Episodes
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Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.
This episode features a presentation from Jeffrey Wasch of West Chester University of Pennsylvania, United States
Abstract:
In a 2011 paper Merold Westphal argues that Gadamer and Ricoeur’s respective hermeneutical projects expose us to a dialectic between distanciation and belonging. Ricoeur shows us our distanciation by pointing out that when an author publishes a book, their text is open to interpretation by anyone who can read. Therefore, the text is distanced from its author. However, Gadamer says that both the reader and the author “belong” to the world of the text through “absorbtion”. Nonetheless, Westphal goes on to argue that we should not think of Ricoeur and Gadamer as “opposite poles” of hermeneutic thought, but that we should think of them as exposing us to an uncomfortable dialectic that the hermeneutical tradition exposes. In this paper, I will argue that there are at least two ways in which one's social media profile shows us this dialectical relationship in action. In the first case, the profile belongs to them since they are in control of what gets posted. But, on the opposite end of the dialectic there is a distanciation that occurs from the poster when they make a post. That is, in the same way the author of a novel puts something out in the world to be interpreted, so too does the poster when making a post. The second way this dialectic gets put on display is that a person belongs to their profile in the sense that it is a sort-of virtual representation of the self. The subject and their profile are inseparable, both belonging to each other. Yet, the profile is also distanciated because there is a distance between the subject and their profile. Put bluntly, the social media profile becomes a distanciated self.
Biography:
Jeff Wasch graduated with an MA in philosophy from West Chester University of Pennsylvania. His interest are in phenomenology, epistemology and philosophy of mind, existentialism, and hermeneutics.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/ -
Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.
This episode features a presentation from Mark Ornelas of University of Cincinnati, United States
Abstract:
Husserlian phenomenology attempts to develop a theory of mind that suspends the major metaphysical questions about human experience. As a result, Husserl focuses on the world as given. Typically, the nature and essence of morality is metaethical question; in other words, determining the essence of morality, or the good, is a metaphysical question. The result is a strange position where the phenomenological method is somewhat unavailable to ask how the essence does of the good relate to experience. Essentially, Husserlian phenomenologists would be required to adopt an antirealist position. Metaethical antirealist could use the phenomenological method because they hold that the essential nature of moral facts are not objective, true, or universal facts or properties but are rather ones that are non-objective, conventional, and particularist judgements or states of affairs. Yet Husserl and other phenomeologist that follow such as Stein and Merleau-Ponty, are careful not to endorse such a position. Husserl clarifies his opposition to antirealism in his ethical lectures, claiming that there is a ’unconditional objectivity of validity in ethics’ (Husserl, Husserliana XXXVII, 147). However, he wants to preserve the notion that affective states indicate moral facts, but cannot be the basis of them, a neo-sentimentalist position. The goal of this paper is to investigate this problem and propose a solution where objective moral facts are investigable in a Husserlian phenomenology. To do so, I will draw on Stein’s understanding of the primordial given. The primordial given, according to Stein is what is naturally given in the world as a part of the essence of the world. I will argue that morality is part of the primordially given resulting a naturalist moral reaslist position.
Biography:
I am a current graduate student at the University of Cincinnati of Hispanic descent. My research focuses on morality and moral experience using interdisciplinary methods. My current project is using philosophical and psychological methods to develop a new method to study moral behavior. In addition, I am interested in understanding the nature of moral perception and moral action as it relates agent’s social experience and behavioral history.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Alessio Ruggiero of University of Verona, Italy Abstract:Recently there has been a spate of interest in Max Scheler’s social phenomenology (Schloßberger, 2016; Szanto & Moran, 2016; Cusinato, 2018). In this paper I aim to show that his philosophical contribution on sociality has its focal point on the concepts of eccentricity (Exzentrizität), both on the individual level and on the collective-social one. The socio-philosophical discussion about these two different levels, according to Scheler, often generates a dangerous dualism between individuation process and emotional relationality (Scheler, 1923). My main hypothesis is that Scheler escapes from this dualism through the theorization of the idea of Exzentrizität (Scheler, 1928): an anthropo-phenomenological reading of eccentricity reveals a creative interpenetration (Ausgleich) between the ideas of freedom, uniqueness and individuality (eccentricity in the individual sense) and the ideas of alterity, open-mindedness and World-openness (Weltoffenheit) (eccentricity in the relational sense) (Scheler, 1923; Scheler, 1928). My idea is that, for Scheler, the essential condition of any attitude towards personal changes (Umkehr) have its center in the idea of personal co-execution (Mitvollzug) for the maturation and the growth of personal singularity (Personbildung) (Scheler, 1925; Scheler, 1927; Scheler, 1928). And this means the formation and the expression, in the eccentric perspective mentioned above, of one's own ethical singularity (An-sich-Gutes für mich) and of one's own vocations. The idea of eccentricity declined in terms of vocation is therefore strictly interdependent on the idea of Otherness-exemplar (Vorbild) and personal witnessing (Scheler, 1921). The latter, as a paradigm of existential improvement, feeding on diversity and inspiration (Cusinato, 2018). On this point, many studies have suggested that Scheler’s reflection on exemplariness is solely grounded on the moral level, and therefore on the emulation of the virtues of others (Russo, 2019). This carries the risk of homologation, rigidity, and fixity. In addition, the risk is to produce a qualitative levelling of individual, value, and cultural differences. A close examination of the ideas of vocation and witnessing reveals instead that they are founded on the exaltation of talents, plasticity, peculiarities, and specificities of the person (Bellini, 2021; Ruggiero, 2018; Ruggiero, 2020). The presence of Otherness-exemplars (in personal, social, cultural, and religious terms) can provide individual with a guide or mentor for his or her peculiar process of axiological growth and personal happiness. While existing studies have clearly demonstrated the centrality of the idea of eccentricity for Scheler’s phenomenology and personalism, they have not addressed the connection between sociality, solidarity, eccentricity and exemplarist theory of Bildung and Vorbildsmodelle all the way. Biography:Alessio Ruggiero is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Verona. He obtained his master’s degree at the University of Salerno, where he has conducted for many years research on the thought of the German phenomenologist Max Scheler as a student and honorary fellow. He is currently working on the analysis of the ethical, pedagogical, and metaphysical-religious elements of personal exemplarity. He is an editor for national and international scientific journals ("New Journal of Philosophy of Religion"; “Philosophical News. Official Publication of the European Society for Moral Philosophy"; "Thaumàzein. Rivista di filosofia"). He collaborates with the Italian Association of Philosophy of Religion (AIFR), and with the European Society for Philosophy of Religion (ESPR) and with the European Academy of Religion (EuARe). Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.
This episode features a presentation from Noam Cohen of The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Abstract:
It is well known that Husserl and Heidegger approach the analysis of the fact that we share one common lifeworld in different ways. For Husserl, the constitution of the shared world relies on transcendental intersubjectivity as a community of co-constituting monads, whereas Heidegger claims that the world is always already a shared space of openness, prior to any constitution by a plurality of subjects. In this paper, however, I propose understanding both views of the foundational social dimension of the world under the same umbrella of a “mereological” phenomenological analysis. That is, I suggest reading Husserl’s and Heidegger’s apparently opposed positions in terms of an approach that emphasizes how certain essential part-whole relations condition experience as such. Against this background, I show, on the one hand, how such an approach brings Husserl’s and Heidegger’s conceptions of the basic sense of sociality closer together. But on the other, through a discussion of the way social relations embody certain parthood relations, I also demonstrate a yet deeper sense in which they disagree on what it means to share a public sphere. The first part of my paper establishes the thesis that both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenological analyses rely on a basic “logic” of parts and wholes, which makes its first appearance in the Logical Investigations. Building on this, the second part shows how such a mereological logic comes into play in Husserl’s and Heidegger’s characterizations of sociality in the Cartesian Meditations, Husserliana 13-15, Being and Time, and the 1928 lectures Einleitung in die Philosophie, respectively. Lastly, I demonstrate how despite this common methodological ground, Husserl and Heidegger hold different conceptions of sharing. Whereas Husserl’s transcendental notion of sharing posits an open-ended plurality, for Heidegger sharing is ultimately grounded in a prior undifferentiated sphere of openness to the truth of being.
Biography:
Noam Cohen is a PhD candidate at the Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2020/21 he was a guest researcher at the Husserl Archive at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. His doctoral dissertation sets out to explore from a phenomenological perspective different models of intersubjectivity and community, with a focus on their relations to the constitution of mathematical objectivity. It takes on the form of a comparative study of this theme in the philosophies of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Hans Georg Gadamer.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.
This episode features a presentation from Tanja Staehler of University of Sussex, UK
Abstract:
This presentation examines the role of shame in relation to giving birth. Three dimensions of shame will be explored: 11.) Nudity. Although giving birth does not necessarily mean being entirely naked, it certainly means an exposure of one’s genitals. 22.) Intimate touch. Before and during birth, vulva and vagina are being touched by healthcare professionals who will normally be strangers to the woman giving birth. 33.) Display of emotions. Giving birth means to experience overwhelming emotions while surrounded normally by one’s closest partner as well as healthcare professionals as strangers. My presentation will describe each of these dimensions with respect to the shame involved. Phenomenological thinkers Jean-Paul Sartre (being looked at), Jean-Luc Nancy (touch) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (flesh, body language, intercorporeality) will be drawn upon for these description to provide us with relevant concepts. Practical solutions will then be suggested with special emphasis on verbal language and body language. Nudity can often be mitigated by verbal speech. Intimacy of touch can be balanced by relevant modes of touching in other areas (esp. massage). The best response to displays of emotion would be normalising these expressions, and not feeling the need to thematise them. Examples will be discussed for each of these. Overall, establishing intercorporeal relations between the involved party helps alleviate shame as well as anxiety, preparing the parents for the wonder to come. The most fundamental intercorporeal relation is simply being there. Although being there for the woman in labour can involve verbal language, the dimensions of body language and silence are crucially important (as I have developed in an online module commissioned by the Royal College of Midwives).
Biography:
Dr Tanja Staehler is Professor of European Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Her research interests include Plato, Hegel, Phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida), Aesthetics, Philosophy of Pregnancy and Childbirth. She has written books on 'Hegel, Husserl, and the Phenomenology of Historical Worlds' (2016); 'Plato and Levinas: The Ambiguous Out-Side of Ethics' (2010); and (with Michael Lewis) 'Phenomenology: An Introduction' (2010).
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.
This episode features a presentation from Brentyn Ramm of Witten/Herdecke University, Germany
Abstract:
Jean-Paul Sartre gives the example of being caught by someone looking through a keyhole as a profound shame experience. He took the essence of the experience of shame as one being a mere object for the other. The other’s look (‘The Look’) is the main way in which I encounter the other’s subjectivity. Personal relationships, for Sartre, are hence an inherently unstable dynamic, in which one is either the subject or the object. Douglas Harding was a British philosopher from outside the academy, who also analysed the lived experience of interpersonal relationships. Like Sartre, he thought of consciousness as a type of ‘nothingness’ and the making of oneself into a mere object as a kind of false consciousness. However, unlike Sartre he thought that my objectification from the gaze of the other is a habit that can be short-circuited. Harding observed that from the first-person perspective I don’t see my face. Rather in my visual experience, I am looking out of a gap. Visually speaking, I am space for the world, not a thing in it. As infants and young children, one gradually learns to identify with how other’s see them – ‘The Face Game’. This social game is at the heart of one’s personal identity and also of difficulties in personal relationships. In particular, it is one of the main sources of the experience of shame (being ‘shame-faced’) and morbid self-consciousness. While Sartre doesn’t tell us how to remedy these debilitating forms of self-consciousness, Harding developed a number of practical awareness exercises that can be used in everyday circumstances. I will guide the audience through some of Harding’s first-person experiments. I will discuss how conscious ‘facelessness’ can be applied to problems such as shame, stage fright and morbid self-consciousness.
Biography:
Brentyn Ramm is a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany. His research focuses on using first-person experimental methods to investigate conscious experience – particularly on the self, awareness, and contemplative experiences in Asian philosophy. He completed his PhD in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University in 2016. His honours in philosophy was at the University of Queensland. Before this he completed a PhD in cognitive psychology at the University of Queensland in 2006. His honours in psychology and BA (majoring in philosophy and psychology) was at the University of Adelaide.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.
This episode features a presentation from Tomás Lally of NUIG, Ireland
Abstract:
This paper argues that current accounts of primitive shame are incomplete and poorly grounded in the relational context within which primitive shame develops. These accounts use adult concepts to explore the pre-linguistic, sensory world of the infant. The use of these concepts is at best indicative or metaphorical. What is required is a proto-phenomenological approach (Hatab) to the infant’s sensory experience. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Hatab I argue that it is our initial experience of bodily sensory connectedness which provides the pre-conditions for the initial development of primitive shame and the later development of pure shame. Nussbaum characterises the infants experience of primitive shame as a “fear of abandonment by the source of good” as in the infants relationship with the caregiver. Rochat theorises primitive shame in the same direction and claims that empathy is an emotional derivative of shame. Both Nussbaum’s and Rochat’s analyses stop far short of a comprehensive understanding of the relational context within which primitive shame emerges. The Foetus begins initially in the tactile, protective environment of the womb. At birth the baby sensorially experiences separation: the cutting of the cord, the drawing of a first breath. It also experiences the intimacy of touch and the other non-visual senses: the comfort and warmth of its mothers breast, the sounds of her voice, the smell and taste of her body . Touch, smell, sound and taste all bring connectedness and familiarity before vision highlights separateness. It is this initial sensorial experience of connectedness which grounds primitive shame. This ‘proto empathy’ which is initially sensorially experienced in connectedness, touch and nurturing grounds and fosters the desire for social proximity and belonging later exhibited by pure shame. (283 words) 1. Guenther critiques Sartre’s account of pure shame for not providing an account of the sharing, supportive and nurturing environment which makes shame possible. p.27 2. Zahavi and Rochat do not use the concept of ‘proto empathy’ but write about a basic other acquaintance which is “a central precondition for experiential sharing and emergence of a we.” Zahavi, Dan and Rochat, Phillipe: Empathy ≠ sharing: Perspectives from phenomenology and developmental psychology. p.551. 3. Dolezal, Luna ; Shame, Vulnerability and Belonging: Reconsidering Sartre’s Account of Shame, p. 436
Biography:
I am currently studying for a practice-based PhD in Philosophy and English at NUIG. My project is: The completion of a philosophy thesis on the origins of subjectivity and the self, titled: How does ‘I’ Begin? The completion of a novel on the theme of unlearning habit and beginning again. The novel is titled: No way to say Goodbye and is written in the first person. I hold a BA (Hons) in philosophy from NUIM and an MA in Philosophy from University of London. I returned to university in 2017 after a gap of 33 years.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.
This episode features a presentation from Hannah Bondurant of Duke University, United States
Abstract:
One receives feedback from outside sources to confirm or discover one’s own beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, and often what group (and its features) to which one belongs. Yet cognitive biases and the source’s social status can influence our evaluations of feedback from outside sources. Since evidence suggests introspection is not an entirely reliable epistemic practice, I present what I call “transformative shared experiences” (TSEs) as way to understand how feedback from others shapes the way a person see themselves as a moral agent. I argue that TSEs take place on cognitive, personal, and cultural levels by drawing from developmental neuroscience, moral psychology, and Confucianism. To conceptualize TSEs, I use research on shared intentionality that occurs when we engage in cooperative activities as individuals or as a society. Shared intentionality or agency involves individuals not just sharing goals but also cognitive representations of multiple actions, roles, and perspectives. Successful shared intentionality has both joint cooperative attention and activity as well as similar representations of how things are going and should go. Research on the nature of “cultural cognition” shows that, at a young age, children are able to create a “shared fictional reality” with others through games which consist in rules, norms, representations, and narratives about what the world is and what it should be like. This construction of social reality is ongoing as this natural tendency is what leads us to create institutions, policies, and other structures to maintain our cultural traditions and values. Feedback about oneself, such as how one should identify as a person, is found within this shared reality. By exploring TSEs, we can better understand how transformation, good and bad, emerges from exchanges of feedback and experiences that shape not just perspective but one’s ability to relate to oneself and others. While we need to seriously consider the ways they can go wrong, I argue that TSEs with a diversity of sources is one way to help combat self-ignorance and the epistemic injustice we commit towards others when discrediting their feedback due to identity prejudice.
Biography:
Dr. H. Bondurant (they/them) recently completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Duke University in May 2021. They specialize in social epistemology with particular attention to issues at the intersection of self-knowledge and epistemic injustice. Their work often draws from moral psychology, feminist philosophy, and bioethics.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.
This episode features a presentation from Donald Landes of Université Laval, Canada
Abstract:
In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues that binocular vision is accomplished neither through the impersonal accumulation of separate images nor through the transcendental inspection of the mind; rather, it is accomplished through the gearing together of the two eyes in a single gesture responding to the tensions that steal across the phenomenal field. The gesture that creatively takes up these tensions is solicited but not predetermined by them. The binocular image haunts the field protentionally; it is a certain absence remaining virtual and imminent, and only there for the person able to sense its call. It is no more contained in these tensions than a poem is prefigured in a language, and only the accomplishment of binocular vision will prove that there was something there to be seen in this way. And yet, how the tensions of the field solicit a creative gearing-into has not been fully appreciated, with much of our focus on the accomplished perception rather than the paradoxical structure of tension that solicits it. Moreover, completing this picture is particularly urgent insofar as this example shapes Merleau-Ponty’s account of the perception of others and collective action. Now, although Gilbert Simondon rarely acknowledged his philosophical debt to Merleau-Ponty, I argue that Simondon’s account of the metastable tensions that solicit oriented but unpredictable individuation completes and furthers Merleau-Ponty’s fascinating use of the figure-ground structure and the event of binocular vision. By mobilizing Elizabeth Grosz’s reading of Simondon’s powerful philosophy of individuation and my own account of the paradoxical solicitation of the virtual, this paper offers foundational insights into our perception of others, collective action, and our being-with-others as a creative resolution of the tension of seeing double, together.
Biography:
Donald Landes is Associate Professor of Continental Philosophy in the Philosophy Faculty at Laval University, Quebec. He has published two books on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the recent English translation of Merleau-Ponty's key text, Phenomenology of Perception. Landes has published many chapters and articles works on Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and contemporary French thought, and is particularly working in critical phenomenology.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
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Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.
This episode features a presentation from Supriya Subramani of University of Zurich, Switzerland
Abstract:
In this paper, I illustrate how reflexivity, humility, and embodiment are integral to moral phenomenological research. While reflexivity and embodiment are widely acknowledged in qualitative inquiry and the phenomenological research process, these concepts are not critically examined within moral phenomenology. With the help of two ‘reflexive moments’ from the exploratory qualitative study which examines the moral experience of humiliation within Non-European migrants' healthcare experiences in Zurich, Switzerland, I will describe how reflexivity and embodiment are intertwined with humility. By doing this, I argue that researchers and participants share the intersubjective space where they engage with the emerging layered complex experiences. Furthermore, I illustrate that embodied humility provides space for mutual recognition of researchers and participants ‘moral self and Other’. Finally, I discuss how these complex intertwining layers, through the reflexive process, result in understanding moral experiences and moral judgments. Through this paper, I conclude and advocate for weaving in embodied humility and reflexivity while conducting moral phenomenological research, as it demystifies the moral and epistemological stances of the researcher and research process.
Biography:
I am a Postdoctoral Fellow, and work on the philosophical and conceptual constructions of (dis)respect, humiliation and respect for persons within bioethics literature. My research interests lie at the intersection of moral emotions, ethics and behaviour. I employ qualitative methodology to explore moral subjectivities of individuals and engage with moral epistemological inquiries in my methodological research.
Further Information:
This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.
About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/
About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Imke von Maur of Osnabrück University, Institute of Cognitive Science, Germany Abstract:Theories of affective intentionality are concerned with the evaluative dimension of emotions. From this perspective, emotions can be seen as the ability to disclose meaningfulness. However, such theories too often neglect the social structuring of affectively disclosed content (for example, in Goldie 2001; Helm 2000; Roberts 2003). Theories within the paradigm of situated affectivity (cf. Stephan, Walter & Wilutzky 2014; Slaby 2014; Colombetti & Roberts 2015) which do consider socio-cultural factors often fail to acknowledge the meaning-making dimension of emotions because of their focus on emotion regulation. In this talk I combine theories of affective intentionality (cf. Slaby 2008; Slaby et al. 2011) with the paradigm of situated affectivity from a critical phenomenological (Ahmed 2010; Al-Saji 2014) and practice-theoretical perspective. On that basis I introduce the concept of “habitual affective intentionality”, which allows to address and, if necessary, to criticise the socio-cultural structuring of affectively disclosed content. I consider affective intentionality to be a bodily, phenomenally experienced way of disclosing complex meaningful Gestalts in and against the background of social practice. In this talk, I will especially spell out the ability to disclose meaningfulness by means of an emotion as the ability to “play along” (cf. Bourdieu and Merleau-Ponty) with practice-relevant “games” and thus to maintain their validity. This raises the normative question of whether the practices and forms of living supported or disturbed by means of affective intetionality are justifiable or not. This orientation leads from the theoretical description of affective intentionality as an embodied and practical capacity to the normative and social theoretical perspective on the critical interrogation of consolidated emotional practices. It thus opens up the philosophy of emotions, which has so far mainly revolved around theoretical questions of affective intentionality, to questions of contemporary social philosophy and social critique. Biography:I work as a postdoctoral researcher at the institute of cognitive science at Osnabrück University, Germany. I defended my PhD thesis in November 2017, which has been about the epistemic relevance of emotions in socio-culturally situated complex understanding processes. I have done research on emotions from a decidedly normative/political stance from the beginning of my studies and am now also working on a theory of education that is concerned with how to properly understand social matters in order to change them (climate change, structural racism, ethical issues concerning AI and technology, etc.). Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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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 Niclas Rautenberg of the University of Essex, UK
Abstract:
Though the relevance of conflict is universally acknowledged in political theory, it rarely is investigated as a political phenomenon in its own right. Instead, philosophical approaches to conflict are end-state theories, i.e., oriented towards the desirable states of affairs after a conflict is mastered. Moreover, these theories do not fully appreciate the particularities of real conflict participants’ experiences and the way these factor in in formulating effective solutions to conflict. Attempting to provide a first step into remedying these shortcomings, this paper discusses the significance of the spatiality of conflict events. Drawing on qualitative interviews I conducted with political actors – politicians, officials, and activists – and on Martin Heidegger’s account of space in Being and Time, I will argue that conflict space, existentially understood as a space of action, is co-constituted by the respective conflict participants, as well as the location where the conflict unfolds. Understood this way, location and conflict parties’ (self-)understandings enable and constrain ways of seeing and acting. This includes to ‘see’ the solution(s) to a conflict. Yet, a purely transcendental phenomenology will remain oblivious to the quasi-transcendental, social structures that shape a person’s conflict experience. Actual conflicts do not take place behind a ‘veil of ignorance;’ their situation is not ‘ideal.’ Instead, conflict spaces, as any other political spaces, are spaces of power. Hence, to illuminate these facets of the phenomenon, phenomenology has to become critical. Combining insights from interviews with Black Lives Matter activists and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s notion of misfit, I will argue that power shapes conflict space in three ways: who chooses the conflict location/who may enter it; who builds a conflict location/for whom is it built; and the agent-relative difference in scopes of possible actions and experiences afforded by the location. Taking conflict seriously, then, involves coming to grips with the where of conflict.
Biography:
Niclas is a doctoral student at the University of Essex. His dissertation analyses philosophical approaches to political conflict. A particular emphasis rests on the phenomenology of conflict, appreciating the complexity and diversity of the phenomenon in modern polities. To this end, he conducts interviews with political actors. His interests include phenomenology (especially applied and critical), political and social philosophy. His research is funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and the Consortium for the Arts and Humanities South-East England. He is also a research assistant at the interdisciplinary project ‘What does Artificial Intelligence Mean for the Future of Democratic Society?’
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/
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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 Abigail Moses of Durham University, UK
Abstract:
his presentation describes an inclusive methodology I will be using in the future to account for the lived experiences of disabled people and the mundane skills they have formed from adapting to everyday social and environmental barriers. In both public thought and philosophy, those interested in understanding the concept of skilled action tend to focus on examples of elite skill, e.g., 'expert athletes'. (Gallagher et al 2019, Dreyfus 2014, Christensen 2019, Fridland 2014). If we ask what skilled action in disability looks like, we are pointed to examples of Paralympic athletes and wheelchair basketball (Edwards and McNamee 2015). However, I address an uncovered aspect in how we understand skilled action, by arguing that there is skill in everyday mundane tasks disabled people carry out in the face of barriers, such as navigating a wheelchair on a cobbled pavement. Although this research stems from reflecting upon my lived experiences of disability and skill, I do not solely include my own first-hand experiences. I will create workshops with 25 disabled individuals who are members of the charity Difference Northeast. They will be asked to scrutinise philosophical ideas about skill and consider the extent to which they fit with their lived experience of skilled action. Lived experiences that conflict with the philosophical conception of skilled action will be gathered and moulded into an inclusive account of skilled action that embodies these everyday mundane experiences. One of the aims of this presentation is to explain the motivation behind the practical workshops, as it arises from my characterization of mundane skill. This inclusive methodology is distinctive in that it aims to change public perceptions of disability and skill, whilst providing conceptual resources that can be used by those with lived experiences of disability to understand and articulate the ways that they are skilled.
Biography:
Abigail Moses is a PhD student at Durham University, UK. Abigail’s research is at the intersection of Phenomenology of Illness and Philosophy of Action, focusing on lived experiences of disability and everyday skills gained from navigating social barriers. She conducts research for the charity Difference Northeast, which aims to change perceptions of disability. Her interest in these areas of philosophy is driven by a longstanding attentiveness to the lived experiences of those around her. This includes personal reflection upon her own disability and chronic illness, in the hope that she will be an authentic voice of intersectional representation in philosophy.
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/
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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 Irene Breuer of Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany
Abstract:
Our age is indeed the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration. Exile is "the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home“, as E. Said claims. But if true exile is a condition of terminal loss“ (E. Said) or of "a mutilated life“ (Th. W. Adorno) we have to ask ourselves what is here lost or mutilated: It is about the loss of attachment, not only to our roots, to our native place, to a community and to our collective identity, but to language and the possibility of a dialogue as well. But above all, it involves the very possibility of acknowledging the personhood or even the humanity not only of the other, but of ourselves. The vulnerable subject, in M. Fineman’s terms, i.e. the body-self, is the one whose being is broken, as E. Levinas states: Hence, a comprehension of the endangerment of the other is the basis for any vulnerability-based ethics, an ethics that should be both universal, constructing the disembodied ethical subject as a moral person, and particular, accounting for an embodied subject who is capable of responsibility and is open to love. Husserl's early ethics, while being both universal and particular and guided by reason, leaves crucial questions open, which I intend to develop with recourse on J. Butler, M.A. Fineman, A. MacIntyre and M.C. Nussbaum: 1) the full recognition of affectivity and vulnerability for ethical intersubjectivity, 2) the development of a material axiology. I contend that a proper recognition of our bodily vulnerability and of the concomitant absolute value of self-preservation involves both the development of a proper material axiology and the cultivation of emotions and virtues within a community bound by love, reason and the pursuit of happiness.
Biography:
Degree in Architecture (1988) and in Philosophy (2003) from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina. 2012: PhD in Philosophy from the Bergische University Wuppertal (BUW), Germany. 1988-2002: Lecturer, then Professor for Architectural Design and Theory at the UBA. 2012 to mid 2017: Lecturer for Theoretical Philosophy and Phenomenology at the BUW. 2019: DAAD scholarship, research on the reception of the German philosophical Anthropology in Argentina. Pesently working on mentioned research subject, with the support of the BUW.
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/
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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 Lillian Wilde of the University of York, UK
Abstract:
The aim of this paper is to better understand the feeling of alienation in the aftermath of trauma. It is a feeling often described as not being at home in the world, the absence of a feeling of belonging not tied to specific individuals or groups. Husserl offers a concept that can aid us in capturing something important to this pervasive background feeling: the ‘homeworld’. The homeworld is constituted in contrast to an alienworld. It is experienced as ours rather than theirs. It is thus an inherently intersubjective concept that rests on the shared experience of possibilities and anticipations within one’s homeworldly horizon. Applying the homeworld concept to experiences of psychological trauma highlights the limitations of the notion. What we perceive as our world is messy, heterogenous, and in constant flux. The clear dichotomy between the home and alienworld that Husserl suggests does not capture the complexity of human experience; an alienworld may become familiar, and the homeworld may cease to feel like our own. I draw on work by Gerda Walther to develop a homeworld concept that allows for movement between and overlap of various homeworlds. I thereby develop a conceptual framework to describe the feeling of alienation in the aftermath of trauma in a more nuanced way. Trauma alters the individual’s sense of possibilities and anticipations. There are constraints on how far an experience can deviate from its normal anticipation-fulfilment structures and still be accommodated within our intersubjectively constituted homeworld. When an experience is too disruptive, the experience cannot be integrated within the homeworldly horizon: the individual no longer feels part of their homeworld and is expelled into a No-man’s-land. I suggest that this captures the sense of alienation common to post-traumatic experience.
Biography:
I recently submitted my PhD on the phenomenology of post-traumatic experience with a focus on intersubjectivity at the University of York. My supervisors are Matthew Ratcliffe (philosophy) and Christina van der Feltz-Cornelis (psychiatry). I hold an MA in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen.
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 Angelos Sofocleous of University of York, UK
Abstract:
In the field of the phenomenology of depression, depressed individuals have reported feeling disconnected, isolated, incarcerated, detached and alienated from other people and the world. I argue that such descriptions of one’s experience of depression can be examined through understanding the depressed individual as a ‘non-participant spectator’ in the world. I begin by examining the structure of interpersonal relationships and suggest that an interpersonal relationship is characterized by the following constitutive aspects: i) Reciprocity, ii) Interaffectivity, and iii) A sense of the other as a person. An interpersonal relationship involves turn-taking and, as such, is a reciprocal interaction in which agents respond to the other’s actions and behaviour. Additionally, such interactions are interaffective in nature as participants have the ability to ‘affect and be affected’. An interpersonal relationship also involves a sense of the other as a person - that is, as an individual who offers the possibility of engaging in contingent interactions, with whom one can interact in a reciprocal and interaffective manner. By focusing on the above three constitutive aspects of an interpersonal relationship, I describe how each of these is disturbed in depression, subsequently affecting the individual’s being-in-the-world. Due to these disturbances, depressed individuals describe themselves as inhabiting ‘another world’, being alienated, isolated, and incarcerated in the world, and also as experiencing a diminished sense of being-with other people. Testimonies from depressed individuals demonstrate that the depressed individual feels that they adopt a third-person detached perspective toward the world and feels that they cannot actively participate in it. As the depressed individual cannot establish interpersonal relationships which are reciprocal, interaffective and which involve a sense of the other as a person, the world for them takes the form of a world being a world-for-others toward which they merely spectate.
Biography:
I obtained a BA in Philosophy and Psychology and an MA in Philosophy from Durham University (UK). I am a 3rd-Year PhD Researcher in Philosophy at the University of York (UK), working on the philosophy of mental health, specifically on phenomenological experiences of depression, under the supervision of Prof Matthew Ratcliffe and Prof Keith Allen. My research focuses on first-person experiences of depression, especially on individuals' experience of the world as alienating, isolating, and incarcerating. I argue that such descriptions of one's experience of depression can be understood using the notion of being a 'non-participant spectator' in the world.
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/
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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 Adam Davidson of University of South Florida, United States
Abstract:
I seek to bridge an experiential and representational chasm between people with significant disabilities and their caregivers by exploring the intercorporeal connections between my son and me on a walk through our neighborhood. Through the materiality of the wheelchair, I consider the embodied knowledge we share of the spaces we traverse and how the contours of those spaces shape our knowledge(s) of our bodies thereby informing my knowledge of disability as both a social construct inscribed on my son’s body and as a shared lived experience. Starting with Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body as the “point of view upon the world” and utilizing his notion of “flesh,” I reflect upon the connections and exchanges between our bodies and with the world of our walk, all mediated through the simple technology of the manual wheelchair. The rhythms and anticipations, the obstacles and mishaps, and the transformation of the visual all give rise to knowledge of the disabled body, disability experience, and of disabling structures in the world. Through my contact with him and his chair and with the world, I discover my own experiential connections to his experience of disability. This phenomenological reading of our walk recenters the body in discourse on disability that often locates disability in social structures and institutions and risks marginalizing the lived experience of people with significant impairments. This work also offers a counter-narrative that foregrounds the interdependence and intercorporeality of caregiving and disability experience and opens up new possibilities for representation. Finally, my account reinforces phenomenological connections between the disabled body and the technologies that support and facilitate life and movement in and with the world. I challenge conceptions of technology as the new, digital, or innovative and reinforce the everydayness of fleshly contact between bodies and a simple machine.
Biography:
Adam is an adjunct faculty member in the Judy Genshaft Honors College at the University of South Florida (USF) and writer on disability issues and parenting. In 2020, he co-led a semester study abroad program for USF students to the University of Exeter. His educational and research background includes musical performance, popular music studies, cultural studies, and Christian theology. He teaches courses on knowledge and ethics, popular music, and walking and civic engagement. His current research interests include parenting and caregiving for children with significant disabilities, conceptions of fatherhood, and walking as a cultural and creative practice.
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/
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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 Rhona J. Flynn (University of Vienna, Austria) & Martin Huth (Messerli Research Institute, Vienna / Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria) Abstract:This talk will highlight classical phenomenology’s epistemic and ethical pitfalls in how it conceives of disabled and non-normate embodiment. Because Merleau-Ponty uses non-normate bodies primarily as contrast foil he runs the risk of misrepresenting non-normate embodiment and reinforcing ableism. The famous example of the blind man’s cane illustrates this well: (1) In imagining blindness as mere lack of sight, rather than a “world-creating” form of embodiment (Reynolds, 2017), Merleau-Ponty gets blindness wrong. Although Merleau-Ponty’s broader account provides us with the means to theorize any form of embodiment as full-blown existence, in misrepresenting blindness, and failing to account for variegated forms of embodiment with particular, non-normate capabilities, he tacitly falls prey to ableism and oculocentrism. (2) The description of the white cane as being included in the body schema mistakes object annexation or extension for incorporation (Reynolds, 2018); this is the result of an imaginative failure by a sighted agent regarding how visually impaired people relate to the world, their own embodiment, and how they use assistive technology. (3) Merleau-Ponty underestimates the social world in which the visibility of assistive technology can expose the body to others as non-normate and, thus, to stigmatization. In omitting “the social dimensions of disabled experiences” (Shew, 2020), he misses important aspects of how disabled people relate to assistive technology precisely because of that sociality. These investigations serve as a starting point for a reconsideration of phenomenology’s potential for the analysis of disability. Imaginative failures can perpetuate ableist stereotypes about disability and lead to epistemic failures. A more plural understanding of the body as vehicle of our being toward the world will recognize the ableist underpinnings of classical phenomenology, and build on the perspectives and experiences of disabled people. Biography:Rhona J. Flynn is prae-doc with the FWF-funded research group “The Limits of Imagination: Animals, Empathy, Anthropomorphism” at the Messerli Research Institute (Vienna), and a member of the Vienna Doctoral School of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Their current research brings into contact feminist epistemology, philosophy of mind, and critical disability theory, to consider whether empathy (or something like it) could be considered a social-epistemic practice. Martin Huth has been graduated from the University of Vienna with a dissertation on biomedical ethics from a phenomenological perspective. Since 2008 he is a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Until 2011 he has also been working with people with cognitive disabilities and mental illnesses. In 2011 he became a Post Doc at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna. His research interests comprise theories of vulnerability, empathy, political theory, disability studies, biomedical ethics and animal ethics. Since 2021 he is PI of the third-party funded project The Limits of Imagination: Animals, Empathy, Anthropomorphism. 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/
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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 Riad Alarian of The University of Toledo, United States
Abstract:
The deployment of nostalgia as a neutral term of expository proportions has become common in political discourse. The promise of objectively analyzing the persuasions and activities of modern subjects for whom the past is apparently important largely explains the term’s discursive appeal. But it is not clear that the political deployment of nostalgia can be “neutral” in the way users hope for at least three reasons: (1) because debates over the term’s exact meaning remain central in enduring tensions over the boundaries of “modernity,” (2) because the term typically functions, in practice, to offer a partisan diagnosis of others’ memoric standpoints, and (3) because the term’s use seems to encompass a particular imagination of the “modern self” and the “un-modern other.” This paper probes these contentions by interrogating recent discourses on so-called Muslim nostalgia. I focus on these discourses for the simple reason that we live today in the age of the Muslim question which, in the words of the political theorist Anne Norton, is a time when “the figure of the Muslim has become the axis where questions of political philosophy and political theology, politics and ethics meet.” I argue that the diagnosis of “Muslim nostalgia” presents one of the clearest expressions of the term’s pejorative deployment, and I claim, in conclusion, that this allegedly neutral use of the term is not only encumbered by a variety of political impressions about time, history, memory, and modernity, but also works to corroborate a certain story about the world and the nostalgic subject’s place in it. Such discursive deployments of nostalgia act not only to dismiss the nostalgic subject’s claims in and about the world, but also to affirm the epistemic regime of a provincial form of modernity—often in the endeavor to deny the desire for radical transformation.
Biography:
Riad Alarian is a part-time lecturer in philosophy at the University of Toledo. He holds an MA in philosophy from the University of Toledo, an MSc in political theory from the University of Edinburgh, and a BA in philosophy from the George Washington University.
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/
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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 Teresa Fazan of the University of Warsaw, Poland Abstract:I would like to propose a contribution discussing the phenomenology of resistance that emerged in 2020 after the Constitutional Tribunal de facto banned abortion in Poland from the perspective of analysis of participants’ affects and emotions. First, I wish to discuss the current situation of abortion in Poland and familiarise listeners with social mobilisation defending reproductive justice, which emerged during the All-Poland Women’s Strike. Then, I wish to engage in a deepened analysis of the interviews I conducted with the protesters during the mobilisation at the break of 2020 and 2021. At the time, I interviewed them in order to understand how singular acts of resistance gained social and political meaning, granted agency to the participants, and helped understand the ends of the movement (Bennet & Segerberg 2012, Korolczuk 2018, Majewska 2021). For this particular presentation, I want to look at how the interviewees described their emotions and shifts in their changing attitudes, how they experienced the relationship between the bodily presence at the site of the protests, personal affects, and collective action with its broader meaning-making processes (Butler 2015, Fraser 1990, McNay 2000). The very specific situatedness of their experiences exposes the power dynamics between different agents (government bodies, police force, activists, citizens), the different strategies of resistance, and the way new possibilities for expression and opposition emerge during lived protest action. In my analysis, I wish to employ a feminist approach to phenomenology in order to treat affects and emotions as political tools shaping attitudes and mobilising agents to take stands and engage in the social movement. Biography:Teresa Fazan — a Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. I studied philosophy and gender studies at the University of Warsaw and Central European University in Vienna. In my research, I am particularly interested in feminist philosophy, postcolonial studies, and issues regarding the politics of reproduction. 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/
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