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Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Paul Tuppeny   Abstract: Our world is, by its nature, a place of change; trees grow, fruit ripens and skin wrinkles; every state of being is finite and all opportunity is fleeting. Intrinsic to the perceptual apparatus through which we know this place, it seems, are pre-reflective judgements concerning these transformative processes. We experience these intuitions as age.   Through this phenomenon of age, we ‘feel’ Time in the physical things around us, every episode of perception conveying the past, projecting a future and delivering to us a temporally extended spatial arena. Although derived from only momentary observations, the discernment of objective age allows us to chronicle the world’s flux and stabilise the evanescent environment in which we find ourselves.   This primordial perceptual comportment, evolved to understand changes in the Natural environment, is applied equally to the artefacts of our technicity, gathering together their sedimented temporal layers to build our heritage.   The paper begins with an investigation into the “material-temporality” of natural entities and speculates on the cognitive mechanisms that might imbue physical objects with temporal characteristics. In these, Husserl’s notion of the ad-memorised co-presentations that fuse with our sensory data appear central. Similarly important, though, are Aristotle’s observations concerning our biographic assimilation of objects and the coalescence of those change-narratives around an entity’s actuality, or telos, as defined through the purposes of the subject.   The discussion then moves to the age that we experience in man-made objects. These artefacts do not just embody their own past but that of their originating community, experienced through our empathic interpretation of them as “spiritualised objects,” animated by the intent of their makers.   The paper concludes with the proposition that it is the phenomenon of age which stitches us into the fabric of the world and marries our needs with its, and our own, inherent generative processes.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Andrejs Balodis   Abstract: The paper will explore the concept of body memory and its application in the context of phenomenologically oriented medical humanities. Recent phenomenological research indicates that body memory plays a significant role in shaping embodied experience, both at the subjective and intersubjective levels. (Casey 1987, Fuchs 2012, 2017, Froese & Izquierdo 2018, etc.) However, due to its non-representational nature, body-memory is a challenging topic for research. I argue that structures of embodiment such as body memory and collective body memory (introduced by Fuchs) contribute in shaping health behaviors of individuals and communities, such as reluctance to get vaccinated against Covid-19 during the pandemic.   We* conducted a phenomenologically grounded qualitative research to explain motivations behind vaccine hesitancy and refusal. Existing studies on the subject lack a comprehensive, in-depth explanation of the role of the embodied experience in vaccine hesitancy. By applying a phenomenological conceptual framework – using concepts like embodiment, intentionality, lifeworld, body image, body schema, habitual body, normality etc.), we have gained insights into the embodied experience of vaccine reluctance and the underlying structures that shapes this experience.   The qualitative study (N=16) carried out in Latvia allows us to draw conclusions not only about individual but also collective models of health experience, emphasizing the socio-cultural and historical dimensions in the embodied experience. I will argue that the phenomenological concepts of the body memory and collective body memory can shed light on long-standing practices, habits and attitudes, thereby explaining culturally specific health behaviours, including hesitancy to vaccinate.   *This research is funded by the Latvian Council of Science, project Hesitant bodies: phenomenological analysis of the embodied experience of vaccine hesitancy, project No. lzp-2021/1-0360   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Dan Degerman   Abstract: This paper articulates the sense of silence as a historically constituted, embodied capacity to skillfully grasp and deploy silence, using mania as a breakdown case.   Silence is ubiquitous. We are surrounded by the silences of objects, spaces, other people, and our own bodies. Generally, these silences go unnoticed, forming a background against which we skillfully engage with people and the world through speech and sound. For example, we can pre-reflectively grasp the silence punctuating an interlocutor’s utterance as a solicitation to break our own silence by speaking. Similarly, we can pre-reflectively grasp their waning attention as a solicitation for us to become silent again, enabling them to speak and us to listen. I will propose that we can usefully understand this as involving the sense of silence.   Drawing on resources from Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, I will define and explore this sense of silence through a case in which that sense has apparently broken down, namely, mania. Symptoms of mania include an unmanageable flood of thoughts and an urge to speak. First-person accounts of those symptoms indicate that they may bring a profound disruption in the individual’s relationship to silence. In some, silence is described as a newfound source of agony, in others, as an elusive goal. Individuals appear reflectively aware of social norms and personal habits that ordinarily govern silence but their affective hold has loosened. Some people invent painful, physical methods to try to replace that hold. This suggests that the sense of silence is an embodied capacity, historically constituted through the sedimentation of norms and habits.   Thus, the paper offers two benefits: first, a better understanding of how our historically constituted relationship to silence enables us in our everyday lives, and second, insight into how its disruption may disable us in mania.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from David Ventura   Abstract: Despite seldom referring to the European phenomenological tradition in his varied studies of Caribbean subjectivity, Édouard Glissant’s work has often been read as phenomenological. Even Glissant’s most perceptive readers seemingly take for granted that his work fits this description, “privileging as it does phenomenology over ontology” (Wiedorn). This paper aims to complicate Glissant’s relation to the phenomenological tradition by placing his work into dialogue with the “six senses of critique for critical phenomenology” identified by Lisa Guenther. I argue that while Glissant’s work is broadly aligned with Guenther’s stipulation that “Critical phenomenology (…) [seeks] to trace the contingent, historical emergence of structures like white supremacy and heteropatriarchy, to ask whether and how these structures could be otherwise (…) and to reclaim, create, and support more liberatory ways of being, relating, and sense-making,” Glissant also significantly alters, or creolizes, the stakes of this critical phenomenological enterprise by virtue of his sustained attention to the brutal historical experiences of transatlantic slavery, the Middle Passage, and their ongoing implications for present and future forms of thinking and relating. Attending both to his theoretical texts (e.g. Poetics of Relation) and his literary output (e.g. Mahagony), I argue that Glissant’s work critically brings into relief some of the still-too-Western presuppositions of Guenther’s politically engaged definition of critical phenomenology. As such, I conclude, Glissant’s corpus offers new directions for what future senses of critique may be adequate for a phenomenological practice seeking to overcome the violence of contingent structures such as coloniality, anti-Black racism, and white supremacy.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Haotian Wu   Abstract: Can film do phenomenology? The short answer is ‘Yes’. As Heidegger (2001: 59) writes, ‘any exhibiting of an entity as it shows itself in itself, may be called “phenomenology” with formal justification.’ In essence, ‘phenomenology is to “let us see”.’ Accordingly, film, an artform excelling at showing, exhibiting, and letting us see, is phenomenology per excellence. It is, therefore, not surprising that many people, including Merleau-Ponty (2020), claim that film is the most phenomenological medium. However, this fertile land of film as phenomenology remains largely uncultivated.   This paper contributes to this gap by showing that Farwell My Concubine (Kaige Chen, 1993), a masterpiece of Chinese cinema, is a phenomenology of modern Chinese history. I argue that it shows a structure of historical experience as a repetition of an ambivalent gesture, a farewell to the past as performative identities, which is simultaneously a beckoning to the future as an authentic self-transcendence. These two aspects of the same gesture are respectively represented by Duan Xiaolou (Fengyi Zhang) and Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung), two Peking opera actors. From their first-person perspective, we witness the historical upheavals of 20th-century China, which, in the film, is foregrounded by the opera ‘Farwell My Concubine’. The opera is a historical drama about an ancient warlord, Xiang Yu, played by Xiaolou, bidding farewell to his beloved concubine, Consort Yu, played by Dieyi, after losing a decisive battle. As the opera mirrors each regime transformation, the phenomenological nature of the film is laid bare: It is not about modern Chinese history per se but about how history, enacted out and suffered by the two actors’ lived bodies, manifests a common structure of experience, worthy of phenomenological articulation.   Articulating this structure, this film-phenomenology paper contributes to exploring the linear and cyclical nature of the phenomenology of history.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Daniele Nuccilli   Abstract: In Die neue Wissenschaft vom Recht II, Husserl’s former student Wilhelm Schapp states that, “the history of humanity is the history of its works” and for this reason the relations between self, work, value, and production can be considered as “the a priori of historical science” (p. 67). Starting from this, he proposes an analysis of the historical dimension of values and their relationship to the production and development of objects of use. This analysis proposes a phenomenology of creation that aims at dismissing the static conception of essences of classical phenomenology. In In Geschichten verstrickt, this analysis is further deepened and linked to the theory of human entanglement in histories. Central to the notion of entanglement is Schapp’s conception of the primal body. By primal body he means the body of humans when they act in the everyday life-world. It is this conception of the primal body that makes it possible to conceive of humans as being intertwined with histories and carrying histories. The life-world displays traces of the histories of the past that thicken around historical events with agent subjects, individual or collective, at the center. We can get in connection with them through what Schapp calls co-entanglement. The co-entanglement can be defined as a kind of taking part in histories, projecting ourselves into the historical horizon of something that is told to us, through narratives and books, but also through things and monuments understood as works of humanity. The past in this way emerges on the horizon as a tangle of intertwining stories of our past in which we personally or our family and nation are entangled. In my paper I will analyze the relationship between body, history and life-world taking into account Schapp conception of entanglement in histories.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Philip Tovey   Abstract: Breverton Pond, situated on the southern edge of Exmoor in Somerset England, is commonly cited as the source of the River Tone - its origins. Rivers often have disputed origins. A second stream, rising in Elworthy, 2.6 miles West, contends to be the source of the River Tone. Problems of origin were central to Husserl's project in Experience and Judgment (EJ), where enduring objects are constituted in the flux of an ever becoming. Judgements, like rivers, have disputed origins, creating issues with the temporal fixity modernity is reliant on. Using the temporal overlaps Jay Lampert extracts from EJ, together with David Woods eco-phenomenological outline of the plexity of time  as my analytical handrails, this paper reports an autoethnography of the embodied ecologies of the River Tone, walked barefoot, from source to mouth, over three consecutive days and nights. How does the River Tone ‘originate’ in experience when I put my foot in it? As the headwaters ‘overlap’ (Überschiebung) my foot now ‘depositioning’ into the streambed of historical depositions of Devonian Sandstone, how do these ecological entanglements mediate the visibility of my origins? The implications of ecophenomenology as an analytical framework coupled with autoethnography are briefly discussed in relation to how temporality features in riverine policy formulations within the UK.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Bence Marosan   Abstract: We, humans, are living in a world, shared with non-human beings. Throughout our entire history, we, humans, prevailingly lived according to an anthropocentric paradigm, and we related to non-humans essentially as potential resources, obstacles, or even threats. In other words, humans instinctively, or sometimes on a reflectively elaborated ideological basis, treated non-humans in objectified or instrumentalized terms. During Modernity, due to rapidly developing technologies, this anthropological stance even had increasingly catastrophic consequences, that became apparent in the 1960s, thanks to the increasing global ecological crisis, which now has features that appear to threaten even the mere physical existence and survival of the human race.   In my presentation, I would like to have a closer look at this ecological crisis from the viewpoint of Husserlian phenomenology, and I will look for possible ways of solution, again, from a Husserlian perspective. Not only from a biological viewpoint, but also for a phenomenological approach, humanity appears as a subsystem of the Earth as a global ecosystem, entwined with other ecological subsystems, and partly interdependent from them.   As many authors and interpreters made it clear (e.g. Erazim Kohák, Annabelle Dufourcq, Ullrich Melle), in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl – especially in his late period, in the 1930s – we can find many ecologically relevant topics. In this regard, I would like to highlight especially his conceptions concerning life and the inherent value of life in his ethical lectures (as could be read in Husserliana Volumes 28, 37, and 42). In my presentation, I aim to show how a Husserlian notion of the inherent value of life would lead to an inescapable ethical imperative to respect life in every form and try to harmonize our relationship with the other, non-human parts of the Earthly ecosystem, with which we are essentially entwined.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a presentation from Andréa Delestrade   Abstract: Is there a possibility to think the ecological crisis through the logic of History, or is the Modern concept of ‘History’ rather driven to its end? I examine Chakrabarty’s and Merleau-Ponty’s strategies to end ‘History’ in their reflections on Nature, and I argue that if Chakrabarty’s diagnosis of the necessity to end ‘History’ to give space to ecological thinking is right, Merleau-Ponty’s strategy proves more effective, as it enables us to think the philosophical end of ‘History’ while retaining the necessity of a political ecology attentive to differentiation and domination. I first develop Chakrabarty’s insights on the exhaustion of ‘History’ as a concept, both in its Eurocentric and anti-Eurocentric variations, and the need to replace it with a negative universal History which substitutes a positive teleology (being-toward-freedom) for a negative teleology (being-toward-catastrophe), and de-centers human subjectivity and freedom in a phenomenologically empty ‘species universalism’. I then argue that evacuating the body, the possibility of phenomenological apprehension and hence of thinking particularity, while retaining a universalising teleological dynamic, leads Chakrabarty to a Eurocentric status quo, that is, an abstract universalism that flattens out the thought of difference. I finally turn to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of Nature, and argue that it offers us a productive articulation of the philosophical experience of Nature, including in its contemporary destruction, and the political differentiation and domination at stake in this ecological crisis. I provide a phenomenological apprehension of the climate crisis, albeit a non-Eurocentric one, which would not be predicated on European or Anthropocene-like universalism, by insisting on two features of his philosophy of Nature: first, the chiasmic intertwining of Nature and History (which recasts universality as foundational); second, the necessity of institution and expression in this intertwining, which gives space to think the political condition of the climate crisis, in its sedimentation, domination, and creativity.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a keynote presentation from Dr Niall Keane   Abstract: 'Self and Other. From Temporality to History'   This talk will examine the self-other relation in phenomenological terms, looking at how a phenomenological examination of the distinct experiences of the world, both my own and the other’s, needs to account for the transition from temporal to historical understanding. While Husserl is usually accused of not having worked out the historical nature of lived experience like those found in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, a case will be made for a more universal concept of history using Husserl’s analyses of the appearance of the other as not only accounting for the appearance of the world in its objectivity, but also for the emergence of culture and history as understandable. Such a universal concept of history will be explored insofar as it presupposes the appearance and givenness of another embodied human being, similar to myself, but over there. The other, in Husserl’s account, is hence not only the indicator of the world’s objectivity and knowability, but also marks the beginning of history and culture. The talk will conclude with an attempt tie the abovementioned concepts of culture and history, founded on the original givenness of the other to the self, to the concept of justice understood as my responsibility to get the other right. While Husserl never claims this explicitly, it will be argued that his concepts of “absolute humanity” and “the absolute meaning of History” [Erste philosophie, 506] are at bottom teleologically guided strivings for justice and self-responsibility.   Biography: I have published widely in the areas of phenomenology and hermeneutics and I am co-author of The Gadamer Dictionary (Continuum, 2012) and co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). In addition to my publications on Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Michel Henry, and Hannah Arendt, I am Treasurer of the Irish Phenomenological Circle (IPC) and executive member of the editorial board at the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (JBSP).   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a keynote presentation from Prof. Darian Meacham   Abstract: In 1988 the French Philosopher André Gorz published Métamorphoses du travail: Critique de la raison économique. In this book, through an engagement with Critical theory, Marxism and to a lesser extent phenomenology, Gorz sets out a critique of economic rationality and puts forward a positive programme of a “politics or time” geared towards an idea of radical autonomy as productive work outside of the industrial economy. Gorz’s work has a close relation to Ivan Illich’s theory and programme of “conviviality” published some fifteen years prior in Tools for Conviviality (1973). Illich argues for a programme of convivial technology, where he defines conviviality as autonomous and creative intercourse among persons and the intercourse of persons with their environments.     In this talk, I examine the ideas of autonomy and conviviality in relation to what can be called an institutional theory of technology and the politics of time that both Gorz and Illich set out in separate ways; and  ask what autonomous time and space can be carved out  within an increasingly automated world of work?   Biography: Darian Meacham is Professor of Practical Philosophy at Maastricht University and chair of the philosophy department.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History.   This episode features a keynote presentation from Prof. Michela Summa   Abstract: Various forms of engaging with history play a crucial role in shaping personal and collective identities. Rituals, anniversaries, family celebrations, monuments, and street names are all examples of how history is embedded and integrated into the fabric of everyday actions that define these identities. Consequently, the concept of history becomes intertwined with memory practices, which involve both remembering and forgetting.   In recent years, debates surrounding the relationship between history, memory, and issues of identity have gained increased significance. This can be attributed to several factors, some of which are directly linked to concrete memory practices. One example is the ongoing critical examination of how certain cultures of remembrance, particularly those relating to influential figures, often overlook or disregard their involvement in authoritarian or colonial regimes. These approaches have drawn attention to the epistemic and social injustices that are deeply embedded in certain methods of transmitting and interpreting history. Furthermore, there has been a growing unease or uncanniness associated with memory practices that have been developed and partially institutionalized since the Second World War. This debate is particularly relevant to Germany and its concept of Erinnerungskultur, which has been evolving since the 1980s-1990s. While this approach is generally recognized as an unprecedented way of engaging with the past, there are recurring critical voices that emphasize what is being forgotten within this culture of remembrance or advocate for moving beyond it. Lastly, despite the rejection of teleological and eschatological narratives concerning the meaning of history, and despite scholarly critiques of using history to justify the present, such instrumentalizations still persist in contemporary discourse.   My contribution will not directly address the social and political issues related to these phenomena. Instead, I aim to discuss the structural elements that characterize how we confront the past and how our relationship with the past shapes who we are. How does the formation of historical identities depend on the embodiment of memory? Why is it that we can only engage with the past through critical analysis after a significant amount of time has elapsed between generations? Does remembering the past always involve elements of forgetting? What are the factors that, at a particular moment, bring forgotten aspects to the fore? In attempting to answer these questions, I will specifically explore how different approaches to confronting the past – including attitudes of owning, ignoring, and disowning history – are connected to particular attitudes towards the present and the future.   Biography: Michela Summa is a Junior Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Würzburg. She received her PhD from the University of Pavia and KU-Leuven, with a dissertation on Husserl’s phenomenology of temporal and spatial constitution. Before joining the University of Würzburg, she worked as a post-doc at the Clinic for General Psychiatry in Heidelberg from 2009 to 2015, and at the Institute for Philosophy in Würzburg from 2015 to 2018. In 2018, she also served as a guest professor for phenomenology and hermeneutics at the Institute for Philosophy in Kassel. She is the author of Spatio-temporal Intertwining: Husserl’s Transcendental Aesthetic, published in 2014 by Springer and co-editor of several volumes and special issues, including the collective volume Das Exemplarische – Orientierung für menschliches Wissen und Handeln“ (with Karl Mertens, Mentis, 2022), the special issue of the journal Human Studies on Affect, Tendency, and Drive: Perspectives on the Basic Structures of Intentionality (with Philipp Schmidt and Nicola Spano, 2024), and the Special Issue of the journal Topoi on Double Intentionality (with Martin Klein and Philipp Schmidt). She has written several articles on topics in the theory of knowledge, philosophy of mind, social philosophy, and phenomenology.   Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. 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 9 continues with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Abel Franco   Abstract:

We both perceive and evaluate aesthetically spaces with our body, in particular by (experiencing ourselves) occupying and moving in them. Unlike simply being in a space, the experience of occupying is the experience of actively filling the space with our bodily presence and mobility. Where exactly we place our body in a space, how we place it (posture, orientation), and with which motion (activity) alters our perception of that space and our aesthetic evaluation. And vice versa: our unique perception of a space also affects how we feel our body. Saying that a space is oppressive or expansive, or warm or cold, or cozy or desolate, seems to express this. Perceiving a space shows strong similarities with the experience of touch: we touch a space with our body and our body is touched by that space. This is quite different from saying that the haptic features of our physical environment (natural or built) are relevant in our perception of spaces (J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, 1996). All sensible features can be said to be, not just add-ons, but integral part of that perception (cf., e.g., G. Böhme., Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces, 2017): the light and colors (vision), the temperature and the textures of materials (touch), the sounds that are altered by, and fill, that space (hearing), the smells that also fill it (smell/taste). Our aesthetic evaluations of spaces not only take this—i.e. our perception of a space--into account but bring into them (a) the uniquely personal meaning we perceive in the sensible features (coziness, warmth, expansiveness) and (b) the evaluation of two types of possibilities we see in the space: (b.1) possibilities to do what is significant for us and, among these, (b.2) possibilities that can be qualitatively enhanced (i.e. in their felt quality) by that space (“it feels better to read in the balcony”). We, thus, evaluate spaces aesthetically, not only by touching them with our body—or being touched by them--but also projecting on them (touching them with?) our ideal of life. Our ideal of life explains our perception of significance and meaningfulness in the (embodied) activities and ways of filling the space (occupying). Reading by the fire while it rains and reading under the sun in the park are experiences of reading altered in different ways by the very experience of occupying that particular space, in a particular way, and at this moment of our life. Our (changing) ideal of life makes our aesthetic choices deeply personal and dependent on the very present moment of our life. And, thus, an aesthetically preferable space reveals itself as the appropriate fit of activity, moment-in-our-life and (perceived) space. It is a space where, not only our body but our life fits well--or fits better. 

Biography:

Abel B. Franco holds a M.A. in History (1998) from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY); a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Salamanca (1999) and a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science (2006) from the University of Pittsburgh (EE.UU). He has taught in different CUNY campuses, at the University of Pittsburgh and, since 2006, at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) where he is currently a Professor in the Philosophy Department. He has written, given talks and published, mainly on the History of Natural Philosophy (especially Middle Ages and 17th century), on the History of Philosophy (especially the 17th century and, in particular, Descartes), on the History and Philosophy of Mind (especially emotions), and on Aesthetics (especially the relation between emotions and art, in the Baroque and in contemporary debates on philosophy of architecture and philosophy of fiction). His most recent articles are “Our Everyday Aesthetic Evaluations of Architecture” (_British Journal of Aesthetics_, 2019) and "The Aesthetic Value of Film" (_Journal of Aesthetic Education_, forthcoming). 

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 9 continues with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Michal Lipták   Abstract: Adorno always maintained that "new music"—his term for mostly atonal, avant-garde music—was not just yet another musical school within the history of music which would gradually settle down and develop its own idioms, but that it was unique in the history of music and that it introduces a certain rift—"an abrupt, qualitative leap"—due to which it would never settle down. He developed this understanding of avant-garde music in writings that, at the same time, combine a philosophy of music, a sociology of music, and an engaged music criticism addressing contemporary works, whereby this criticism was never value neutral. In this paper, I demonstrate that phenomenology—despite Adorno's explicit but misplaced distaste for it—is well disposed to ground this understanding; in doing so, I use notions developed in general phenomenology and in "classic" texts of phenomenological aesthetics, such as notion of Typik in Husserl, notions of schemata and historical a priori in Dufrenne, or conception of a schematic work in Ingarden. Interpreting Adorno phenomenologically allows us to confirm the profound rift between atonal avant-garde music and the rest of music that Adorno identified, and to disclose it more precisely, describing phenomenologically how such music places unnatural demands on us, while it simultaneously stimulates us. In return, phenomenology of music itself benefits from phenomenological absorption of Adorno's philosophy of music, too. Such absorption helps phenomenology to engage critically with contemporary musical works and thereby test the thesis of the profound rift on the current atonal avant-garde works; this approach also helps to develop criteria to evaluate the avant-garde works. Finally, this rift can be interpreted as a defining feature of avant-garde music, and therefore contribute to discussions about definition of avant-garde music, which are still unsettled in musicological literature. 

Biography: Michal Lipták is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of Slovak Academy of Sciences. He defended and published his dissertation on aesthetics of Husserl and Ingarden, and his current research involves Husserlian phenomenology, phenomenology of art (and music in particular), structuralism and post-structuralism, political philosophy including critical phenomenology, Hegelianism, Marxism and post-Marxism, philosophy of new media, and philosophy of law. He regularly reviews contemporary classical music for Slovak cultural magazines. In addition to philosophy, he also studied law and works as an attorney.    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 9 continues with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Anna Petronella Foultier   Abstract: In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of “anthropological spatiality” – various spatial levels related to the manner that we project the world, and that are not connected through geometrical space where each part is interchangeable, but rather through a more primordial, existential space where we are anchored as natural subjects. The experience of the dreamer, the schizophrenic or the person under influence from mescaline give examples of anthropological spatialities. Another such spatiality is said to be opened by “aesthetic perception” (1945, 333) – such as that of painting or of dance – and I will accordingly term it aesthetic spatiality. The spatiality of dance is “without goals or directions … the subject and its world are no longer opposed” (1945, 333), in a similar way that a painting is not “at the same place” as the canvas or the cracks on the wall of the cave. Now, the spatiality of a hallucinating or schizophrenic person seems available only to the subject doing the projection, while an aesthetic spatiality must be intersubjectively available: art only makes sense a cultural and shareable phenomenon. How, then, does the dancer, for example, constitute a form of spatiality that is valid for others? To resolve this problem, I will first appeal to Merleau-Ponty’s idea that the body is “the first cultural object” (1945, 401) and thus already in itself intersubjectively given with cultural meanings. Our body has, moreover, an “emblematic value”, so that our bodily positions, emotions and desires have a symbolic relation to one another (1945, 329). Finally, the characterisation of the spatiality of dance will be amended, and described, not as being “without goals or directions”, but with often unpredictable direction and as its own goal: one of the tasks of dance is to understand the very dynamics of bodily movement itself.    

Biography: Anna Petronella Foultier is a Senior Lecturer in philosophy at Umeå University. Her present research is focused on the dancer’s experience and aesthetic know-how. She has published in journals such as Hypatia, JSBP, Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, Chiasmi international and Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and coedited the anthology Material of Movement and Thought: Reflections on the Dancer’s Practice and Corporeality, with Cecilia Roos (2013). Foultier also works as a translator of philosophy and fiction, and has translated Beauvoir, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Kundera, Merleau-Ponty, Nora and many others into Swedish.    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 9 continues with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Jodie Russell   Abstract: In this talk, I will explore the implications that our interpretive capacities have for experiences of mental disorder. The traditional view, as I call it, describes mental disorder as a dysfunction of the individual, whether that be in the brain, or in body-world interactions (de Haan 2020). By looking at the interaction between our folk-psychological tools for social understanding and the self, we see that mental disorders have an importantly intrapersonal (as well as interpersonal) dimension which should be brought forth front and centre. My thesis develops from an understanding of what it means for human beings to be ‘self-interpreting animals’ (Taylor 1985), drawn from the mind-shaping literature (Andrews 2015a, 2015b; McGreer 2007, 2015; Mameli 2001; Zawidzki 2008, 2016). Under this view, “What determines one’s being human is the image one adopts.” (Heschel 1965, p.8). Our folk-psychological concepts are inherently normative under the mind-shaping view and when applied to the self, we shape our behaviour in norm-conforming ways so we can be understandable to others. I argue that, while the ‘self-understanding as self-shaping’ thesis from Zawidzki (2016) and Andrews (2015b) is compelling as it explains the consistency and inconsistency of the self, the mechanisms at play create significant problems for individuals with mental disorders. Namely, it entails that these individuals may be overburdened to be understandable to others and themselves, feeling compelled to make sense of the inconsistent and incoherent self-experiences. This is troubling when individuals lack folk-psychological tools to make sense of experiences such as in cases of hermeneutical injustice (Ritunnano, 2022). This suggest to me new tactics in alleviating the suffering of individuals with distressing pathological experiences. 

Biography: I’m a 3rd year, SGSAH-funded philosophy PhD student interested in the intersection of mind and medicine. My research began with a deep dissatisfaction to our current approach and concepts of mental disorder and so I develop my project with the intention of developing a concept of mental disorder that both better captures the experiences of individuals and does better work for us politically and socially by reducing stigma and allowing people more agency in how they treated and understood. As such, I explore and am interested in all aspects of phenomenology of illness, from embodiment to agency, language and emotions.    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 9 continues with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Andrew Turk   Abstract: This presentation discusses more than twenty years of transdisciplinary research with geographers, linguists, philosophers and collaborators from other disciplines.  This research into landscape language (ethnophysiography) utilised applied and critical phenomenological methods to investigate practical, embodied, affective and engaged modes of dwelling which have continued for tens of thousands of years.  This included the authors (second) PhD investigation and dissertation: Understanding Modes of Dwelling: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Phenomenology of Landscape (Murdoch University, Western Australia).  A transdisciplinary approach, using engaged phenomenology as the over-arching meta-paradigm, was operationalised via a detailed case study and data analysis methodology, including phenomenography and other hermeneutic methods.  Such collaborative research with indigenous peoples requires comprehensive ethical considerations, negotiations and protocols, involving appropriate engagement with both female and male participants.  The research produced an explanatory model of factors relevant to differences in relationships with landscape, as place, (Ethnophysiography Descriptive Model) and identified language ontologies represented in landscape terms and toponyms (placenames).  Case studies with Australian Indigenous language communities investigated their embodied relationships with landscape, as ‘taskscape’. Some language group members continue traditional practices; ceremonies at sacred sites, hunting, gathering and caring for ‘country’.  The research recognised the central importance of their social/cultural/spiritual holistic system called (T)Jukurrpa in the central and western desert areas and other names in different languages (e.g. Bidarra Law in Yindjibarndi).  This integrates social organisation, ethics and spirituality, intimately linking each specific language group to their ‘country’.  It is inadequately termed ‘The Dreaming’ in English.  This collaborative investigation facilitated interpretation of relationships with landscape in terms of commensurability with Heideggerian concepts of ‘care’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘topology’, while addressing ‘Eurocentrism’.  Two case studies produced a Pictorial Dictionary of Landscape Terms for Yindjibarndi and for Manyjilyjarra Aboriginal languages.  These dictionaries assist in language preservation, community cohesion and practical caring for ‘country’ by indigenous ranger teams.  

Biography: Andrew Turk has degrees in Surveying, Applied Science (Cartography), Arts (Psychology/Philosophy), PhD [1992 - Melbourne University] and second PhD [2020 - Murdoch University].  In the 1970s and 1980s he worked for the Australian Government producing topographic maps, involving surveying fieldwork in remote areas (including Antarctica) and development of digital-mapping and GIS.   In 1983 he commenced research/teaching at Melbourne University.  From 1993 Andrew taught human factors aspects of Information Systems at Murdoch University and researched Native Title, community development and cultural information with Aboriginal communities. Since 2000 he has conducted transdisciplinary research into cultural/linguistic aspects of landscape (ethnophysiography) using phenomenology methods.    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 9 continues with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Janko Nešić   Abstract: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a psychopathological condition characterized by persistent deficits in social interaction, social communication and restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour and interests (APA 2013). To build an integrative, ecological-enactive account of autism, I propose we should endorse the skilled intentionality framework (SIF; Rietveld, Denys, & van Westen 2018). SIF connects a number of disciplines - ecological psychology (landscape of affordances), phenomenology (selective openness to and relevance of affordances, optimal grip), emotion psychology (states of action-readiness), and embodied neurodynamics (self-organizing affordance-related states of action-readiness). In SIF, embodied cognition is understood as skilled engagement with affordances (possibilities for action) in sociomaterial environment of the ecological niche by which an individual tends toward the optimal grip. An important part of SIF is an ecological-enactive interpretation of the free energy principle and predictive processing (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014). Predictive processing accounts point out that in ASD too much precision is assigned to prediction errors (Van de Cruys et al. 2014; Constant et al. 2020; Miller et al. 2022).  Autistics suffer from suboptimal generative models that do not reach high levels of abstraction and generality (they have “overfitted” models). I will show that in SIF`s terms, autistic patterns of action-readiness pick out very specific solicitations in the environment and achieve optimal grip only in well-known situations and specifically constructed niches. They make interventions in the environment with reliable cue-effect relations. Autistic individuals lack the openness (pathological embodiment) needed to be responsive to the relevant affordances, pilling up habits and skills that are rigidly applied without adjustment to the changing environment. I argue that autistic persons favour social environments that increase predictability through ritual behaviour and routines (XXX et al. 2022) and design monotonous landscapes of affordances.  

Biography: I am a junior postdoctoral researcher on The Sciences of the Origin Project (University of Oxford project ‘New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe’ and John Templeton Foundation) at the Institute for Philosophy (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade). My research is located at the intersection of Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Psychiatry. I focus on studying pathologies of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in autism spectrum disorder and building an integrative approach to autistic disturbances that combines phenomenological, enactivist, ecological and neuroscientific (predictive processing /free energy principle) perspectives.    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 9 begins with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Natalia Burakowska & Danielle Petherbridge   Abstract: The notions of what constitutes self and personhood are philosophically disputed, with different accounts focusing on narrative construction, others on a pure identity pole, or different phenomenological accounts pointing to a minimal or experiential notion of self in contrast to personhood, which includes habitual, social and culture aspects. In this paper, we problematise these various accounts based on the consequences for persons with neurological illnesses, such as dementia. The paper, however, has a more important aim. We draw on research arising out of engaged phenomenological workshops conducted with carers and persons with dementia to investigate the implications of assumptions about what constitutes the self and personhood in health care settings. In recent years, the ‘person-centred’ approach to dementia, first developed by Tom Kitwood (1997), has gained prominence within healthcare settings. However, we identify ways in which the person-centred approach to dementia is limited and potentially problematic. In many settings, it relies on a narrative construction of personhood, whether prior to memory loss or reconstructed from family members (McGreevy, 2015). We suggest persons with dementia should be considered to maintain personhood even after the onset of memory loss or seeming loss of narrative and linguistic capacities. We reflect on the ways in which our engaged phenomenological workshops have informed new understandings of: i) persons with dementia as dynamic and developing persons capable of expressing themselves in embodied ways; ii) the ramifications of defining what constitutes persons in the context of dementia in terms of narrative selves iii) how such reassessments might inform the practice of carers. This research will demonstrate that a shift away from understanding persons merely as narrative constructions and equipping carers with an embodied understanding of personhood can shift some of the power and dignity back to the patient.     

Biography: Natalia Burakowska is a PhD student in Philosophy at University College Dublin and an Irish Research Council postgraduate scholar. She works in the areas of phenomenology, philosophy of mind and applied philosophy. Her doctoral work is focused on a phenomenological approach to dementia that conceptualises it as both a cognitive and bodily condition, taking account of the lived experience of dementia, vulnerability and forms of ethical responsiveness and care. 

Danielle Petherbridge is Ass. Professor in Philosophy at University College Dublin. Her primary research interests include phenomenology and social philosophy, medical humanities and ethics. She writes in the area of phenomenology and illness, critical phenomenology, and social philosophy. She is currently working on a research project on phenomenological approaches to dementia, and is PI of an Irish Research Council New Foundations funded project BodyDementia. She is a team member of the EU Funded Horizon 2020 grant Policy, Expertise and Trust (PERITIA) and co-founder of Health, Ethics and Narrative Ireland.       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 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 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/