obtained his master’s degree at the University of Salerno, where he has conducted for many years research on the thought of the German phenomenologist Max Scheler as a student and honorary fellow. He is currently working on the analysis of the ethical, pedagogical, and metaphysical-religious elements of personal exemplarity. He is an editor for national and international scientific journals ("New Journal of Philosophy of Religion"; “Philosophical News. Official Publication of the European Society for Moral Philosophy"; "Thaumàzein. Rivista di filosofia"). He collaborates with the Italian Association of Philosophy of Religion (AIFR), and with the European Society for Philosophy of Religion (ESPR) and with the European Academy of Religion (EuARe).     Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Noam Cohen of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel   Abstract: It is well known that Husserl and Heidegger approach the analysis of the fact that we share one common lifeworld in different ways. For Husserl, the constitution of the shared world relies on transcendental intersubjectivity as a community of co-constituting monads, whereas Heidegger claims that the world is always already a shared space of openness, prior to any constitution by a plurality of subjects. In this paper, however, I propose understanding both views of the foundational social dimension of the world under the same umbrella of a “mereological” phenomenological analysis. That is, I suggest reading Husserl’s and Heidegger’s apparently opposed positions in terms of an approach that emphasizes how certain essential part-whole relations condition experience as such. Against this background, I show, on the one hand, how such an approach brings Husserl’s and Heidegger’s conceptions of the basic sense of sociality closer together. But on the other, through a discussion of the way social relations embody certain parthood relations, I also demonstrate a yet deeper sense in which they disagree on what it means to share a public sphere. The first part of my paper establishes the thesis that both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenological analyses rely on a basic “logic” of parts and wholes, which makes its first appearance in the Logical Investigations. Building on this, the second part shows how such a mereological logic comes into play in Husserl’s and Heidegger’s characterizations of sociality in the Cartesian Meditations, Husserliana 13-15, Being and Time, and the 1928 lectures Einleitung in die Philosophie, respectively. Lastly, I demonstrate how despite this common methodological ground, Husserl and Heidegger hold different conceptions of sharing. Whereas Husserl’s transcendental notion of sharing posits an open-ended plurality, for Heidegger sharing is ultimately grounded in a prior undifferentiated sphere of openness to the truth of being.    Biography: Noam Cohen is a PhD candidate at the Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2020/21 he was a guest researcher at the Husserl Archive at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. His doctoral dissertation sets out to explore from a phenomenological perspective different models of intersubjectivity and community, with a focus on their relations to the constitution of mathematical objectivity. It takes on the form of a comparative study of this theme in the philosophies of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Hans Georg Gadamer.      Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Tanja Staehler of University of Sussex, UK   Abstract: This presentation examines the role of shame in relation to giving birth. Three dimensions of shame will be explored: 11.) Nudity. Although giving birth does not necessarily mean being entirely naked, it certainly means an exposure of one’s genitals. 22.) Intimate touch. Before and during birth, vulva and vagina are being touched by healthcare professionals who will normally be strangers to the woman giving birth. 33.) Display of emotions. Giving birth means to experience overwhelming emotions while surrounded normally by one’s closest partner as well as healthcare professionals as strangers. My presentation will describe each of these dimensions with respect to the shame involved. Phenomenological thinkers Jean-Paul Sartre (being looked at), Jean-Luc Nancy (touch) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (flesh, body language, intercorporeality) will be drawn upon for these description to provide us with relevant concepts. Practical solutions will then be suggested with special emphasis on verbal language and body language. Nudity can often be mitigated by verbal speech. Intimacy of touch can be balanced by relevant modes of touching in other areas (esp. massage). The best response to displays of emotion would be normalising these expressions, and not feeling the need to thematise them. Examples will be discussed for each of these. Overall, establishing intercorporeal relations between the involved party helps alleviate shame as well as anxiety, preparing the parents for the wonder to come. The most fundamental intercorporeal relation is simply being there. Although being there for the woman in labour can involve verbal language, the dimensions of body language and silence are crucially important (as I have developed in an online module commissioned by the Royal College of Midwives).   Biography: Dr Tanja Staehler is Professor of European Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Her research interests include Plato, Hegel, Phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida), Aesthetics, Philosophy of Pregnancy and Childbirth. She has written books on 'Hegel, Husserl, and the Phenomenology of Historical Worlds' (2016); 'Plato and Levinas: The Ambiguous Out-Side of Ethics' (2010); and (with Michael Lewis) 'Phenomenology: An Introduction' (2010).     Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Brentyn Ramm of Witten/Herdecke University, Germany   Abstract: Jean-Paul Sartre gives the example of being caught by someone looking through a keyhole as a profound shame experience. He took the essence of the experience of shame as one being a mere object for the other. The other’s look (‘The Look’) is the main way in which I encounter the other’s subjectivity. Personal relationships, for Sartre, are hence an inherently unstable dynamic, in which one is either the subject or the object. Douglas Harding was a British philosopher from outside the academy, who also analysed the lived experience of interpersonal relationships. Like Sartre, he thought of consciousness as a type of ‘nothingness’ and the making of oneself into a mere object as a kind of false consciousness. However, unlike Sartre he thought that my objectification from the gaze of the other is a habit that can be short-circuited. Harding observed that from the first-person perspective I don’t see my face. Rather in my visual experience, I am looking out of a gap. Visually speaking, I am space for the world, not a thing in it.  As infants and young children, one gradually learns to identify with how other’s see them – ‘The Face Game’. This social game is at the heart of one’s personal identity and also of difficulties in personal relationships. In particular, it is one of the main sources of the experience of shame (being ‘shame-faced’) and morbid self-consciousness. While Sartre doesn’t tell us how to remedy these debilitating forms of self-consciousness, Harding developed a number of practical awareness exercises that can be used in everyday circumstances. I will guide the audience through some of Harding’s first-person experiments. I will discuss how conscious ‘facelessness’ can be applied to problems such as shame, stage fright and morbid self-consciousness.     Biography: Brentyn Ramm is a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany. His research focuses on using first-person experimental methods to investigate conscious experience – particularly on the self, awareness, and contemplative experiences in Asian philosophy. He completed his PhD in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University in 2016. His honours in philosophy was at the University of Queensland. Before this he completed a PhD in cognitive psychology at the University of Queensland in 2006. His honours in psychology and BA (majoring in philosophy and psychology) was at the University of Adelaide.     Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Tomás Lally of NUIG, Ireland   Abstract: This paper argues that current accounts of primitive shame are incomplete and poorly  grounded in the relational context within which primitive shame develops. These accounts use adult concepts to explore the pre-linguistic, sensory world of the infant. The use of these concepts is at best indicative or metaphorical. What is required is a proto-phenomenological approach (Hatab) to the infant’s sensory experience. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Hatab I argue that it is our initial experience of bodily sensory connectedness which provides the pre-conditions for the initial development of primitive shame and the later development of pure shame. Nussbaum characterises the infants experience of primitive shame as a “fear of abandonment by the source of good” as in the infants relationship with the caregiver. Rochat theorises primitive shame in the same direction and claims that empathy is an emotional derivative of shame. Both Nussbaum’s and Rochat’s analyses stop far short of a comprehensive understanding of the relational context within which primitive shame emerges.   The Foetus begins initially in the tactile, protective environment of the womb. At birth the baby sensorially experiences separation: the cutting of the cord, the drawing of a first breath. It also experiences the intimacy of touch and the other non-visual senses: the comfort and warmth of its mothers breast, the sounds of her voice, the smell and taste of her body .  Touch, smell, sound and taste all bring connectedness and familiarity before vision highlights separateness.  It is this initial sensorial experience of connectedness which grounds primitive shame. This ‘proto empathy’ which is initially sensorially experienced in connectedness, touch and nurturing grounds and fosters the desire for social  proximity and belonging later exhibited by pure shame.  (283 words) 1. Guenther critiques Sartre’s account of pure shame for not providing an account of the sharing, supportive and nurturing environment which makes shame possible. p.27 2. Zahavi and Rochat  do not use the concept of ‘proto empathy’ but write about a basic other acquaintance which is “a central precondition for experiential sharing and emergence of a we.” Zahavi, Dan and Rochat, Phillipe: Empathy ≠ sharing: Perspectives from phenomenology and developmental psychology. p.551. 3. Dolezal, Luna ; Shame, Vulnerability and Belonging: Reconsidering Sartre’s Account of Shame, p. 436     Biography: I am currently studying for a practice-based PhD in Philosophy and English at NUIG.  My project is: The completion of a philosophy thesis on the origins of subjectivity and the self, titled: How does ‘I’ Begin?  The completion of a novel on the theme of unlearning habit and beginning again. The novel is titled: No way to say Goodbye and is written in the first person.  I hold a BA (Hons) in philosophy from NUIM and an MA in Philosophy from University of London. I returned to university in 2017 after a gap of 33 years.     Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Hannah Bondurant of Duke University, United States   Abstract: One receives feedback from outside sources to confirm or discover one’s own beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, and often what group (and its features) to which one belongs. Yet cognitive biases and the source’s social status can influence our evaluations of feedback from outside sources. Since evidence suggests introspection is not an entirely reliable epistemic practice, I present what I call “transformative shared experiences” (TSEs) as way to understand how feedback from others shapes the way a person see themselves as a moral agent. I argue that TSEs take place on cognitive, personal, and cultural levels by drawing from developmental neuroscience, moral psychology, and Confucianism. To conceptualize TSEs, I use research on shared intentionality that occurs when we engage in cooperative activities as individuals or as a society. Shared intentionality or agency involves individuals not just sharing goals but also cognitive representations of multiple actions, roles, and perspectives. Successful shared intentionality has both joint cooperative attention and activity as well as similar representations of how things are going and should go. Research on the nature of “cultural cognition” shows that, at a young age, children are able to create a “shared fictional reality” with others through games which consist in rules, norms, representations, and narratives about what the world is and what it should be like. This construction of social reality is ongoing as this natural tendency is what leads us to create institutions, policies, and other structures to maintain our cultural traditions and values. Feedback about oneself, such as how one should identify as a person, is found within this shared reality. By exploring TSEs, we can better understand how transformation, good and bad, emerges from exchanges of feedback and experiences that shape not just perspective but one’s ability to relate to oneself and others. While we need to seriously consider the ways they can go wrong, I argue that TSEs with a diversity of sources is one way to help combat self-ignorance and the epistemic injustice we commit towards others when discrediting their feedback due to identity prejudice.     Biography: Dr. H. Bondurant (they/them) recently completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Duke University in May 2021. They specialize in social epistemology with particular attention to issues at the intersection of self-knowledge and epistemic injustice. Their work often draws from moral psychology, feminist philosophy, and bioethics.     Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Donald Landes of Université Laval, Canada   Abstract: In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues that binocular vision is accomplished neither through the impersonal accumulation of separate images nor through the transcendental inspection of the mind; rather, it is accomplished through the gearing together of the two eyes in a single gesture responding to the tensions that steal across the phenomenal field. The gesture that creatively takes up these tensions is solicited but not predetermined by them. The binocular image haunts the field protentionally; it is a certain absence remaining virtual and imminent, and only there for the person able to sense its call. It is no more contained in these tensions than a poem is prefigured in a language, and only the accomplishment of binocular vision will prove that there was something there to be seen in this way. And yet, how the tensions of the field solicit a creative gearing-into has not been fully appreciated, with much of our focus on the accomplished perception rather than the paradoxical structure of tension that solicits it. Moreover, completing this picture is particularly urgent insofar as this example shapes Merleau-Ponty’s account of the perception of others and collective action. Now, although Gilbert Simondon rarely acknowledged his philosophical debt to Merleau-Ponty, I argue that Simondon’s account of the metastable tensions that solicit oriented but unpredictable individuation completes and furthers Merleau-Ponty’s fascinating use of the figure-ground structure and the event of binocular vision. By mobilizing Elizabeth Grosz’s reading of Simondon’s powerful philosophy of individuation and my own account of the paradoxical solicitation of the virtual, this paper offers foundational insights into our perception of others, collective action, and our being-with-others as a creative resolution of the tension of seeing double, together.   Biography: Donald Landes is Associate Professor of Continental Philosophy in the Philosophy Faculty at Laval University, Quebec. He has published two books on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the recent English translation of Merleau-Ponty's key text, Phenomenology of Perception. Landes has published many chapters and articles works on Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and contemporary French thought, and is particularly working in critical phenomenology.       Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Supriya Subramani of University of Zurich, Switzerland   Abstract: In this paper, I illustrate how reflexivity, humility, and embodiment are integral to moral phenomenological research. While reflexivity and embodiment are widely acknowledged in qualitative inquiry and the phenomenological research process, these concepts are not critically examined within moral phenomenology. With the help of two ‘reflexive moments’ from the exploratory qualitative study which examines the moral experience of humiliation within Non-European migrants' healthcare experiences in Zurich, Switzerland, I will describe how reflexivity and embodiment are intertwined with humility. By doing this, I argue that researchers and participants share the intersubjective space where they engage with the emerging layered complex experiences. Furthermore, I illustrate that embodied humility provides space for mutual recognition of researchers and participants ‘moral self and Other’. Finally, I discuss how these complex intertwining layers, through the reflexive process, result in understanding moral experiences and moral judgments. Through this paper, I conclude and advocate for weaving in embodied humility and reflexivity while conducting moral phenomenological research, as it demystifies the moral and epistemological stances of the researcher and research process.   Biography: I am a Postdoctoral Fellow, and work on the philosophical and conceptual constructions of (dis)respect, humiliation and respect for persons within bioethics literature. My research interests lie at the intersection of moral emotions, ethics and behaviour. I employ qualitative methodology to explore moral subjectivities of individuals and engage with moral epistemological inquiries in my methodological research.     Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Imke von Maur of Osnabrück University, Institute of Cognitive Science, Germany   Abstract: Theories of affective intentionality are concerned with the evaluative dimension of emotions. From this perspective, emotions can be seen as the ability to disclose meaningfulness. However, such theories too often neglect the social structuring of affectively disclosed content (for example, in Goldie 2001; Helm 2000; Roberts 2003). Theories within the paradigm of situated affectivity (cf. Stephan, Walter & Wilutzky 2014; Slaby 2014; Colombetti & Roberts 2015) which do consider socio-cultural factors often fail to acknowledge the meaning-making dimension of emotions because of their focus on emotion regulation. In this talk I combine theories of affective intentionality (cf. Slaby 2008; Slaby et al. 2011) with the paradigm of situated affectivity from a critical phenomenological (Ahmed 2010; Al-Saji 2014) and practice-theoretical perspective. On that basis I introduce the concept of “habitual affective intentionality”, which allows to address and, if necessary, to criticise the socio-cultural structuring of affectively disclosed content. I consider affective intentionality to be a bodily, phenomenally experienced way of disclosing complex meaningful Gestalts in and against the background of social practice. In this talk, I will especially spell out the ability to disclose meaningfulness by means of an emotion as the ability to “play along” (cf. Bourdieu and Merleau-Ponty) with practice-relevant “games” and thus to maintain their validity. This raises the normative question of whether the practices and forms of living supported or disturbed by means of affective intetionality are justifiable or not. This orientation leads from the theoretical description of affective intentionality as an embodied and practical capacity to the normative and social theoretical perspective on the critical interrogation of consolidated emotional practices. It thus opens up the philosophy of emotions, which has so far mainly revolved around theoretical questions of affective intentionality, to questions of contemporary social philosophy and social critique.   Biography: I work as a postdoctoral researcher at the institute of cognitive science at Osnabrück University, Germany. I defended my PhD thesis in November 2017, which has been about the epistemic relevance of emotions in socio-culturally situated complex understanding processes. I have done research on emotions from a decidedly normative/political stance from the beginning of my studies and am now also working on a theory of education that is concerned with how to properly understand social matters in order to change them (climate change, structural racism, ethical issues concerning AI and technology, etc.).     Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   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.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/