BSP Podcast

Season five of our podcast concludes with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online. This episode features a presentation from Marieke Borren, Faculty of Humanities, Open University Netherlands.   ABSTRACT: Within critical race theory, phenomenological scholarship is unique in focusing on the racialized body. Based on the work of Fanon and Merleau-Ponty (even if the latter does not address racial difference), phenomenologists have recently developed rich explorations of racial embodiment, predominantly in a visual register (Alcoff, Al-Saji, Gordon, Weiss, Yancy, among others). However, ‘white' and ‘black' embodiment are not just involved in perceptual (notably: visual) habits, but also, so I will argue in this paper, in ways of inhabiting and taking up space and habits of moving. What ‘I can' do, and where, is to a large extent dependent upon my racial situation. This presentation seeks to expand the phenomenology of racial embodiment, more particularly whiteness, by attending not just to the (in)visibility but also to the spatiality and motility of racialized – in particular: white – embodiment. To this end, I will I confront the conceptual resources for understanding spatiality and motility in relation to embodiment, present in the work of Merleau-Ponty (while challenging its false racial neutrality), Fanon's phenomenological account of black racialization, and Shannon Sullivan's (feminist) pragmatist account of the ‘ontological expansiveness' of whiteness. Being a key feature of what the latter calls ‘the unconscious habits of racial privilege', white expansiveness entails the taken-for-granted freedom to inhabit space and move around as one sees fit. Finally, I will argue that the normative implications of the phenomenology of white expansiveness are undecided. It might be strategically employed for undercutting itself. However, any effort to fight white privilege may end up reconfirming rather than undermining white expansiveness. I will illustrate this undecidability with the case study of Carola Rackete, the self-proclaimed white and privileged German captain of the Sea-Watch 3, who rescued 42 African migrants on the Mediterranean and brought them into port in Lampedusa in July 2019.   BIO: Marieke Borren currently works as an assistant professor in philosophy at Open University Netherlands. From 2015-2017, she held a postdoctoral fellowship at the department of philosophy of the University of Pretoria, South Africa. Specializing in Hannah Arendt's political phenomenology, her research expertise lies at the intersection of continental political philosophy, philosophical anthropology and phenomenology. She is particularly interested in feminist and postcolonial perspectives. She has widely published on Arendt's work, in particular about dis-placement and having a place in the world (‘the right to have rights'), focusing on the predicament of refugees and undocumented migrants.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/  

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Ondra Kvapil, École Normale Supérieure de Paris / Charles University in Prague. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online.   ABSTRACT: My paper will focus on Sartre's meditations on death. Sartre formulates them as a critique of Heidegger – and the majority of commentators adopt his approach. I will however claim it more fruitful to read Sartre's conclusions in the light of Husserl's analyses of death. These were indeed unknown to Sartre, nonetheless the two share key presuppositions: Because our death cannot be grasped in reflection on our subjectivity, it cannot belong to the ontological structure of subjectivity itself; death is then classified as a mundane event, as well as a limit-problem of phenomenological description. I will demonstrate how Sartre radicalizes this notion. Death is not a limit-problem only for transcendental reflection, but already in pre-theoretical and pre-phenomenological attitude. Not only can we never live to seeit coming, we cannot even anticipate it, as the instant of death is principally indeterminate. The only meaning we can attribute to our death is that of the end of our –meaningful, or meaningless – existence. Our death is thus categorically different from all that is intended in the world. There is also a tacit consequence to the exclusion of death from subjectivity: mortality is reduced to bodily vulnerability. Death is the final strike, which may come in various disguises – perhaps that of a virus. Coming from the world, where we nevertheless cannot intend it, death remains essentially exterior to us. In sum, I will unravel the missing link between Husserl's unpublished reflections on death and Levinas' grasp of death as radically Other. Moreover, it will emerge that death, which as a mundane fact becomes a subject to a variety of disciplines, at the same time exceeds all empirical facts and thus engages philosophy. Far from being limited to academia, death engages thinking of each and every one of us – no matter where we come from.   BIO: I am a postgraduate researcher at École Normale Supérieure de Paris and Charles University in Prague, currently working on my dissertation The Philosophical Significance of Death. Previously, I have also studied at Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne and Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg. I have taught several courses in phenomenological philosophy, mainly on Heidegger, at the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Charles University. My research concerns phenomenology, existentialism and hermeneutics, as well as 19th-century continental philosophy, with particular research interests that include death and mortality, relation between being and nothingness, and the problem of time.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online. This episode features a presentation from Sam McAuliffe, Monash University   ABSTRACT: Hermeneutic-phenomenology as a method of inquiry is increasingly finding its way into music studies, and the performing arts more generally. Indeed, with respect to music studies there is no shortage of projects where hermeneutic-phenomenology is employed as a means to better understand music, both from the perspective of creating music and experiencing it as a spectator. There is a clear distinction, then, between the practice of music and the application of hermeneutic-phenomenological inquiry; one is used to understand the other. Rarely acknowledged however, are those characteristics that are common to both music and hermeneutic-phenomenology. In this paper I would like to explore one of those shared characteristics: improvisation. By exploring the hermeneutic-phenomenological tradition from a Gadamerian perspective and the practice of music, broadly conceived, I argue that what is common to each is the ‘improvisational encounter'. Which is to say, the improvisation that is essential to the practice of music is equally essential to hermeneutic-phenomenological inquiry. By highlighting the hermeneutic-phenomenological nature of improvisation in music and the improvisational nature of hermeneutic-phenomenology we might better notice the relevance of each field to the other. Consequently, not only can applied hermeneutic-phenomenology better speak to the practice of music, but so too can studying music provide insight into hermeneutic-phenomenology as such. Thus, perhaps by acknowledging the commonalities between art and philosophy we can notice ways in which these disciplines might speak to and complement one another.   BIO: Sam McAuliffe is a PhD candidate at Monash University, working at the intersection of improvised music and philosophical hermeneutics. In addition to his academic work Sam has worked as a musical director for experimental theatre productions, has curated sound installations for major Australian art festivals, and he plays guitar in a variety of ensembles.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Adriano Lotito, Milano-Bicocca University. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online.   ABSTRACT: This contribution focuses on the Tran Duc Thao's work, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, that is fundamental to post-war French thought, having influenced thinkers as Lyotard and Derrida amongst others and representing the first systematic attempt to synthesize Marxism and phenomenology. Firstly I examine the Tran's reconstruction of Husserlian phenomenology. Originally there is an objective idealism theorizing the independence of the object; then there is its reversal in a subjective idealism highlighting the constituting consciousness; finally there is the switch from static to genetic phenomenology with the thematization of the life-world as historical-empirical ground (I). Secondly I explore the contradiction indicated by Tran between the Husserl's idealistic frame, implicating the reproduction of an abstract dualism, and the results of the concrete analysis, bound to the original claim of going back to the things themselves. This tension is particularly detectable in The Origin of Geometry (II). Thirdly I discuss the Tran's solution to this riddle, namely the radicalisation of the materialistic stance discovered in the Husserl's late writings towards a Marxist horizon. The genesis of the a priori forms of the antepredicative experience is derived from the evolution of species and from the development of human work. The dialectic of behaviour as practical interaction between organism and nature determines the emergence of meanings structuring the experience. The notion of intentionality is interpreted as result of an immanent negation, the aufhebung of any immediate determinations through the work of an emerging  bodily-social intersubjectivity that in this way reaches the self-consciousness. The real movement, insofar as is sketched out and repressed at once, is sublated as intentional content. Transcendental subjectivity becomes an immanent subjectivisation of the object through praxis. This could lead to an alternative antireductionist ontologization of phenomenology despite a teleologism that risks to cage the dialectic in a too narrow path (III).   BIO: Adriano Lotito graduated in Philosophy (B.A) at the University of Bologna with a thesis entitled Phenomenology and Marxism in Tran Duc Thao (Supervisor Prof. Manlio Iofrida) and in Philosophy of the Contemporary World (M.A) at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University with a thesis entitled Criteria of Normativity in the Axel Honneth's Critical Theory (Supervisor Prof. Roberto Mordacci). He is currently attending the Advanced Course in Critical Theory of Society at the Milano-Bicocca University. He is focusing, with the view to a future Ph.D., on the rethinking of the immanent critique specifically in connection with the work transformations.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/  

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online. This episode features a presentation from Maria-Nefeli Panetsos, National and Kapodistrian University of Athens.   ABSTRACT: When talking about Phenomenology we usually think about only the traditional studies of the subject's perception of its surrounding phenomena. However, when turning the point of view towards the body, except the first steps done by Merleau-Ponty, Philosophy remains under some limitations of the orthological perception of reality. I found interesting the fact that in the history of Philosophy there is a clear absence towards the art of Dance, as the main corporeal - and for Hegel ‘primitive' and ‘uncivilized' - form of art which has no place in the fine art hierarchy. Looking for the reasons why this may have happened, I see that there always have been the fear of the body as a source of knowledge, as it has been always seen as unreliable filter of the human perception. However dance helps to see how the process of sensing and understanding one's subjectivity and may enrich and change the perspective of one's identity. I would like to merge the concept of the dancer with the phenomenological existential subject, as an example of conscious and aware subject that actively experiences its existence, transcendental self and its physicality into the intersubjective space where it lives. Through dance, borders and ‘merleaupontian' fleshes can be managed in a conscious way, essentially focusing on one's subjectivity and its relationship with time, space, other objects and subjects. As Prof. Shusterman already proposes in his Somaesthetics, the philosophical research can be amplified in the embodied experience of other corporeal activities that usually are not taken into consideration as explanatory for the human existence. An involved, inclusive phenomenological process, will definitely find further ways to sense and understand the aspects of the subject's condition, as the self and identity are always related and influenced by the corporeal dimension of the human.   BIO: My name is Maria-Nefeli Panetsos, born in Madrid (Spain), student of the Italian School of Madrid, and recent graduate student of the faculty of Philosophy, Pedagogy and Psychology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, where I specialised in Philosophy and my main fields of interest have been Phenomenology, Existentialism and Aesthetics. Since 2016 I started personal research focusing on the Identity of Dance and its Aesthetics, and later I continue finding connections with Philosophy of the Body and other applied phenomenological and existentialist perspective of Philosophy. I'm currently interested in continuing my research in Art History studies and Aesthetics in a postgraduate level.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/  

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Pablo Fernandez Velasco, Institut Jean Nicod. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online.   ABSTRACT: This paper provides a comparative phenomenological analysis of the navigational practices of Evenki reindeer herders in arctic Siberia and of the artistic dérives (drifting excercises) of the Situationist movement. This paper will build on an existing analysis of the phenomenology of disorientation (Fernandez 2020, which focused on the negative aspects of the phenomenon) and on ethnographic research among the Evenki natives of central Siberia. Evenki reindeer herders and hunters have unique navigation methods that result in a very special relationship to their environment. A central aspect of this relationship is the feeling of being ‘manakan' (‘making your own way' in Evenki language), a feeling of autonomy and independence. A study of Evenki navigational style and its relationship to manakan will serve to elucidate the workings behind the emergence of the positive aspects of spatial disorientation. Section 1 introduces the topic. Section 2 provides an overview of the phenomenology of spatial disorientation. In section 3, we will introduce the case of Evenki reindeer herders and hunters and discuss their navigational methods, using both our own ethnographic work and previously existing research. Section 4 will analyse the central features of the experience of manakan in Evenki culture and how it relates to the positive aspects of spatial disorientation. Section 5 will provide a conclusion and potential avenues for future research.   BIO: I am a doctoral researcher working at Institut Jean Nicod, an interdisciplinary research centre at the interface of philosophy and cognitive science. The focus of my work is on how space structures our experience of the world and of ourselves. The topic of my doctoral thesis is the phenomenology of spatial disorientation. Studying disorientation is studying how, through our bodies, culture and technology, we humans are connected to our environment, and what happens when this connection is weakened or severed.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online. This episode features a presentation from Mary Coaten, Durham University.   ABSTRACT: My paper explores doctoral research on the therapeutic mechanisms of Dance Movement Psychotherapy (DMP) in an in-patient setting for acute adult psychiatry through the qualitative dynamics of movement and the symbolic and metaphoric processes present. Previous research has focussed on the efficacy of DMP in relation to psychosis spectrum disorders, but little on the mechanisms, especially the role of the moving body within phenomenological approaches. I drew on the phenomenological tradition through Heidegger and Jung, utilising similarities between the two to develop ideas about body movement, space and time. For Brooke (1988), Jung and Heidegger understood the body as the incarnation of psychological life and not as the meaning-less body of anatomy; they saw psyche and dasein as spatial, viewing distance and closeness as lived realities, and not merely in absolute time which they both argued is a limited abstraction from lived reality. “Jung's method is primarily hermeneutic-phenomenological; the psyche is not “mind” or an inner realm more or less linked to the body, but is the embodied life world, and Jung's descriptions of it - of its autonomy, spatiality and bodiliness, for instance – achieve ontological clarity when it is articulated as Dasein." (Brooke, 1988:ii). The results demonstrated an altered sense of space and time and a specific imbalance in engaging with the future and the past. The study revealed gender differences in the use of space and sense of self. Both men and women's movement lacked structure, a lack compensated for through my movements. Participants expressed their sense of self differently by gender. The men engaged more with one another as a group and women focussed more on the individual bodily self. Symbolic and metaphoric communications indicated a relationship between an altered sense of space and time, and the movement dynamics present acted synchronistically with the symbols and metaphors.   BIO: I am a dance movement psychotherapist (DMP) with a special interest in psychosis and have recently completed my doctoral thesis at Durham University which explored the therapeutic mechanisms at play in the acute psychotic episode. For the past 15 years, I have delivered DMP groups within the acute inpatient mental health setting. My work is informed by a Jungian and phenomenological framework which highlights an embodied approach to psychopathology. I also work as a DMP within an outpatient psychological therapies team with a trauma focus.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features María Jimena Clavel Vázquez, University of Stirling and University of St Andrews. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online.   ABSTRACT: In what sense is perceptual experience situated? Embodied theories of perception might be good candidates to answer this question. However, most of these views have omitted the situated aspect of embodiment, i.e. the way perceptual experience is shaped by a body that is the concrete locus of our social, historical, economic and cultural situation. In this paper, I focus on sensorimotor enactivism (SMEn). I aim to show that this view can remedy this omission by paying closer attention to the idea that perceptual experience consists in situated embodied skills I begin by outlining the relevant aspects of SMEn, a theory that claims that perceptual experience is enacted by the interactions of an embodied agent with her environment (see Hurley 1998, O'Regan & Noë 2001, Noë 2004, O'Regan 2011). In section II, I argue that, although for SMEn perceptual experience is shaped by the body of the perceiver, the view fails to do justice to the situated aspect of embodiment. This aspect is reflected in perceptual experience's lack of social and cultural neutrality. In section III, I articulate the lack of neutrality of the body by drawing on Iris Marion Young's view of the gendered situated body (Young 1980). She claims that our social, cultural, economic, and political situation is embodied in that it is manifested in the way we relate to and inhabit our space, i.e. in our movements and comportment. In section IV, I argue that, if we accept with SMEn that perceptual experience is constituted by practical knowledge and consists in the execution of embodied skills, we should accept that these skills are also a manifestation of our situation. If perception is “something we do” (O'Regan and Noë 2001, p. 970), as the motto of SMEn goes, it is something we do as situated agents.   BIO: I am a PhD candidate at the St Andrews/Stirling Philosophy Graduate Programme. I work on Philosophy of Cognitive Science, Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Mind. I am particularly interested in embodied approaches to cognition and the way these can be informed by phenomenology. For my doctoral research, I have focused on the sensorimotor theory of perceptual experience and the notion of embodiment within this approach. I have also developed an embodied approach to imagination.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online. This episode features a presentation written by Mary Fridley & Susan Massad, with Gwen Lowenheim presenting for Susan Massad, all from The East Side Institute, New York City.   ABSTRACT: As viewed through a biomedical lens – which remains the dominant way in which dementia is seen – Alzheimer's and related dementias (ADRD) is seen primarily as a condition of loss of capabilities within an individual: of speech, of cognitive abilities, of physical capacities and, eventually, of life while research and treatment is directed toward cure of the  individual. Dementia activists across the globe are now raising the question: Is the shame, stigma, and isolation that people with ADRD and their families experience in large part a result of this very narrow lenses through which dementia is understood? In this paper we will present on the Joy of Dementia (You've Got to Be Kiddin!) project, a  playful, philosophical and conversational collective exploration of the dementia experience as an effort to introduce a different lens – a development lens – as a counter narrative that challenges the current “tragedy narrative” surrounding ADRD. Seen through a development lens, humans are no longer are viewed, not as discrete and isolated individuals but as relational beings, connected to one another in ways that allows us to grow with, rather than fear, uncertainty.  In this view, a dementia diagnosis presents transformational opportunities not just for the individual diagnosed, but to everyone in the “dementia ensemble” – including people of all ages who fear growing older and losing cognitive abilities. The workshops, always experiential, often involve mixed groupings of family members, care givers, professionals and those diagnosed, introduces improvisational play and philosophical conversation as activities that support the discovery of new ways of relating, being together, listening and responding. Participants are supported to challenge deeply held assumptions about what we and others “know” about the dementia experience, and it is within this collaborative ensemble building activity that the joy that comes with creating a new performances of dementia is discovered.   BIOS:    Mary Fridley is pro-bono Director of Special Projects at the East Side Institute in NYC and an accomplished teacher and workshop leader. She practiced social therapy for 12 years and continues to use the social therapeutic approach as an Institute faculty member. Mary co-leads two popular workshop series, “The Joy of Dementia (You Gotta Be Kidding)” and “Laughing Matters” and was featured in a February 2019 Washington Post article, “Changing ‘the tragedy narrative': Why a growing camp is promoting a more joyful approach to Alzheimer.” Mary is also a playwright and theater director and works as a non-profit fundraising consultant.   Susan Massad is a retired clinician and medical educator. A primary care physician she has researched and taught in the arena of doctor-patient communication and the social-cultural-biological dimensions of health and wellness. She is a faculty member at the The East Side Institute where she is the co-creator of the Joy of Dementia© workshops that she coleads all over the US with colleague, Mary Fridley.   Gwen Lowenheim is a learning design specialist and TESOL instructor. She is co-founder/co-director of The Snaps Project, an educational consulting firm. Gwen trains and supervises educators and social entrepreneurs around the world in a social therapeutic, performance-based learning approach that brings creativity and innovation into classrooms and community-based programs. Her programs introduce theatrical improvisation, philosophical exploration, remix and group play as part of developing collaborative teams, language learning and stress management.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Giuseppe Torre, University of Limerick, Ireland. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online.   ABSTRACT: With respect to digital technologies, noise is something that is at once both fought and sought. We may wish to minimise noise in communications but require it for encrypting the very content communicated. We may wish to minimise noise when recording sound but also want to use it to improve the fidelity of the recording process. The catch is that noise is both an abstract idea and a concrete thing that does not sit comfortably in relation to systems that are deterministic/probabilistic, such as digital technologies. This is a fact that computer scientists know well but that is systematically overlooked in order to safeguard and improve the functioning of digital technologies, such as digital instruments. Indeed beyond the plethora of different kinds of noises, the comparison between analogue and digital technologies highlights the existence of just two types of noise: one that is naturally occurring (noise) and one that is humanly constructed (pseudo-noise). Digital technologies operate by moving from noise to pseudo noise, in order to then 1) crystallise reality into mathematical constructs and 2) create realities from mathematical constructs. This makes the digital realm a type of technology different from any other, namely, one in which noise is fiercely fought and used for the digitisation process but then relentlessly sought, and always denied, within the digital realm. This observation points to at least two further implications: one is that noise may point to essential differences between analogue and digital technologies; the second is that the presence or absence of noise may lead to either crippled or diverse phenomenologies. To this extent, digital technology, rather than revealing by challenging (Heidegger), has more to do with enabling a psychotic stance towards reality - one in which reality has been made to conform to our mathematically constructed idea of it … and one which might be too much even for a phenomenologist to overcome. These arguments will be developed from the perspective of a digital art practitioner.   BIO: I am a lecturer in Digital Arts at the University of Limerick (Ireland). My research interest lies at the crossroads between digital art practices, open source technology/culture and philosophy. These interests respond to a questioning of the relationships between art and technology and that has so far led me to question under what forms and forces truly creative efforts may, or may not, arise.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season five of our podcast is back after a short break, and continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online. This episode features Joel Krueger, University of Exeter.   ABSTRACT: Despite increased interest in comparative philosophy within the past few decades — including particular interest in the Kyoto School of Japanese philosophy — Tetsurō Watsuji has not received the attention he deserves. Watsuji was a broad-ranging and original thinker who developed important insights into culture, ethics, religion, embodiment, and the self. He was also a skilled phenomenologist. His rich analysis of embodiment, space, and intersubjectivity not only predates insights developed by phenomenologists such as Sartre and Merleau-Ponty but also deepens and extends their analysis in productive ways. This talk has two objectives: first, to briefly introduce Watsuji's phenomenology of aidagara (“betweenness”), including its novel analysis of embodiment, space, and intersubjectivity; second, to use aidagara to think through the dynamics of subjectivity and expression within the Internet-enabled “techno-social niches” found in everyday life. I argue that Watsuji develops a prescient analysis of embodiment and expression — centered around core notions of “subjective spatiality” and “spatial extendedness” — anticipating modern technologically-mediated forms of expression, connection, and engagement. More precisely, I show that instead of adopting a traditional phenomenological focus on face-to-face interaction, Watsuji instead argues that communication technologies — which now include Internet-enabled technologies and spaces — are expressive vehicles enabling new forms of emotional expression and co-regulated experiences that would be otherwise inaccessible without these technologies. For Watsuji, these expressive vehicles and spaces aren't mere add-ons to the self and its capacities. Rather, they are progressively incorporated into the self, understood as “betweenness”. Accordingly, they should be seen as constitutive parts of our “subjective spatiality” — that is, part of the embodied self and the rich pathways of “spatial extendedness” that establish enduring interconnections with others. I consider some of Watsuji's arguments and indicate how this view might productively impact several debates, including debates over our perceptual access to other minds.   BIO: Joel Krueger is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Exeter. He works primarily in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of cognitive science — with a particular focus on issues in 4E (embodied, embedded, enacted, extended) cognition, including emotions, social cognition, and psychopathology. He also works in comparative philosophy and philosophy of music.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online. This episode features Juan Toro, Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen. Toro's co-authors are Erik Rietveld, Amsterdam University Medical Center; Department of Philosophy, University of Twente, Enschede; Institute for Logic, Language and Computation, Faculty of Science, University of Amsterdam; and Julian Kiverstein, Amsterdam Brain and Cognition; Amsterdam University Medical Center.   ABSTRACT: In the last 50 years, discussions of how to understand disability have been dominated by the medical and social models. According to the medical model, disability can be understood in terms of functional limitations of a disabled person's body caused by a pathological condition, to be treated and cured through rehabilitation or normalization. In contrast, the social model claims that disability is not an individual physical condition, but is rather the outcome of oppressive conditions imposed by society on physically impaired people. Paradoxically, both models overlook the disabled person's experience of the lived body, thus reducing the body of the disabled person to a physiological body. Based on a co-authored paper (by Juan Toro, Julian Kiverstein, and Erik Rietveld [‘The Ecological-Enactive Model of Disability: Why Disability Does Not Entail Pathological Embodiment']) I introduce the Ecological-Enactive (EE) model of disability. The EE-model combines ideas from phenomenology, enactive cognitive science and ecological psychology with the aim of doing justice simultaneously to the lived experience of being disabled, and the physiological dimensions of disability. More specifically, we put the EE model to work to disentangle the concepts of disability and pathology. From an ecological-enactive perspective, we locate the difference between pathological and normal forms of embodiment in the person's capacity to adapt to changes in the environment by establishing and following new norms. From a phenomenological perspective, we distinguish normal and pathological embodiment of disabled people in terms of the structure of the experience of I-can and I cannot. The I-cannot experienced by the non-pathologically disabled person can be understood as a local I-cannot, with a background of I-can: I-can do it in a different way, I-can ask for help, etc. This contrasts with the experience of I-cannot of the pathologically embodied person, which deeply pervades their being-in-the-world. To ensure that the discussion remains in contact with lived experience, we draw upon phenomenological interviews we have carried out with people with Cerebral Palsy. BIOS:    Juan Toro: I'm a PhD student at the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, and a researcher at the Enactlab – an interdisciplinary team of researchers, artists, journalists and practitioners working on solutions for complex problems faced by minorities in society. In my research, I combine an empirical approach to physical disabilities – focusing on cerebral palsy – with insights from phenomenology, 4E cognition and ecological psychology.   Prof. dr. Erik Rietveld is Socrates Professor, Senior Researcher at the University of Amsterdam (AMC/Department of Philosophy/ILLC/Brain & Cognition) and a Founding Partner of RAAAF [Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances]. In 2013 his research project on skilled action titled “The Landscape of Affordances: Situating the Embodied Mind” was awarded with a NWO VIDI-grant for the development of his research group on skilled intentionality & situated expertise. Recently he received an ERC Starting Grant for a new philosophical project titled “Skilled Intentionality for ‘Higher' Embodied Cognition: Joining Forces with a Field of Affordances in Flux”. His work as a Socrates Professor at the University of Twente focuses on humane technology: the philosophy of making and societal embedding of technology in the humanist tradition.   Julian Kiverstein is Assistant Professor of Neurophilosophy at the University of Amsterdam. He is currently writing a monograph for Palgrave Macmillan entitled The Significance of Phenomenology. He edited a comprehensive handbook for Routledge Taylor Francis on the philosophy of the social mind. He is associate editor of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences and was until recently Book Review Editor for the Journal of Consciousness Studies. Before his appointment at Amsterdam in 2011, Kiverstein was teaching fellow at Edinburgh University, where he played a lead role in developing and designing the Mind, Language and Embodied Cognition Masters Programme, of which he also became director.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/  

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Ellen Moysan, Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online.   ABSTRACT: A musical performer plays or composes what is “heard in the mind.” I call this musical phenomenon: “inner song,” and I use a Husserlian framework to describe it as an object of phantasy. In the present paper, I will demonstrate how an accurate description of the inner song requires a rigorous praxis of phenomenology giving voice to actual performers coming from various backgrounds. The “inner song” is a musical phenomenon of phantasy in the sense that it is independent from the perception of a physical sound and constituted in consciousness by the imagination reshaping sensory-data (essentially sounds) in a totally new fashion. It can take two forms: a “pure phantasy object” (improvisation and composition), and a “hearing through seeing” (interpretation from a score); the difference between the two is the mode of involvement of perception. My method is to engage with phenomenology as a “praxis.” I go back to the experience of the inner song: (1) questioning my experience as a cellist, and (2) engaging in a dialogue with musicians from various traditions interviewing them about their practice. This approach provides a plurality of points of views and constitutes an “eidetic variation” that helps me to highlight the essential structures of the “inner song”. From this foundation I develop a description grounded in a Husserlian framework. Engaging with the inner song offers a unique perspective on the challenges of interdisciplinary phenomenology: first, it brings back to phenomenology as a “praxis” starting with the reduction and shaped by the object itself; second, it highlights the necessity to listen to a plurality of practitioners who have a first-hand experience of the object, here the musicians themselves; finally, it demonstrates how it is the object itself which brings together the phenomenologist and the practicing musician in a collaborative description of the lived-experience.   BIO: Ellen Moysan started her education in Philosophy at Paris-Sorbonne IV (France), before studying with the French and German Master Erasmus Mundus Europhilosophy at the Karl University (Czech Republic), Hosei University (Japan), and Wuppertal University (Germany). She is now a doctoral candidate at Duquesne University (USA). Over the last ten years, Ellen Moysan has researched the notion of “inner song,” interviewing more than fifty musicians from different horizons on that topic, and creating a digital archive where the collection of interviews is available in French, Italian, and English. Currently, she is working on her interviews and finishing her dissertation.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online. This episode features Bence Peter Marosan, Budapest Business School, Pazmany Peter Catholic University.   ABSTRACT: In my presentation, I will attempt to show how a phenomenologically consequent interpretation of narrative identity would lead to eco-ethical and eco-political consequences. In particular, I will try to show the outlines of an eco-socialist theory, which implies an egalitarian approach of all living beings, and which is motivated by a phenomenological understanding of narrative identity. My presentation consists of two main parts. In the first part, I would like to treat the relationship between freedom, responsibility and – narratively conceived – personal identity, from a phenomenological point of view. The main authors of this part will be Husserl, Heidegger, Ricoeur, Lévinas and László Tengelyi. For Husserl, the narrative aspect of personal identity was already an important topic. For Heidegger, our own decisions constitute our identity. But in my opinion, there is a decisive factor, which was marginal for Heidegger, in regard of our identity and freedom: the Other. The Other's problem became central for Lévinas, and also for Ricoeur. László Tengelyi modified Ricoeur's account of narrative identity on a decisive point: he draws the attention to the role of “events of fate”; events that change the course of our lives fundamentally. In the second part I would like to show the ethical and political implications of the first part. The way in which we treat in fact the Other shows the best, who we are in real.  But the Other must not just be a human being; she or he can be a living being whatsoever. Here I would like to emphasize the eco-phenomenological motifs in Husserl (to this see also: Erazim Kohák); and I will try to show how such motifs lead to an egalitarian, eco-socialist view of everything which lives.   BIO: Bence Peter Marosan's PhD Studies were on Philosophy and Phenomenology, and conducted at the institutes of Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary), University College Dublin (Ireland), Bergische Universität Wuppertal (Germany), Université Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne, École Normale Supérieure, (France). His affiliations are now with the Budapest Business School, Pázmány Péter Catholic University. His more important publications include two monographies on Husserl (in Hungarian), and he has edited two volumes on Marx and on László Tengelyi (in Hungarian). His research interests are Phenomenology (Husserl in particular), Hermeneutics, Philosophy of Mind, Political Philosophy, Eco-ethics, Eco-politics.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Belinda Marshal, University of St. Andrews. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online.   ABSTRACT: Questions surrounding the nature of being and existence have been tackled by philosophers for centuries, however, in this paper I analyse how concepts explored by these philosophers translate into virtual environments, as explored within virtual reality technologies. To begin, I will discuss the concept of “realism” - in an attempt to argue for the case that virtual reality - although still technology - can actually be considered a form of reality in itself. In accepting that virtual reality is a form of reality - or at least, a convincing enough extension of reality, we can accept that many existential possibilities and freedoms can be explored within virtual realms. (See: Myeung-Sook (2001)) This then opens up the potential for discussion surrounding what kinds of experiences we could expect to have within virtual environments, how they compare to phenomenological discussion of experience within “real” environments - and how these still hold both philosophical, and real world significance. Phenomenological analysis of accounts of “being” in terms of technology are vastly unexplored, beyond the postphenomenological movement as written by the likes of Ihde and Verbeek - however, even within postphenomenology, this discussion rarely ventures into virtual reality technologies. This research is important due to the level of potential real world impact - which is something else I will further clarify; particularly, with the increased use of virtual reality technologies to treat people with severe disabilities, I believe that it is crucial to explore how virtual environments can best be used and designed, to enable the user to maximise their lived experiences within virtual reality, if it is not possible for them in the primary version of reality. This does not limit the impact of such research, however, as virtual reality is becoming an increasingly popular form of entertainment technology, it is critical that we aim to gain a well-rounded understanding of its potential impact. This level of research also expands beyond the phenomenological questions, but also gains strength from other areas of philosophy such as extended cognition; Clark and Chalmers' original paper The Extended Mind (1998) has often been translated to suit modern day technology (such as the smartphone) - however, more recent research on extended cognition (and 4E cognition as a whole) has wide applicability to many forms of technology, yet is rarely explored within the context of computer-mediated reality. The cognitive links between technology and self, combined with the sensory and experiential links between virtual reality and self, can provide an excellent framework for further philosophical discussion on the phenomenology of virtuality.   BIO: I have a PhD in progress at the University of St Andrews as part of the SASP program, under supervision by Prof. Michael Wheeler and Dr. Kevin Scharp, project titled: ‘Virtual Reality and the Extended Mind'. Previously completed my MA thesis titled ‘The Question Concerning Virtual Reality' for which I was awarded a Distinction. I have also presented my paper ‘Authenticity, Virtual Reality and AI' at Cambridge University for the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, as well as in Nottingham for the British Personalist Forum; and my paper ‘Feminism and the Extended Mind' at Cardiff University for the Feminism and Technology conference. I also have an upcoming chapter publication in an edited volume on Transhumanism, titled ‘Evolving the Natural-born Cyborg: Using Virtuality to Navigate the Posthuman'.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology' Online. This episode features D. R. Koukal, University of Detroit Mercy.   ABSTRACT: In this paper the author will report on an ongoing experiment: teaching graduate-level students of architecture how to use phenomenology as a technique of discovery to assist them in their design process. This experiment originated in directed readings that attempted to theoretically engage phenomenologically-informed “schools” of architecture, and over fifteen years has evolved into a small seminar-workshop that is focused on having students produce their own rigorous phenomenological analyses in the service of their various thesis projects. The paper will convey the challenges of grounding non-philosophers in the demanding literature of phenomenology and its place in modern thought, and then move on to outline the basic features of the course: exposure to the “orthodox” methodologies of phenomenology; highlighting examples of phenomenological analyses of place and space by philosophers and practicing architects; and an exploration of different ways of doing phenomenology collaboratively. However, most of the paper will be focused on the “practical” dimension of the course, where every member has a say in refining an adopted collaborative methodology to phenomenologically explore a different architectural “theme” every week, all of which are chosen by the class as a whole. These explorations have taken a variety of forms over the years, including peer-reviewed free writing, directed “free” writing, sketches, illustrations, word clouds, meaning-schematics, collaborative narration, and computer-generated eidetic imagery. In the end, the author will report on the course's successes and failures, but will ultimately conclude that the biggest challenge to any “engaged” phenomenology is motivating others to “see” or intuit what phenomenology can reveal to them, and that the best way of doing this is giving them the tools to “do” phenomenology for themselves.   BIO: D.R. Koukal's research has centered on the phenomenological method and the problem of expression. They have published articles on Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and Sartre. They are interested in the actual practice of phenomenology, and have undertaken several investigations of the experience of media, lived space and the body.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Sadaf Soloukey, Erasmus Medical Center, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.   ABSTRACT: Spinal Cord Injury (SCI) is a field of research currently experiencing unprecedented results in functional recovery of patients due to neurotechnological developments. As such, the number of patients with SCI receiving neural implants is expected to increase steadily. However, current literature seems to lack a parallel development focused on users’ experience in terms of implanted tool incorporation or embodiment of neurotechnological devices in general. As such, we ignore how interwoven neurotechnological efforts are with human experience, and how vital accurate considerations in this process are for treatment success. In a previous publication, I developed a theoretical framework forembodiment in neuro-engineering and defined three concepts that facilitate ‘transparency’: functionality, sensorimotor feedback and affective tolerance. Based on these concepts, I discuss practical guidelines for clinicians which can contribute to the actual success of embodiment: 1) The ‘Patient Preference Diagnosis’, which warms up the patient for the existential reorientation and 2) The ‘Patient Transparency Diagnosis‘ during and after implantation, which provides  the patient with possibilities to fine-tune the level of incorporation. However, this attempt to capture the complexity of tool incorporation into a single theoretical framework might be inherently limited and calls for a move back from the bench to the actual bedside. In this paper, we present the results of a series of in-depth interviews with five SCI patients receiving temporary neural implants as part of a clinical trial. Based on our previously published embodied phenomenological framework, we questioned our patients on domains including 1) body image, 2) expectations of the neural implant, 3) their judgement on the possibility of incorporation of the device and 4) their ‘ideal’ implant. Interviews were performed both pre- and post-implantation, subjected to thematic analysis and compared against the backdrop of the previously mentioned theoretical framework based on embodied phenomenology as developed by group.   BIO: Sadaf Soloukey is a MD/PhD-Candidate in the departments of Neuroscience and Neurosurgery at the Erasmus Medical Center in Rotterdam, The Netherlands. Sadaf holds two MSc-degrees (Neuroscience and Health Economics) and one MA-degree (Philosophy, cum Laude). Sadaf's research interests lie in neuro-technology and include neuromodulation for Spinal Cord Injury. Additionally, Sadaf works on identifying the phenomenological implications of neuro-technological interventions in the clinical domain.Sadaf’s applied philosophical work has so far received multiple awards, including the prestigious prof. Brouwer Prize awarded by the Dutch Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) to the best philosophical thesis of that academic year.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Michael Fitzgerald, Bruyère Research Institute. Fitzgerald’s co-authors are Esther Shoemaker, Simon Fraser University; Lisa Boucher, University of Ottawa; Claire Kendall, Bruyère Research Institute.   ABSTRACT: This paper draws on Husserl’s notions of epoché and phenomenological reduction to interpret patient engagement in research. The epoché suspends or bracket naturalistic assumptions about the existence of the world, so as to allow phenomenological inquiry to focus on meaning or significance. Phenomenological reduction to the life-world, in turn, functions to restore the significance of the concrete world of basic life, i.e., to allow the phenomenologist access to the structures of meaning that are the basis for all inquiry (Luft 2004). In particular, it suspends the assumptions of the positive sciences. Patient engagement in research is an approach that includes patients and caregivers as partners on the research team. Arguably, this approach has become the standard for a wide variety, if not all, types of health research, driven in part by funding agency imperatives. Studies of this approach have argued that the significance of and motivation for engaging patients can be understood in terms of three sets of values: “moral or normative (e.g., empowerment and rights), instrumental or substantive (e.g., improving research quality), and process (e.g., having to do with research conduct)” (Kendall et al. 2018). However, further investigation is needed into the impact of patient engagement in research, and in particular how it affects health researchers’ own understanding of their research activities, exploration of which has so far been limited (Staley 2015; 2017). This paper proposes a phenomenological approach, in which patient engagement is seen as a transformation of research. We suggest that patient engagement in research can function as an epoché or even a type of reduction, by challenging researchers’ assumptions about the process of research. As with the life-world reduction, this can be seen as a way of resituating health research in the life-world, so as to expand and deepen its meaning and significance.   BIOS:    Michael Fitzgerald, Research Associate, Bruyère Research Institute, Ottawa, Canada, is a social phenomenologist with expertise in the phenomenology of international development. He works on projects on patient engagement, intersectionality and social accountability.   Esther Shoemaker, Postdoctoral Fellow, Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, and Affiliated Scientist, Bruyère Research Institute, is a medical sociologist and early career researcher with sex- and gender-based mixed methods expertise in health services delivery for marginalized populations.   Lisa Boucher, PhD candidate in Epidemiology and Public Health, University of Ottawa, has expertise in participatory research approaches and both quantitative and qualitative methods. Her projects focus on highly marginalized populations, especially people who use illicit drugs.   Claire Kendall, a primary care physician and Clinical Scientist, Bruyère Research Institute and Associate Professor, University of Ottawa, where she is also Assistant Dean, Social Accountability, has expertise in health services research, cohort and administrative data linkages, systematic reviews, participatory approaches, qualitative research and practice-based interventions, with strong links to policy makers in primary care of marginalized populations.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Lucienne Spencer, University of Bristol. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.   ABSTRACT: Fricker coined the term ‘hermeneutical injustice’ to highlight gaps in the interpretive framework where experiences of marginalised groups ought to be. Fricker illustrates hermeneutical injustice primarily through the victims of sexual harassment prior to the 1960s: without the term ‘sexual harassment’ at their disposal, the victim was not only incapable of discussing sexual harassment but also lacked the hermeneutical resources to fully make sense of the experience themselves. Fricker identifies a primary harm in hermeneutical injustice, through which the victim is undermined as a ‘knower’, and a secondary harm, through which the victim encounters practical disadvantages such as being unable to report sexual harassment. The purpose of this talk is to draw out a further, phenomenological harm that is overlooked in the literature. For Merleau-Ponty, speech expression is a manner of employing one’s body to engage with the world. Prior to expression, there lingers nothing in the mind but a ‘vague fever’. Only upon expression does this ‘vague fever’ transform into meaningful communication. As a gesture, speech expression does not signify meaning; rather words are saturated with meaning through their expression. Merleau-Ponty emphasises the role of speech expression as fundamental to the activity of projecting oneself toward the world. Hermeneutical resources are created and sustained by those who belong to privileged groups, and as such are designed to express their privileged experiences. Armed with speech expression, the hermeneutically advantaged move through the world with a pre-reflective openness. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty, I will argue that hermeneutical injustice causes a disruption of the patterns of embodiment in marginalised subjects, who are unable to engage with the world in the same way as their privileged counterparts.  As speech expression is a fundamental aspect of embodiment, I will show that hermeneutical injustice constitutes a breakdown of the body-world synthesis for marginalised subjects.   BIO: I’m a third-year SWW-DTP funded PhD student at the University of Bristol under the supervision of Havi Carel (and co-supervised by Lisa El Refaie of Cardiff University). My research spans the areas of phenomenology, epistemic injustice and the philosophy of illness. Through my thesis, I hope to develop an account of the experience of psychiatric illness through Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of speech expression. Given my interest in widening participation, I have been involved in the ‘Insights into Philosophy’ scheme targeted at state schools across Bristol and am the Postgraduate Representative for the Society for Women in Philosophy UK.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Lewis Coyne, University of Exeter.   ABSTRACT: In recent years the phenomenological approach to bioethics has been rejuvenated and reformulated by, amongst others, the Swedish philosopher Fredrik Svenaeus. Building on the now-relatively mainstream phenomenological approach to health and illness, Svenaeus has sought to bring phenomenological insights to bear on the bioethical enterprise, with a view to critiquing and refining the ‘philosophical anthropology’ presupposed by the latter. In this talk I will offer a critical but sympathetic analysis of Svenaeus’ efforts, focusing on both his conception of the aims of phenomenological bioethics and the broadly Heideggerian methods he employs. Doing so reveals certain problems with both. I argue that the main aim of phenomenological bioethics as set out by Svenaeus needs to be reformulated, and that there are important oversights in his Heideggerian approach to reaching this end. I will conclude by arguing that to overcome the latter problem we should draw on the works of Max Scheler and Hans Jonas in future research.   BIO: I am an associate lecturer and honorary research fellow in philosophy at the University of Exeter, working at the intersection of existential phenomenology, practical ethics, and philosophical anthropology. My overarching interests are in the phenomena of life and death, and the ethics of technologically appropriating (human and non-human) nature. My publications on these topics include being co-editor of Moral Enhancement: Critical Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 2018), and author of Hans Jonas: Life, Technology and the Horizons of Responsibility (Bloomsbury, 2020).   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

  This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Margaret Steele, University College Cork. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.   ABSTRACT: Dolezal and Lyons (2017) have argued that shame may be an ‘affective determinant of health.’ They include weight as a potential site of such shame, and they recommend further research including, “Explore shame associated with different health problems and in different settings.” (2017, 262) In this paper, I take up that invitation, describing how shame might be a determinant of health for fat/obese people, due to its effects on their constitution of their own bodies as sites of “I can.” Weight-based shame can make people reluctant to engage in physical activity.This reluctance is partly explained by a desire to avoid the acute shame associated with, for example, a derisive comment about one’s body. This fear of how others might respond to one’s body could itself have a negative effect on health by directly reducing one’s movement. However, I argue that there is also a deeper problem: Weight-based shame, I suggest, affects how people constitute themselves not just as objects but as subjects. When we move less as a result of weight-based shame, we lose strength, endurance and agility. I argue this diminished capacity is directly given in experience. The body itself feels stiffer, more easily fatigued. The body’s correlates, spaces and terrains, feel inaccesible, even hostile. The body comes to feel like a burden instead of a site of agency. Thus weight-based shame not only reduces a person’s movement; it can also reduce both their perceived and their actual ability to move. Iris Marion Young said women in a sexist society are physically handicapped. I make a similar claim about fat/obese people in a fatphobic society. It seems cruelly ironic that fat/obese people are shamed for moving too little in a society that handicaps them in their efforts to move.   BIO: Dr Margaret Steele is a lecturer in philosophy at University College Cork. Her research interests include philosophy and phenomenology of health, particularly in relation to fatness, fitness and food. Her work in this area draws not only on scholarly resources but also on her direct experience of living as a fat person.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Pablo Andreu, University of Zaragoza (Spain).   ABSTRACT: George Canguilhem has affirmed that pathology, far from being a state of abnormality, should be considered as another way of life (Canguilhem, 1978, p. 45). According to Canguilhem, being healthy is not the same as being “normal”, what he considers to be an inapplicable concept to biology, but normative, this is, making of a way of life a norm. If accepted, such consideration not only affects what we take to be “pathological”, it also questions what the nature of medical practice is, and what this praxis should be to start. Specifically, if illness is not something that bursts into existence and interrupts it, but rather a new mode of existence properly speaking, then what role, if any, does a patient play in the understanding we have of their illness, and what importance should be attributed to this role during the medical treatment. To this aim, an approach to pathology and medical praxis from a phenomenological point of view seems promising. Martin Heidegger’s notion of care (Sorge) and Paul Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity could explain the existential shift on a patient’s existence. But tracing illness as a continuity rather than an interruption could be problematic, questioning our very understanding of recovery. In other words, to what extent would a phenomenological approach to medical practice entail a methodological and epistemological differentiation between medically treating a patient and healing a person, and, more importantly, would this demarcation be constructive for the patient’s wellbeing to begin with? The task, hence, is double: on the one hand, to state the benefits phenomenology can bring to medicine; on the other, its plausibility. The following article aims to do so by following the personal account of a cancer fighter, evaluating it through the lens of Heidegger’s notion of care and Ricoeur’s concept of narrative identity.   BIO: Pablo Andreu is a PhD Student at the University of Zaragoza, Spain. Mainly focused on phenomenology, and specifically the phenomenology of death, Pablo Andreu has also approached analytic philosophy through the Master’s program offered by the University of Barcelona.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Caroline Greenwood Dower, University of Durham. The paper is co-authored with Benedict Smith, University of Durham. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.   ABSTRACT: Anxiety is the most common mental disorder in primary care and higher education counselling settings.  Observations from clinical psychotherapy suggest a shift in reporting towards “I have anxiety”, an object-related sensation, rather than “I feel anxious”, a subject-related sensation. In anxious states individuals are typically highly vigilant, attentive to and at times preoccupied with the external world.  The physical symptoms of anxiety – breathlessness, increased heart rate – draw attention back to the inner experience of the body, but as with anxious thoughts, they are often reported as ‘intrusive’. In response to the increase in help-seeking students a programme of workshops entitled ‘Calm to the Core’ was developed within a higher education counselling setting, as an applied phenomenological therapeutic alternative to individual counselling sessions.  Group facilitated workshops help participants to explore and share the lived experience of anxiety, through a series of movement and breath-based enquiries.  Our interest is whether these workshops increase body awareness and specifically awareness of how the individual experiences and organises their contact with the world. A helpful way to understand the benefit of this approach is by utilizing Merleau-Ponty’s account of embodiment, particularly how an enhanced sense of embodied agency can help mitigate the effects of previously ‘intrusive’, passively-experienced, anxious symptoms. This paper addresses the practical application of phenomenology to common mental disorders for therapeutic benefit.  Some modalities of psychotherapy have a rich tradition of employing phenomenological methods within a talking therapy.  Here, movement is central to the approach, combined with an emphasis on the group verbal sharing of first-person lived experiences.  Diagnoses of anxiety, particularly in young adults, are increasingly becoming part of how such people regard their identity.  An increased understanding of anxiety is thus urgent.  To this end this paper will present pilot research findings from the workshops and set-out areas for future research.   BIOS:    Caroline Dower is a psychotherapist and Head of the Counselling Service at Durham University.  Caroline has a long-standing interest in the integration of body-based methods into talking therapies and is beginning a study of the experience and conceptualisation of student anxiety in the ecology of the university setting.   Dr Benedict Smith is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Durham University. His research interests include phenomenology, philosophy of psychiatry, Wittgenstein and Hume. Dr Smith’s research has focused on narratives of depression and the value of lived-experience in an interpersonal setting. His current research uses related phenomenological insights to address experiences of anxiety.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Joe Smeeton, University of Sheffield.   ABSTRACT: Social work theory often tears itself between sociological and psychological ways to understand the human condition and, as I will argue, is always therefore left missing important ways to think about what is happening for people. This paper will draw upon phenomenology to make the case that social work should focus first of all on the lived experience of the people who use its services and to prioritise the meanings they make of their experiences prior to applying external theoretical 'professional' meanings. Theorists such as Merleau-Ponty offer a theoretical framework that sees the human condition as embodied in the social world and therefore consisting of plural accounts of experience that don't easily lend themselves to oversimplified ontical descriptions of the social or psychological realms that claim to explain the commonalities of 'humanity'. Social work is therefore able to work within a more ethical mode of practice and Levinas adds a richness to current ethical frameworks to support a questioning about social work practice.   BIO: Joe Smeeton has practiced, taught and researched social work within the UK for the last 30 years. He has focused much of this work within child protection social work and with looked after children. He is particularly interested in the knowledge bases that inform social worker's decision-making and especially how the risk paradigm has impacted upon organisational and individual decisions. More recently Joe is exploring the use of phenomenology as a way of understanding and theorising about social work. Joe has taught at the Universities of Sheffield, Salford, East Anglia and Nottingham Trent. He has developed qualifying and post-qualifying programmes and has also acted as external examiner at a number of other programmes.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Maja Berseneva, Freie Universitaet Berlin. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.   ABSTRACT: Being vulnerable is a conditio humana. This condition represents characteristics, key events and situations which compose the essentials of human existence. One definition of vulnerability is the general human capacity to being exposed. As such, it can make a subject a victim (when violence is inflicted), but it also represents the capability to being open to the world with its unpredictable events, and to others. Furthermore, vulnerability structures the subject’s experience of the world and makes transformation possible. The concepts of ‘limit situations’ (Jaspers) and ‘transformative events’ (Heidegger), are helpful for the understanding of how we experience ourselves as vulnerable. Encountering a transformative event as the current pandemic crisis, we are forced to realize that our safety and the foundations of our being can be instantly undone. Limit situations touch us in our core values, reminding us of the fragility of everyday life, relationships, and health. While it is possible to respond to vulnerability that shows in a limit situation through avoidance, denial, and rationalization, Jaspers advises to not hastily try to make it vanish. On the contrary, the demand and challenge lie in endurance of the unknown, of the ambiguity that this situation brings. I will argue with Butler’s critical claim that vulnerability can (and must!) be turned into strength, into a resource, since the experience of vulnerability and dependence can move us beyond and against the vocation of the paranoid victim.  Acknowledging that I am vulnerable and enduring it brings a choice for encountering the other without violence: it means having space for showing consideration and attention for the other. The chance of self-improvement lies in vulnerability as permitted openness, and in waiver of protection. In compelling me to deal with my fears and vulnerabilities as part of who I am, lay the transforming power of vulnerability.   BIO: Maja Berseneva is a translator and language teacher, currently living and working in Athens, Greece. Currently graduate student of Philosophy at Freie Universitaet Berlin. Writing Master Thesis on the Vulnerable self and the ‘ethics of the welcome’ in Levinas’ work. Research interests:  Philosophy of Mind, Affectivity, Self-experience, Empathy, Personhood, No-self doctrines, phenomenology, alterity, ethics of embodiment, Vulnerability and the human condition, intentionality, philosophy of medicine and mental health, nature of grief. politics in the feminine, philosophy of sexual difference, embodied female subjectivity, violence, feminist life.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/  

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Jan Halák and Petr Kříž as co-authors and co-presenters. Halák is from Palacky University Olomouc, Czech Republic, and Kříž is from Charles University, Prague, and Palacky University Olomouc, Czech Republic.   ABSTRACT: This paper clarifies the significance of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological account of the body for physiotherapeutic practice. Physiotherapists are trained to approach the functioning of the body from an objectivist perspective, but their therapeutic interaction with patients is not limited to an application of natural-scientific explanations. Analogically, they often perceive mechanistic models of bodily functioning as insufficient, yet they generally lack an appropriate theoretical framework to formalize and systematically describe their experience. We argue that physiotherapists’ practice well corresponds to Merleau-Ponty’s theorization of the body as the bearer of an original bodily intentionality and makes it possible to elaborate it further. On the one hand, the practice of physiotherapy corroborates Merleau-Ponty’s critical arguments against objectivist interpretations of the body. For example, norms of optimal corporeal functioning are highly individual and variable, and thus do not depend on generic physiological structures in a direct way; correspondingly, objectively measurable physical deviations rarely correspond to specific subjective difficulties; and similarly, a patient’s reflexive insight into his or her motor deficiencies does not necessarily produce significant motor improvements. Physiotherapeutic procedures can therefore be understood neither as an expert mechanical manipulation with a patient’s machine-like body nor as a process of instructing the patient’s consciousness to manipulate it in that way. On the other hand, physiotherapeutic practice can draw on Merleau-Ponty’s positive suggestion to understand motor disorders as modifications of bodily intentionality. Conceived in this way, physiotherapy approaches motor disorders as bodily mis-understandings or failures to optimally deal with motor requirements of a situation. Correspondingly, the therapeutical process itself becomes an inter-corporeal dialogue or bodily empathy. In the course of this process, a richer motor intentionality of the therapist takes up the patient’s limited, less adaptable, and more laborious intentionality, and guides it to discovering better ways of grasping a situation as meaningful through particular postures and movements.   BIOS:    Jan Halák, Ph.D., works as assistant professor at the Department of Philosophy, Palacky University Olomouc, Czech Republic. His scientific interests are in phenomenology, enactivism, and philosophy of embodiment. He has published several papers on Merleau-Ponty, with a special focus on Merleau-Ponty’s Collège de France period, his interpretation of the concept of body schema, and the corporeal infrastructure of higher cognitive processes. Jan Halák also published several translations of Merleau-Ponty’s works into Czech language (e.g. Resumés de cours). Dr. Halák is now working on a monograph on Merleau-Ponty’s ontology based on the concept of flesh.   Petr Kříž is a physiotherapist, doctoral student of philosophy at Charles University, Prague, and research associate at Palacky University Olomouc, Czech Republic. His thesis aims to develop a new theoretical framework for physiotherapy on the basis of a phenomenological interpretation of bodily intentionality. His scientific interests are in motor intentionality and its pathologies, differentiation of body schema, bodily empathy, and the expressivity of the body. Apart from several papers written in Czech, Petr Kříž has recently published an English paper on “Merleau-Ponty’s Discovery of the Pre-objective Body and Its Consequences for Body-Oriented Disciplines” (Sport, Ethics and Philosophy, 2019).   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Miriam Ambrosino, New York University. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.   ABSTRACT: In her essay, “The Difference of Feminist Phenomenology: The Case of Shame,” Bonnie Mann (2018) contends that feminist scholarship in all areas of philosophy is up against “an affective problem, not a cognitive one.” Mann calls attention to the “problem of reverence” that prevents philosophy—especially feminist phenomenology—from considering new methods of theorizing and interpreting. Following Mann's claims and Alia Al-Saji’s (2014) work on affective hesitation, I investigate how contemporary thinkers can attend to and thus reconfigure their affective commitments of reverence towards the white male canon in phenomenology. I argue that part of this project involves using one’s affects as a mode of critique. For phenomenology to open up to cross-disciplinary dialogue, it must recognize that critique is sufficient at the level of self reflection and transformation of habitual modes of feeling and perceiving. I read Aimé Césaire epic poem, Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, as a case study that demonstrates my methodology of using affect in critical phenomenological practice. I explicate how the rhetoric of disgust in this poem can catalyze a critical and ethically responsive phenomenological reduction for myself, a white reader. I claim that this experience of disgust in reading resonates with Merleau-Ponty’s (1945) account of wonder, vis-à-vis Eugen Fink, as “perhaps the best formulation of the reduction,” a reflection that “reveals the world as strange and paradoxical.” Guiding this methodology is Louise Rosenblatt’s (1969) transactional theory of literary criticism, inspired by John Dewey’s pragmatism. Through my case study I clarify how this theory provides a framework for engaging phenomenology with lived aesthetic experience to facilitate transformative affective work on one’s affective commitments.   BIO: I am a masters student at NYU Gallatin School of Individualized Study. My individualized course of study examines affects-broadly including sentiments, feelings, sensations- as they are theorized across disciplines such as in philosophy and literature. I build from my undergraduate degree in philosophy at Fordham University in which I began studying philosophy of emotions and contemporary French philosophy. Though my central discipline is in philosophy, I develop my research on affect studies and critical phenomenology through my graduate coursework in literary criticism and critical race and gender theory.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/  

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Jamie Murphy, University College Cork, Ireland.   ABSTRACT: According to a widespread assumption in contemporary literature on the philosophy of emotions, it is possible for a subject to elicit anger for no reason (Nussbaum 2016, Huebner 2018, Cherry 2018, Callard 2018). This talk aims to reject this claim by arguing for the opposite idea: it is impossible for an agent to get angry for no reason.  The talk is organized in three parts. Part 1 gives a brief outline of how anger is viewed in contemporary literature, and presents the assumption that anger can occur for no reason. Part 2 rejects this claim: anger must come about from a reason. First, I distinguish between a reason and a cause for an emotion by showing that a reason can be either justified or unjustified, whereas a cause either exists or not. A cause will always become a justified reason for the angry subject. The reason has the potential to be unjustified when it is presented to the angry subject’s peers. I build on this by introducing warranted anger and vindicated anger. Warranted anger is anger which has a justified reason. Vindicated anger is anger which, if presented to the angry subject’s peers, would be seen as warranted anger. In part 3 I posit and explain the idea of “Vapid Anger”. Vapid Anger is anger the subject of which knows they shouldn’t feel, but feel it anyway. It is controlled by an agent’s mood and overall disposition to anger, thereby determining the likelihood they will get angry at something “vapid”. I introduce this concept as it is a response to potential attacks against my argument; it shows that one can still have a reason for being angry but are aware that, if their reason was presented to a group of their peers, would be seen as unjustified.   BIO: I attained my BA with a major in philosophy in 2016. I graduated with my MA in philosophy in 2018. My MA dissertation was focused on moral responsibility, specifically on compatibilist thought. Both of these degrees were attained in University College Cork (UCC). After 2 years away from academia I returned to begin my PhD in September 2019. My thesis is focused solely on anger as an emotion, in an attempt to give a full account of all types of anger.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Natalia Burakowska & Danielle Petherbridge. Dr. Petherbridge is Assistant Professor in the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin; and Burakowska is a PhD student in Philosophy at University College Dublin. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.   ABSTRACT: Dementia is a complex disease that is most often framed in terms of diminished cognitive capacity or neurodegeneration, together with assumptions about the loss of personhood, memory and communication skills. As a consequence, forms of dementia assessment and care are often based on a cognitive account of personhood and framed in terms of cognitive and linguistic capacities. One of the central arguments of this paper is that such accounts of personhood are one-sided and neglect the important embodied dimensions of persons both as subjects in the world and in their interactions with others. More significantly, drawing specifically on phenomenology, the research constructs an embodied-cognitive account of dementia that offers new insights not only into the lived experience of persons with dementia but also alternative forms of care. The paper begins by examining the appropriateness of an account of empathy in encounter with persons with dementia before investigating the importance of dynamic engagement that can give rise to embodied and relational capabilities and forms of communication. This has significant ramifications for forms of interaction and care, as well as existing policies, medical attitudes and diagnosis of dementia. Our aim in this paper is to: (a) offer an embodied-cognitive approach to dementia drawing on a phenomenology; (b) provide an account of the lived experience of persons with dementia that in turn informs policy and care; (c) explore alternative forms of expressivity and personhood informed by a phenomenological approach. This research offers an important phenomenological alternative to current research on dementia with implications for the understanding of dementia, as well as diagnosis and methods of care.   BIOS:    Dr. Petherbridge is Assistant Professor in the School of Philosophy at University College Dublin and Deputy-Director of the UCD Centre for Ethics in Public Life. Previously Dr. Petherbridge was an IRC Marie-Curie fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Columbia University, New York. Her primary research interests include the relation between perception, attention and affect; theories of intersubjectivity in phenomenology and social philosophy as well as embodied-cognitive approaches to illness. She is PI of a research project on embodied-cognitive accounts of dementia being undertaken in partnership with the Alzheimer Society of Ireland.   Natalia Burakowska is a PhD student in Philosophy at University College Dublin. She works in the areas of phenomenology, philosophy of mind and applied philosophy. Her doctoral work is focused on a phenomenological approach to dementia that conceptualizes it as both a cognitive and bodily condition, taking account of the lived experience of dementia, vulnerability and forms of ethical responsiveness and care.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/  

Season five of our podcast features presentations from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. In this episode we release one of our keynote talks, that of Professor Sophie Loidolt, who focuses upon phenomenological method in political and legal theory. Loidolt is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Practical Philosophy, Technische Universität Darmstadt / Technical University of Darmstadt.   ABSTRACT: The talk investigates phenomenology’s possibilities to describe, reflect and critically analyse political and legal orders. It presents a “toolbox” of methodological reflections, tools and topics, by relating to the classics of the tradition and to the emerging movement of “critical phenomenology,” as well as by touching upon current issues such as experiences of rightlessness, experiences in the digital lifeworld, and experiences of the public sphere. It is argued that phenomenology provides us with a dynamic methodological framework that emphasizes correlational, co-constitutional, and interrelational structures and thus pays attention to modes of givenness, the making and unmaking of “world,” and, thereby, the inter/subjective, affective, and bodily constitution of meaning. In the case of political and legal orders, questions of power, exclusion, and normativity are central issues. By looking at “best practice” models such as Hannah Arendt’s analyses, I will elaborate on an analytical tool and flexible framework I call “spaces of meaning,” which phenomenologists can use and modify as they go along. In the current debates on political and legal issues, I see the main task of phenomenology in reclaiming experience as world-building and world-opening, also in a normative sense, and in demonstrating how structures and orders are lived while they condition and form spaces of meaning. If we want to understand, criticize, act, or change something, this subjective and intersubjective perspective will remain indispensable.   BIO: Sophie Loidolt is professor of philosophy at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. She is a member of the “Young Academy” of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and “Recurrent Visiting Professor” at CFS Copenhagen. During her time and education at University of Vienna (PhD, habilitation, assistant professor), she was a visiting researcher at the Husserl-Archives of KU Leuven and at The New School for Social Research in New York. Her work centers on issues in the fields of phenomenology, political and legal philosophy, and ethics, as well as transcendental philosophy and philosophy of mind. Her books include Anspruch und Rechtfertigung. Eine Theorie des rechtlichen Denkens im Anschluss an die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls (Springer 2009), Einführung in die Rechtsphänomenologie (Mohr Siebeck 2010), and Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity (Routledge 2017).   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season five of the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast features presentations from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. In this episode, however, we present an interview given by Professor Sophie Loidolt, one of our keynotes from the event. Loidolt is Professor of Philosophy and Chair of Practical Philosophy, Technische Universität Darmstadt / Technical University of Darmstadt. The interview was recorded in August of this year, and first released to conference attendees. The interviewers are Jessie Stanier and Hannah Berry from the event team.   In the interview Loidolt talks about reading groups, armchair philosophy, music, film and all things phenomenology. In the next episode we will release her paper from the event, ‘Order, Experience, and Critique: The Phenomenological Method in Political and Legal Theory’.   BIOS:    Sophie Loidolt is professor of philosophy at the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany. She is a member of the “Young Academy” of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and “Recurrent Visiting Professor” at CFS Copenhagen. During her time and education at University of Vienna (PhD, habilitation, assistant professor), she was a visiting researcher at the Husserl-Archives of KU Leuven and at The New School for Social Research in New York. Her work centers on issues in the fields of phenomenology, political and legal philosophy, and ethics, as well as transcendental philosophy and philosophy of mind. Her books include Anspruch und Rechtfertigung. Eine Theorie des rechtlichen Denkens im Anschluss an die Phänomenologie Edmund Husserls (Springer 2009), Einführung in die Rechtsphänomenologie (Mohr Siebeck 2010), and Phenomenology of Plurality: Hannah Arendt on Political Intersubjectivity (Routledge 2017).   Jessie Stanier is a PhD student at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. She takes an engaged approach to her transdisciplinary research on phenomenology, ageing, and older age, collaborating with publics affected by the lived realities of ageing and caring. In her PhD thesis, she aims to shed new light on normative determinants of ageing and how they affect lived experiences and possibilities for older people. She is co-supervised by Dr Robin Durie, Dr Felicity Thomas, and Prof Luna Dolezal. She completed her MA in Philosophy at KU Leuven, Belgium, in 2018.   Hannah Berry has recently completed her Ph.D. on a linguistic and phenomenological analysis of empathy. She has had a lectureship at Liverpool Hope University in Sociolinguistics and has taught at various institutions such as the University of Liverpool and Manchester Metropolitan University. She is now working in the adult education sector.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Welcome to the 100th episode of the BSP Podcast. To celebrate this milestone we have a specially recorded interview with Professor Shaun Gallagher (University of Memphis, USA, and University of Wollongong, Australia). Gallagher is interviewed by Jessica Stanier (Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter) and Hannah Berry (BSP Secretary).   “I’m really happy we’ve reached 100 episodes!” – writes Dr Matt Barnard, founder and editor of the BSP Podcast. “I started the podcast because I wanted to amplify the voice of our delegates at conferences. Phenomenology is an important movement in thought, challenging us to listen harder, and engage with the world and human experiences. As such, I’m delighted that Shaun Gallagher, who has done so much to advocate for phenomenology and communicate it clearly, agreed to be interviewed for this special episode. I’m also super grateful to Jessica Stanier and Hannah Berry. They came up with really interesting questions, leading to a unique and open discussion that I really enjoyed editing. I am sure our listeners will enjoy it too.”   BIOS:   Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis, USA, and Professorial Fellow at the School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong, Australia. His research is interdisciplinary and focuses on embodied cognition and the phenomenology of self, action, intention, and social interaction, He held the Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Fellowship (2012-18). He has been Honorary Professor at Tromsø University (Norway), Durham University (UK) and the University of Copenhagen (Denmark). He has held visiting research positions at MRC: Centre for Cognition and Brain Sciences, Cambridge University; Ecole Normale Supériure, Lyon; CREA and Ecole Normale Supériure, Paris; Humboldt University, Berlin; Keeble College, Oxford University; and Sapienza - University of Rome. His publications include Action and Interaction (Oxford 2020); The Phenomenological Mind -3rd ed (Routledge 2020); Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (Oxford 2017); The Neuro-phenomenology of Awe and Wonder (Palgrave Macmillan 2015); Phenomenology (Palgrave Macmillan 2012; 2nd ed in 2021); How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford 2005); Hermeneutics and Education (SUNY Press 1992); and as editor, the Oxford Handbook of the Self (2011); and co-editor The Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition (2018). He is editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. His books and articles have been translated into 14 different languages, and have been cited more than 29,000 times (Google Scholar). He served as principle investigator on grants from the European Science Foundation, Marie Curie Actions, the National Science Foundation, the Templeton Foundation; and has been co-PI on awards from the Australian Research Council, Marie Curie, Humboldt Foundation, and the Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK).   Hannah Berry has recently completed her doctoral thesis on empathy from the University of Liverpool. The thesis is called ‘The Shoe Never Fits: a phenomenological revision of empathy and intersubjectivity’ and offers a critical analysis of phenomenological, psychological and biological descriptions of empathy and proposes a development to Husserl’s theory of analogising apprehension in order to describe an interpersonal experience that takes into account sociability as well as the subjective experience of self and other. Her interests are in psycho- and socio-linguistics, forensic linguistics, pragmatics, phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Hannah is the current secretary for the British Society for Phenomenology and is the lead tutor of the WEA’s North West refugee education programme.   Jessie Stanier is a PhD student at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. She takes an engaged approach to her study of phenomenology, ageing, and older age by collaborating with various people affected by the lived realities of ageing and caring. In her PhD thesis, she aims to shed new light on normative determinants of ageing and how they affect lived experiences and possibilities for older people. She co-hosted this year’s BSP conference online, and she is currently co-editing a Special Issue of Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology on ‘Pandemic Politics & Phenomenology’.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

To close the first series of releases of season five of our podcast, we continue with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Hannah Berry (University of Liverpool). Hannah was one of the organisers of the 2020 annual conference, serves as Secretary of the BSP, and will be back next week for our 100th episode of the BSP Podcast conducting a special interview to celebrate the milestone. Before that, here is Hannah telling us why ‘We Need to Talk About Ted’.   ABSTRACT: There is an increasing fascination with serial killers, morbid crime and the general macabre within popular culture and contemporary society. It has often been argued that our enjoyment of sad films; the act of slowing down when driving to view a crash site; looking at a dead animal in the park; listening to interviews with serial killers, and even; eating meat are “survivalist” tendencies, as well as a means of reinforcing pro-social values (Burkeman, 2012). We indulge these curiosities and watch highly rated television programs such as Making a Murderer, Unabomber, Mindhunter, Criminal Minds, The Fall, True Detective, etc. These fictional and non-fictional narratives examine the intricate details of the crime, the history, the criminal investigation and the prosecution of serial killers and are often supplemented with a clinical psychologist’s reflection of why the perpetrator acted in this way. Bonn claims that there appears to be an innate human tendency to identify or empathise with all things –whether good or bad –including serial killers (2014), and this may be why we are fascinated with them. I will present a corpus analysis and critical discourse analysis of interviews with two serial killers: Ted Bundy (an American serial killer who kidnapped, raped and murdered women during the 1970s) and Ted Kaczynski (also known as the Unabomber: an American domestic terrorist and anarchist who killed 3 people in the late 1970s and 80s). I will analyse the linguistics devices the criminals used when: referring to the victims; the use of agency in descriptions of the crimes, and; present a phenomenological description that aids my linguistic analysis in order to track the awareness of the embodied other and the level of consciousness of the others’ subjectivity throughout the interviews. I will include a social commentary on how the criminals were presented to the public and how the language used to describe them shaped the popular conception of “serial killer”.   BIO: Hannah Berry has recently completed her doctoral thesis on empathy from the University of Liverpool. The thesis is called 'The Shoe Never Fits: a phenomenological revision of empathy and intersubjectivity' and offers a critical analysis of phenomenological, psychological and biological descriptions of empathy and proposes a development to Husserl's theory of analogising apprehension in order to describe an interpersonal experience that takes into account sociability as well as the subjective experience of self and other. Her interests are in psycho- and socio-linguistics, forensic linguistics, pragmatics, phenomenology and philosophy of mind. Hannah is the current secretary for the British Society for Phenomenology and is the lead tutor of the WEA's North West refugee education programme.    This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

To begin to close the first series of releases of season five of our podcast, we continue with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Nicole Miglio (San Raffaele University) and Jessica Stanier (Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter). Jessie was one of the organisers of the 2020 annual conference, set the theme of ‘Engaged Phenomenology’, and will be back next week for our 100th episode of the BSP Podcast conducting a special interview to celebrate the milestone. Before that, here are Jessie and Nicole exploring ‘Painful experience and constitution of the intersubjective self’.   ABSTRACT: Pain is ordinary and integral to our experiential topography; a ‘background texture’ of pain characterises our whole lives. I flinch away from a hot pan as it brushes against my arm at the stove. I absent-mindedly rub my shoulder, relieving the dull ache from sitting at my desk too long. If we consider these routine and mundane ways in which pain features in everyday experience, it becomes clear that - far from presenting only through unusual and excruciating events - pain is familiar and, in many ways, vital for navigating the world. Pain draws our attention to our bodies as they pertain to our surroundings. And while everyday pain is often a far cry from the overwhelming agony of extreme injury, it is nonetheless recognisable as pain across these various contexts. Pain relief and treatment is a huge global pharmaceutical industry, based on a medical conception of pain as a set of quantifiable and calculable conditions in a physiological body. This notion of pain fails to account for social and political contexts which constitute subjects in pain, as they are alternately marginalised, disbelieved, prioritised, or cared for; the status of their painful experience garners significance in this relational intersubjective context. By taking a critical-phenomenological approach, this paper seeks to critique and further reductionistic conceptions of pain by better accounting for the complex contextual and intersubjective variation of painful experiences. We articulate how painful experience involves several phenomenological levels – from the hyletic to the intersubjective – differentially affected by the subject’s social, political, and cultural situation. We suggest that this critical-phenomenological account might be integrated into lifeworld-based approaches to care and treatment of pain, through social and political engagement, as well as raising some critical points of investigation for phenomenology in itself.   This presentation is based on a book chapter due to be published soon in Phenomenology of Bioethics and Technoethics; ed. S. Ferrarello (Springer).   BIOS:   Nicole Miglio is a PhD Student at San Raffaele University (Milan). She’s carrying her doctoral research in several institutions, in the U.S. (George Washington University and The University of San Francisco), in the UK (University of Exeter), and in Israel (University of Haifa). Her background is in theoretical philosophy and aesthetics, but she is working especially in the field of Feminist phenomenology. She is currently writing her PhD dissertation, which is exploring the many philosophical facets of the gestating subjectivity, considering both the classical accounts (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Arendt, Beauvoir) and the contemporary ways to think the experiential complexity of the gestational relationship. She is co-supervised by Prof. Chiara Cappelletto (Aesthetics), prof. Francesca de Vecchi (Phenomenology and Social ontology), and Prof. Marjolein Oele (Contemporary European Philosophy).   Jessie Stanier is a PhD student at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. She takes an engaged approach to her study of phenomenology, ageing, and older age by collaborating with various people affected by the lived realities of ageing and caring. In her PhD thesis, she aims to shed new light on normative determinants of ageing and how they affect lived experiences and possibilities for older people. She co-hosted this year’s BSP conference online, and she is currently co-editing a Special Issue of Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology on ‘Pandemic Politics & Phenomenology’.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/  

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Filipa Melo Lopes, from the Philosophy Department of the University of Edinburgh. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.   ABSTRACT: At the end of 2017, Kristen Roupenian’s short story, Cat Person, went viral. Published at the height of the #MeToo movement, it depicted a ‘toxic date’ and a disturbing sexual encounter between Margot, a college student, and Robert, an older man she meets at work. The story was widely viewed as a relatable denunciation of women’s powerlessness and routine victimization. In this paper, I push against this common reading. I suggest that it fails to capture the disturbing and ‘skin-crawling’ quality of the story because it fails to engage with its rich phenomenological description. I propose an alternative feminist interpretation of Cat Person through the lens of Simone de Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism. For Beauvoir, narcissism is a particular form of alienation that consists in making oneself both the subject and the ultimate project of one’s life. Framing Margot as a modern-day narcissist casts her as engaging, not in subtly coerced, undesired sex, but rather in sex that is desired in a tragically alienated way. I argue that Beauvoir’s notion of narcissism is an important tool for feminists today –well beyond the interpretation of Cat Person. It presses us to see systematic subordination not just as something done to women, but also as something women do to themselves. This in turn highlights the neglected role of self-transformation as a key aspect of feminist political resistance.   BIO: Filipa Melo Lopes is a Lecturer in Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. She completed her Ph.D. in Philosophy, in 2019, at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. Her research interests include Social Theory, Feminist Philosophy, Philosophy of Disability and Philosophy of Sexuality.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Kata Dóra Kiss, University of Pécs, Hungary.   ABSTRACT: Intersubjectivity had become one of the key concepts for the relational school of psychoanalysis. Although for most psy-sciences the importance of relations in the constitution of the self is out of the debate, there is much less consensus on how decisive this relation is.  Furthermore, the question of intersubjectivity in psychology drives us to one of the ultimate question of the psychology of the present: human beings are more biologically determined, than socially or vice versa? Nowadays, natural scientific discourse is the mainstream scientific frame for western psy-sciences, although, there has never been one coherent and fully consensual one in psychology. This frame prefers biological explanations over the socio-cultural account. The fundamental unit of examination in this approach is the individuality and its implicit assumption is that the psychic structure is a closed system where mental processes are taking place. Western clinical practices mainly rely on this paradigm, as it could produce a testable and comprehensive empirical framework. This framework, however, implicitly formulate a generalized and normative ideal. In cognitive sciences or universal diagnostic systems, there is an implicit notion on how our cognition or psyche has to function. It raises the risk of normalization, in which therapy is a tool for the modification of the patient’s self to approach a “neurotypical” ideal. However, the notion of normality is a protean category that is culturally determined and very changeable in time and space. The presentation would like to argues that those therapeutic forms that are based on the intersubjectivitist approach could easier avoid the menace of normalization. These concepts are prioritized the complex cultural, social and family matrix in which human experiences are formed. It implies that our self, traits, and attitudes are unfolding through our connections and bonds from early childhood. The relational school of psychoanalysis does not accept the myth of the isolated mind, but it emphasizes our embeddedness in the web of social relations. Budapest School, British object-relations theory, intersubjective psychoanalysis or relational psychoanalysis are assuming that psychotherapy is first and foremost an interpersonal event between two people. In the field of therapy, the analysand’s psychic structure could never be independent of its objects, in this case, from the therapist. This intersubjective relation is the central element of the healing process. It assumes that psychological events are never just a function of inner structures and forces but are always derivate of interaction with others. Consequently, therapeutic space is also an open-ended plane of transactions. Transference and counter-transference, occur in the therapy, create a dialectical field where past emotions and traumas are re-enacted and embodied in the two-person context. Memories from the past, specific associations cannot spring automatically but because of the presence of the other person. This phenomenological approach would be helpful for professionals to understand in-depth the importance of embodied emotions that could only raise by the physical contact. The two main topics of the presentation are the connection between the phenomenological intersubjectivity and the relational approaches of psychoanalysis and the importance of intersubjectivist approaches in psychological healing.   BIO: I am a second-year student of the Theoretical Psychoanalysis Ph.D. program at the University of Pécs, Hungary. My doctoral research focuses on the importance of intersubjective relations in the field of psychological therapy. By this, I would like to point out that a more humanistic approach, that intersubjectivity could offer, could help professionals to avoid the process of normalization and the reproduction of social imbalances through psychological treatment. Before my Ph.D., I completed my Masters in Philosophy and Critical Gender Studies at the Central European University in Budapest. These fields help me to see this question not only from an insider, psychological approach but from a more critical and social scientific perspective.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

This episode of Season 5 of the BSP Podcast features Rachel Elliott, assistant professor of Philosophy at Brandon University. The presentation is taken from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online.   ABSTRACT: Is sharing time what underpins the experience of belonging to a higher-order unity or group? In this paper, I consider the extent to which music produces collective belonging using Alfred Schütz’s idea of a tuning-in relationship among participants in a musical event. I claim that Schütz’s Husserlian account of that relationship relies too much on the idea of active synthesis, whereas the notion can be better articulated using Merleau-Ponty's conception of time as transition synthesis, derived from his idea of the habit body. This Merleau-Pontian version of the tuning-in relationship, however, foregrounds questions about musical genre, particularly in the distinction between improvised and non-improvised musics, in constituting the tuning-in relationship characteristic of what Schütz calls a ‘we’ experience. By examining this transition-synthesis in more depth, we see that it is through the projecting of compatible futures, perceived gesturally in one another, that any sort of ‘tuning-in’ relationship can occur. This raises the question about the ability of musics whose futures are distinctly unspecified, such as improvised musics, to produce the shared experience of time that underlies this variety of ‘we’ experience.   BIO: Rachel Elliott is currently an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy Department at Brandon University in Brandon, Manitoba, Canada. Her research focus is the phenomenology of groups at the level of embodiment with a special interest in temporality. Her current research centers on music, particularly improvised music, as an entry point for understanding the nature of co-perception. Her future research will address questions of temporality in relation to neurodiversity, seeking to map out the limits and possibilities of group consolidation when taking neurodiversity into account.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season five of our podcast continues with another presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Francesca Brencio who was one of three speakers (along with Prisca Bauer and Valeria Bizzari and Francesca Brencio) on the preconstituted panel “Engaging phenomenology in the neurosciences”. Bauer and Bizzari’s presentations feature in episodes #92 and #93 of the BSP Podcast respectively. Brencio, from the University of Seville, concludes this triad of papers.   ABSTRACT: In the history of neurosciences, phenomenology arrived pretty late as a method able to enhance the understanding of neurological conditions. While psychiatry and psychology recognised the contribution of the phenomenological method at the beginning of XX century, other branches of neurosciences (neurology, neuropsychology, etc.) are still not including this approach, affirming that the investigation of the brain’s neuronal states can be understood only through third-person perspectives and that the subject’s experience is not necessary in order to understand clinical conditions and psychopathological phenomena, since memory, behaviour, perception and consciousness can be explained through a purely biological approach. This paper aims to propose a paradigm shift and to challenge neurosciences to bridge the gap between brain and experience. This contribution is articulated in two parts:  in the first one, I will briefly rebuild the origin of this methodological gap in order to show how the implications of this approach affect contemporary understanding and treatment of neurological conditions and neurodiversity. Techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and Electroencephalogram (EEG) measure brain activity in response to sensorimotor, cognitive, affective or social stimuli or tasks, and many have tried to find brain correlates of neuropsychological conditions. However, recent findings show that causes or risks of mental disorders may operate at many levels, including genetic and neural elements of course, but also individual, family and social environments, that can be grouped under the item “experience”. In the second part, I will propose how to bridge the gap with an interpretative hypothesis aimed to show how the brain is part of a more complex system of elements in which human being is situated, involved and embedded. The 4E approach, as the most recent result of phenomenological adjustment to neurosciences, and the systemic approach stress the need of understanding the mental life of people and their life circumstances in a non-reductionist view. We will see how there is a bidirectional way to understand the link between brain and experience: mental disorders cannot be reduced only to brain dysfunctions and brain disorders cannot be caused by abnormal mental experience.   BIO: Francesca Brencio is Assistant Professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Seville, Convener and Instructor at the Pheno-Lab, a theoretical laboratory on Philosophy and Mental Health at the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine at the University Hospital in Freiburg and Member of The Phenomenology and Mental Health Network, The Collaborating Centre for Values-Based Practice in Health and Social Care, Catherine’s College, University of Oxford (UK). Her field of research is mainly related to Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Philosophy of Psychiatry and Philosophy of religion.   This presentation is part of a preconstituted panel with Prisca Bauer, Valeria Bizzari, and Francesca Brencio. “Engaging phenomenology in the neurosciences”: Before becoming a subject of study in philosophy classes, phenomenology is the method that underpins all of science. Husserl conceived phenomenology as an a priori science of essences, but it has developed through other important authors during the beginning and first half of XX century (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012; Moran, 2000; Zahavi, 2003). Engaging phenomenology in the contemporary scenario means embracing the legacy of the classics and also exploring its potential for different fields of knowledge, such as politics, public space, health. Phenomenology is a methodical effort to describe the basic structures inherent to conscious experience, such as embodiment, spatiality, temporality, intentionality, intersubjectivity, and to analyse their possible deviations and derailments (Fuchs, 2002). In recent years phenomenological approaches contributed to psychiatry and psychopathology by providing novel theoretical frameworks (Sass, Parnas, & Zahavi, 2011) and defining the subjective essence of experience more clearly. The aim of this panel is to explore how the phenomenological method can contribute to neurosciences through three different areas of research: to bridge the gap between the brain and lived experience allowing to understand mental disorders as not merely reducible to brain dysfunctions and brain disorders as consequence of abnormal mental experience; to offer a multidisciplinary account of autism, linking the role of the body and intercorporeality with recent findings in philosophy of neuroscience under the predictive brain hypothesis; and to improve care in people with epilepsy by implementing the neurophenomenological paradigm through systematic interviews, which allow people with epilepsy to recognise subjective seizure “warning signs”. The aim of the panel is to present findings already recognised by the scientific and academic community, and to go a step further by showing the necessity of a paradigm shift capable of improving the understanding and treatment of neurological conditions and neurodiversity.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

This episode of the BSP Podcast features Valeria Bizzari from the Clinic University of Heidelberg, Department of Psychiatry. The presentation is from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. Bizzari was one of three speakers (along with Prisca Bauer and Francesca Brencio) on the preconstituted panel “Engaging phenomenology in the neurosciences”. Bauer’s presentation can be found in episode #92, and Brencio’s presentation will be released next week. In this episode, Bizzari talks on ‘A multidisciplinary analysis of autism’.   ABSTRACT: The aim of this paper is to offer a multidisciplinary account of autism, linking the role of the body and intercorporeality with recent findings in philosophy of neuroscience under the predictive brain hypothesis. Firstly, I will show some coherences between the predictive engagement hypothesis and the phenomenological approach (with a particular emphasis on the notions of motor intentionality and habit body). Within the three approaches to predictive model (predictive coding, predictive processing and predictive engagement), in fact, for predictive engagement, active inference is more action than inference; it’s an enactive adjustment, a loop that also navigates through the body and environment and forms a whole (Gallagher and Allan 2016: 9). This seems to be coherent with the phenomenological account, according to which cognition is dynamically incorporated and located in the environment. In fact, the living body seems to entertain a dialogical and enactive relationship with the surrounding context, as well as with neural circuits actively responding to external stimuli. Accordingly, in the second part I will analyze the HIPPEA (High, Inflexible Precision of Predictions Errors in Autism) theory on autism and I will show how, phenomenologically speaking, this theory argues for an impairment of the habit body. In this view, autism itself seems to be a complex disorder which needs an interdisciplinary analysis that considers it: (1) A neurobiological disturbance (the mechanisms which seem to be responsible for HIPPEA are a deficient neural mechanism for precision and a deficient meta-learning system); (2) An intercorporeal deficit; (3) A lack of motor ability and an impairment of the attitude of being engaged with the world. Predictive engagement approach can integrate phenomenology in a mutually informed manner, enabling a description of the subject not as an “I think” but as an “I move”.   BIO: Valeria Bizzari is a Thyssen postdoctoral researcher at the Clinic University of Heidelberg, section Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychotherapy. Her research involves intersubjective disorders, with a special focus on autism spectrum disorder and Asperger’s syndrome.   This presentation is part of a preconstituted panel with Prisca Bauer, Valeria Bizzari, and Francesca Brencio. “Engaging phenomenology in the neurosciences”: Before becoming a subject of study in philosophy classes, phenomenology is the method that underpins all of science. Husserl conceived phenomenology as an a priori science of essences, but it has developed through other important authors during the beginning and first half of XX century (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012; Moran, 2000; Zahavi, 2003). Engaging phenomenology in the contemporary scenario means embracing the legacy of the classics and also exploring its potential for different fields of knowledge, such as politics, public space, health. Phenomenology is a methodical effort to describe the basic structures inherent to conscious experience, such as embodiment, spatiality, temporality, intentionality, intersubjectivity, and to analyse their possible deviations and derailments (Fuchs, 2002). In recent years phenomenological approaches contributed to psychiatry and psychopathology by providing novel theoretical frameworks (Sass, Parnas, & Zahavi, 2011) and defining the subjective essence of experience more clearly. The aim of this panel is to explore how the phenomenological method can contribute to neurosciences through three different areas of research: to bridge the gap between the brain and lived experience allowing to understand mental disorders as not merely reducible to brain dysfunctions and brain disorders as consequence of abnormal mental experience; to offer a multidisciplinary account of autism, linking the role of the body and intercorporeality with recent findings in philosophy of neuroscience under the predictive brain hypothesis; and to improve care in people with epilepsy by implementing the neurophenomenological paradigm through systematic interviews, which allow people with epilepsy to recognise subjective seizure “warning signs”. The aim of the panel is to present findings already recognised by the scientific and academic community, and to go a step further by showing the necessity of a paradigm shift capable of improving the understanding and treatment of neurological conditions and neurodiversity.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season five of our podcast continues with a panel presentation from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. This episode features Prisca Bauer who was one of three speakers (along with Valeria Bizzari and Francesca Brencio) on the preconstituted panel “Engaging phenomenology in the neurosciences”. Bizzari and Brencio’s presentations will be released in the next two episodes of the BSP Podcast. To begin, here is Bauer from the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy University Medical Center, Freiburg Faculty of Medicine, University of Freiburg.   ABSTRACT: The burden of neurological conditions is enormous and steadily increasing. When including stroke, neurological conditions are the main cause of disability-adjusted life-years. Modern medicine is based on a strict division between body and mind. As a consequence, neurological conditions are reduced to conditions of the brain, yet they have a profound impact on the experience of people affected by them. Phenomenological accounts are not routinely considered in the diagnostic or therapeutic processes in neurology. I will show the potential of using a systematic phenomenological approach to improve care in people with neurological conditions by taking epilepsy as an example. The main symptom of epilepsy, a condition affecting 1% of the population, is unpredictable seizures, which severely impact people’s lives. Our hypothesis is that through systematic interviews, people with epilepsy can learn to recognise subjective seizure “warning signs”. The recognition of these may help people to increase their safety around seizures, and to regain a sense of control over their unpredictability. I will present preliminary data from phenomenological interviews with people with epilepsy, and explorative analyses of the neural correlates of these subjective seizure “warning signs”. The combination of phenomenological and neural data has the potential to help to improve data-based seizure prediction algorhythms. This study is the first clinical implementation of the neurophenomenological paradigm first proposed by Francisco Varela. It shows how phenomenological and biological data can be used complementarily, and have the potential to greatly advance our understanding and management of neurological conditions, bridging the gap between the brain and experience.   BIO: Prisca Bauer is a physician (M.D) and scientist (PhD) at the Department of Psychosomatic Medicine and Psychotherapy of the University Medical Center Freiburg. Her main research interests are in neurological conditions, especially epilepsy, and in combining phenomenological and biological approaches.   This presentation is part of a preconstituted panel with Prisca Bauer, Valeria Bizzari, and Francesca Brencio. “Engaging phenomenology in the neurosciences”: Before becoming a subject of study in philosophy classes, phenomenology is the method that underpins all of science. Husserl conceived phenomenology as an a priori science of essences, but it has developed through other important authors during the beginning and first half of XX century (Gallagher & Zahavi, 2012; Moran, 2000; Zahavi, 2003). Engaging phenomenology in the contemporary scenario means embracing the legacy of the classics and also exploring its potential for different fields of knowledge, such as politics, public space, health. Phenomenology is a methodical effort to describe the basic structures inherent to conscious experience, such as embodiment, spatiality, temporality, intentionality, intersubjectivity, and to analyse their possible deviations and derailments (Fuchs, 2002). In recent years phenomenological approaches contributed to psychiatry and psychopathology by providing novel theoretical frameworks (Sass, Parnas, & Zahavi, 2011) and defining the subjective essence of experience more clearly. The aim of this panel is to explore how the phenomenological method can contribute to neurosciences through three different areas of research: to bridge the gap between the brain and lived experience allowing to understand mental disorders as not merely reducible to brain dysfunctions and brain disorders as consequence of abnormal mental experience; to offer a multidisciplinary account of autism, linking the role of the body and intercorporeality with recent findings in philosophy of neuroscience under the predictive brain hypothesis; and to improve care in people with epilepsy by implementing the neurophenomenological paradigm through systematic interviews, which allow people with epilepsy to recognise subjective seizure “warning signs”. The aim of the panel is to present findings already recognised by the scientific and academic community, and to go a step further by showing the necessity of a paradigm shift capable of improving the understanding and treatment of neurological conditions and neurodiversity.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season five of our podcast features presentations from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. In this episode we release one of our keynote talks, that of Professor Dan Zahavi. Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy, University of Copenhagen, Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford, and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research (CFS).   ABSTRACT: At its core, phenomenology is a philosophical endeavour. Given its distinctly philosophical nature, one might reasonably wonder whether it can offer anything of value to positive science. Can it at all inform empirical work? There can, however, be no doubt about the answer to these questions. For more than a century, phenomenology has provided crucial inputs to a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, including psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Within the last few decades, phenomenology has also been an important source of inspiration, not only for theoretical debates within qualitative research but also for ongoing research within the cognitive sciences. But what is the best way to practice, use and apply phenomenology in a non‐philosophical context? How deeply rooted in phenomenological philosophy must the empirical research be in order to qualify as phenomenological? How many of the core commitments of phenomenology must it accept? In my talk, I will discuss and assess some different answers to these questions.   BIO: Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy at University of Copenhagen and University of Oxford, and director of the Center for Subjectivity Research in Copenhagen. In addition to a number of scholarly works on the phenomenology of Husserl, Zahavi has mainly written on the nature of selfhood, self-consciousness, intersubjectivity, and social cognition. His most important publications include Self-awareness and Alterity (1999), Husserl’s Phenomenology (2003), Subjectivity and Selfhood (2005), The Phenomenological Mind (together with Shaun Gallagher) (2008/2012), Self and Other (2014), Husserl’s Legacy (2017), and Phenomenology: The Basics (2019). Zahavi also serves as the co-editor in chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/  

Welcome back to the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast. Season five features presentations from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. We begin, however, with an interview given by Professor Luna Dolezal, the host of the event. Dolezal is associate professor in Philosophy and Medical Humanities in the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. The interview was recorded in August of this year, and first released to conference attendees. The interviewers are Jessie Stanier and Hannah Berry from the event team.   In the interview Dolezal talks about what the theme of ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ means to her, as well as how she got into phenomenology and her research interests, her love of yoga, and how phenomenology can inform activism. Performance artist Marina Abramović also gets a look in.   BIOS:    Professor Luna Dolezal is associate professor in philosophy and medical humanities, the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, University of Exeter. Her research is primarily in the areas of applied phenomenology, philosophy of embodiment, philosophy of medicine and medical humanities; and is driven by an interest in understanding lived experience and embodiment, and how these intersect with, are co-determined by, the socio-political and technological frameworks in which we are enmeshed. Her publications include the books New Feminist Perspectives on Embodiment (with C. Fischer); Body / Self / Other: the Phenomenology of Social Encounters (with D. Petherbridge); and The Body and Shame Phenomenology, Feminism, and the Socially Shaped Body.   Jessie Stanier is a PhD student at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. She takes an engaged approach to her transdisciplinary research on phenomenology, ageing, and older age, collaborating with publics affected by the lived realities of ageing and caring. In her PhD thesis, she aims to shed new light on normative determinants of ageing and how they affect lived experiences and possibilities for older people. She is co-supervised by Dr Robin Durie, Dr Felicity Thomas, and Prof Luna Dolezal. She completed her MA in Philosophy at KU Leuven, Belgium, in 2018.   Hannah Berry has recently completed her Ph.D. on a linguistic and phenomenological analysis of empathy. She has had a lectureship at Liverpool Hope University in Sociolinguistics and has taught at various institutions such as the University of Liverpool and Manchester Metropolitan University. She is now working in the adult education sector.   This recording is taken from the BSP Annual Conference 2020 Online: 'Engaged Phenomenology'. Organised with the University of Exeter and sponsored by Egenis and the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health. BSP2020AC was held online this year due to global concerns about the Coronavirus pandemic. For the conference our speakers recorded videos, our keynotes presented live over Zoom, and we also recorded some interviews online as well. Podcast episodes from BSP2020AC are soundtracks of those videos where we and the presenters feel the audio works as a standalone: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/bsp-annual-conference-2020/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season Four of British Society for Phenomenology Podcast concludes with one of the keynotes from our 2019 Annual Conference. Keith Crome is Principal Lecturer in Philosophy, and Education Lead for the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University; as well as the BSP Impact Director.    ABSTRACT: While schooling is a serious business, and education requires discipline, we are often told by educationalists, and also by our students, to make learning fun. There is an obvious extrinsic justification for doing this. As John Dewey noted a century ago in Democracy and Education (1916), experience has shown that allowing pupils to play makes going to school a joy — or at least provides relief from the tedium and strain of regular school work — and management less of a burden. Nevertheless, the link between education and play, familiar to us all (who hasn’t learnt by playing?), is fundamental. The aim of this talk is to explore this connection and its implications for a radical conception of education. I will begin with the contention that the originary co-belonging of play and education has been obscured by the rise of homo faber and the animal laborans, and the attendant overpowering of homo ludens. I will argue that a failure to recognise this vitiates Dewey’s celebrated pragmatist account of education. I will attempt to suggest that it is possible to think beyond the horizon of Dewey’s work by following Eugen Fink in conceiving the phenomenon of play as a mode of activity irreducible to either praxis and poiesis. Such a conception permits us to return to and rethink the originary correspondence between education and play as it was recognised by the Ancient Greeks.   BIO: Dr Keith Crome is Principal Lecturer in Philosophy and Education Lead for the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. He served as President of the British Society for Phenomenology from 2014 - 2018, and is currently a member of the editorial collective of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology and Impact Director for the society. He has published widely on 20th century French Philosophy and he is the author of Lyotard and Greek Thought (Palgrave, 2004) and co-editor of The Lyotard Reader and Guide (Edinburgh University Press, 2006). His current research focuses on the history of character. He is working with the Cooperative College on a project examining the role that character plays in ideas and practices of cooperation.   The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season four of the BSP Podcast continues with a paper from Hannah Berry, University of Liverpool. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.   ABSTRACT: When considering and reflecting on language, do we empathise with the interlocutor by simulating thoughts, feelings and actions? Do we project ourselves into the narrator’s shoes via simulation? Does this, then, create a boundary between the listener’s understanding, the person’s actual experience and their communication of the experience?  This paper will steer away from traditional literary-linguistic themes of stylistic analysis and will approach interdisciplinary narratives from phenomenological descriptions of experience and empathy. Lay understanding of the term ‘empathy’ suggests that you “put yourself in someone else’s shoes” when considering another person’s experience. However, no-one else’s “shoes” fit in the same way and this creates a border between narratives. The traditional approach to empathy in narrative is an analytic simulation theory. An alternative to this approach, meanwhile, is Gallagher’s ‘empathy informed by narrative practice’ (2012). I argue that this theory is also problematic, and propose another alternative. I reject the concept of empathy as a fundamental part of human experience. Rather, understanding someone else’s experience involves an understanding that another person experiences in the same way that I do, that a ‘self’ has consciousness of an object. This description arises from the phenomenological reduction, but we need to be aware that anything other than this description is context, and so cannot be experienced by anyone else. Consequently, narratives are simultaneously borderless (as everyone fundamentally experiences in the same way), and with borders (that experience is isolating and cannot be shared in its entirety with anyone else through communication, regardless of context). To understand a narrative is to negotiate this dichotomy. I will apply a phenomenological understanding of interpersonal experience onto a narrative from a recent court case in order to argue the instability of the lay understanding of empathy as well as the debatable application in a judicial context.   BIO: Hannah has recently submitted her Ph.D. thesis ‘The shoe never fits: a phenomenological rejection of the lay concept of empathy’ and is currently working on interdisciplinary applications of phenomenological methodology and lectures in the English department at the University of Liverpool.   The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

The BSP Podcast turns to a paper from Francesca Brencio, University of Seville, Spain. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.   ABSTRACT: Phenomenology has recently contributed to illuminate medicine and in setting up different theoretical frameworks. The scope of applying phenomenology to healthcare is not to select symptoms in view of a nosographical diagnosis, rather is to recover the underlying characteristic modification that keeps the manifold of phenomena meaningfully interconnected in the life-world of the person. This contribution intends to show how the phenomenological method applied to psychiatry implies a new understanding of psychopathological phenomena, conceived as a coherent way of being in the world, and its peculiarities lie in recovering the underlying characteristic modification that keeps the manifold of phenomena meaningfully interconnected in the life-world of the person, in describing and understanding the inner experience of a human being, of its suffering and also the limitation of its freedom. In doing so, what is required is a radical move away from an “objective” body-orientated psychiatry which is grounded on the idea of fixing something broken instead of understanding why existence itself can collapse and loose its meanings. Advances in philosophy and neuroscience have suggested that mental symptoms are not ‘things’, rather they have a wider, deeper, personal, and cultural sense and a fluidity that may not be reduced to the taxonomy used in relation to the organic dimensions of disorders. Patient’s existence (as well as clinicians’ one) is embodied (physically) and embedded (socially and culturally) and psychopathological phenomena are specific ways of this embodiment and embeddedness. This means that we cannot simply classify them as something that happen to an objective body, a purely physiological condition that is explainable entirely in causal or mechanistic terms. A phenomenologically-informed psychiatry can “fill the gap” between clinical meanings and existential ones and can overcome evidence-based approaches by finding a common language in which words can show relations and not merely signify objects.   BIO: Francesca Brencio (PhD) is Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Seville, and Member of the Phenomenology and Mental Health Network at the St Catherine’s College (University of Oxford). Her field of research is mainly related to Heidegger Studies, Hermeneutics, Phenomenology, Philosophy of Psychiatry and Philosophy of Religion. She has published in Italian, English, German and Spanish on a wide range of topics, in several collaborative book projects and philosophical and medical journals. She is one of the invited contributors to the The Oxford Handbook of Phenomenological Psychopathology (OUP, 2019).   The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season four of the BSP Podcast continues with a paper from William Large, University of Gloucestershire. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.   ABSTRACT: This paper offers a broad historical analysis of atheism and a new conceptual definition. It describes three kinds of atheism: atheism of being, atheism of the idea, and atheism of the word. The first is an atheism of a metaphysical order and science; the second an atheism of morality; and the third an atheism of the community and the word. Each atheism comes in an historical sequence but are conceptually distinct. In terms of the traditional divisions of philosophy, the first atheism is ontology, the second is ethical, and the third is aesthetic and political. This historical sequence is not a necessary one, but contingent, and because each atheism is conceptually distinct, they can emerge at any time. Cutting across this horizontal historical series of atheism, is a vertical distinction between essence and existence. Theism responds to atheism through the passion of religion which sets the next form in motion. When, philosophy says, ‘God is being’, religion responds, ‘God is a hidden’. If philosophy replies, ‘God is an idea’, then religion responds again, ‘faith is the passion of a life’. Only in the last form is the dialogue between philosophy and religion reversed. Religion says, ‘faith is the word’, but philosophy responds, ‘the word is spoken by no-one’. The last atheism has a political consequence. What binds a community without a word?   BIO: William Large is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham. He is the author of Maurice Blanchot [co-authored] (Routledge, 2001), Ethics and the Ambiguity of Writing: Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot (Clinamen, 2005), Heidegger’s Being and Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), Levinas ’Totality and Infinity: A Reader’s Guide (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), and numerous articles in continental philosophy. He was president of the British Society of Phenomenology from 2010-14.   The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Our podcast turns to a paper from Pablo Andreu, University of Zaragoza, Spain, and University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland.. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.   ABSTRACT: The following paper aims to open the reader to a comprehension of death from a phenomenological and hermeneutical point of view. Set against the background work of Max Scheler and Martini Heidegger’s analysis of the phenomenon, we adopt Paul Louis Landsberg’s interpretation of death as an “ontological infidelity”. Such definition of death deals with a fundamental and original predisposition to believe, which we recognize as faith. This faith, which stand as a complete openness to the other, is an essential constituent of human existence, without which we cannot understand Heidegger’s Angst. As such, we postulate that this faith is ontologically prior to Heidegger’s anxiety. As Landsberg says, “the anguish of death, and not only the pain of dying, would be incomprehensible of the fundamental structure of our being did not include the existential postulate of something beyond” (Landsberg, 2009, p. 25). We defend that by the braking of the connections entangled through this essential openness, the person is striped from the meaning of her existence and therefore thrown to a state of dead. This implies that there is no possible understanding of the phenomenon of death without a comprehension of our relation with and to the other. As a result, first, we aim to give a specific reading on the phenomenon of death, that is not to be confused with our mortal condition – so in Scheler and Heidegger – and, second, shed some light unto the actual medical debate concerning the state of being of patients in situations that cannot be clearly determined neither as alive nor dead.   BIO: Pablo Ilian Toso Andreu is a PhD Student at the University of Zaragoza, Spain, currently staying at University College Dublin (UCD) in Ireland. Mainly focused on phenomenology, and specifically the phenomenology of death, Mr. Andreu has also approached analytic philosophy through the Master’s program offered by the University of Barcelona.   The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Our podcast turns to a paper from Marco Di Feo, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University of Milan. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.   ABSTRACT: All people, to the extent that they wish, have the right to be fully integrated into the social world in which they live, regardless of their institutional status (citizen, immigrant, refugee, etc.). The integration is a very complex process, which includes at least three essential levels of the social life: the community one, that is, the level of interpersonal bonds (i.e. sentimental, friendship, etc.); the territorial one, that is, the level of social interactions (i.e those that depend on a social role, or a profession, etc.); and the political one, that is, the possibility of taking part in the collective political life (expressing opinions, voting, etc.). The phenomenological analysis of the essential forms of social interaction shows the peculiarity of each different level of integration. The crucial point on which I intend to pay attention is the following: each democratic country that welcomes an immigrant must create the conditions for her/his fully successful social integration. The hospitality of the immigrants is intrinsically connected to the duty of making them members of the society, at all three levels of the social life. I specifically intend to deal the theme of family reunifications within this conceptual horizon. Since family ties are the central nucleus of the community weaving, and since every person has the right to live in relation to her own reference community context, then the family reunification must be considered an inalienable right of every person who is welcomed in a new country. This right cannot be subordinated to any other type of evaluation, of economic, bureaucratic or political nature, because it is a human right. Only by guaranteeing a family context of belonging, institutions can avoid situations of social degradation, which are linked to conditions of loneliness and social isolation.   BIO: I was born in Milan, Italy, 46 years ago. Philosophy has always been my passion, but before dedicating myself to it, I felt the need to grow. I worked in a bank; then I changed radically my life, going to work in a social farm. Ten years ago I moved to Switzerland to work as social worker. During these years I achieved my degree with a thesis on the collective subjects from a phenomenological perspective. Actually I am working with young refugees and ending my second year of PhD. In my life path work and study are linked and grow together.   The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season four of the BSP Podcast continues with a paper from Botsa Katara, Durham University. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.   ABSTRACT: The term “super-crip” can be construed as a misleading twist on the derogatory term crippled. The latter signifies the dire condition of human frailty, limitations of embodiment, and a life without possibilities, while the latter is emblematic of overcoming those limitations to such a preposterous extent that not only demonises, and annihilates the experience of living with physical disabilities but also heralds an insidious discourse of superlative athletic vigour, and prowess. This paper aims to demonstrate that to reduce the body into a functional machinery which might be repaired and augmented is to disavow the intricate mechanisms of the body-mind connect that are orientated towards intentionality, affectivity, attunement, proprioception, and kinesthesis. Under the theoretical lens of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, Gallagher’s How the Body Shapes the Mind, and Carel’s Phenomenology of Illness, this paper shall analyse of the depiction of physical impairments in literary fiction, and memoirs. Following Carel’s conception of “epistemic injustice” it shall delineate the exigent need to incorporate felt experiences of disability in the wider cultural domain, thereby promulgating an informed and empathetic approach towards disability that adheres neither to the derogatory conception of the crippled nor the superhuman creation of the super-crip.   BIO: My name is Botsa Katara, second year PhD in English literature and Medical Humanities, from Durham University. My research focuses on the depiction of impaired movement in the literary works Beckett, Coetzee, and Kelmann. I am also looking at graphic memoirs, and life writings of amputees, and prosthetics that serve as counter narratives to the contemporary culture of the ‘super-crip’. I hold a Master’s degree in Modernity and Literature from the University of Edinburgh where my thesis focussed on identity conflict, desire, and domination in cancer patients. I have worked as a trainee at a prosthesis centre in New Delhi, India, where my work centered on closely observing young amputee rehabilitation.   The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/ The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Our podcast turns to a paper from Pablo Fernandez Velasco, Institut Jean Nicod, Département d’études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL; and University College London. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.   ABSTRACT: The present paper explores the phenomenology of disorientation and its relationship with self-consciousness. Section 1 discusses previous literature on the links between self-location and self-consciousness and proposes a distinction between minimal self-location (which requires only an ego-centric frame of reference) and integrated self-location (which requires the integration of egocentric and allocentric frames of reference). The double aim of the paper is, on the one hand, to use this distinction (between minimal and integrated self-location) to deepen our understanding of spatial disorientation and, on the other, to use the phenomenology of disorientation to elucidate the role that self-location plays in shaping self-consciousness. Section 2 starts by looking at the experience of being “turned around”, which is a common experience of disorientation, and then expands to disorientation episodes related to the other two egocentric axes: experiences of being “left-right reversed”, and of being “turned upside-down”. This leads to the conclusion that integrated self-location is transmodal and depends on all three egocentric axes, and that disorientation destabilizes this integrated self-location. Section 3 explores a corpus of reports of disorientation episodes and highlights four key characteristics of these experiences (anxiety, vulnerability, confusion and diminishment) and their links to self-consciousness, focusing on the transformations in both the lived body and the experience of space. This phenomenological analysis reveals that during disorientation, the body-space shrinks, and the horizon of experience becomes more uncertain, leading to anxiety and a feeling of unfamiliarity. The central thesis of this paper is that during disorientation a destabilization of integrated self-location results in a diminished form of self-consciousness. Section 4 concludes with a summary of the key points of the paper and points to future directions of research.   BIO: The central aim of my current research is to explore the varieties and different dimensions of disorientation from the subjective side, in order to produce a characterisation of the phenomenon that is compatible with both empirical data and data about the subjective experience of disorientation, and to use disorientation as a vantage point to understand some of the complexities of spatial cognition and of the human mind at large.   The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Season four of the BSP Podcast continues with a paper from Andreas Sandner, Department of Philosophy at University of Koblenz-Landau. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.   ABSTRACT: It is widely held in analytic philosophy of mind and cognition that olfactory perception – first and foremost – represents odours if it represents anything at all. Despite some controversies on the very nature of those odours we encounter in olfactory perceptual experience, the vast majority of today’s philosophers hold that the intentional objects of olfactory perception are the odorous emanations of so-called source objects – ordinary concrete things. So, broadly speaking, most discussants account for some version of the principle of ‘olfactory austerity’: When we smell we perceive nothing but odours, and never do we (directly) smell particular objects. After depicting the main reasons for adopting such a view especially within a chiefly representationalist framework, I will examine one of the alleged benefits a bit more carefully. Namely I will address the anti-visuocentricism in austere theories of olfactory objects. It has been argued frequently that the view of olfactory austerity reveals our visuocentric biases and guides us to overcome them in theorising perception. In short, the idea goes pretty much as follows: Those who think that we could smell ordinary objects in olfactory experience just like we can see these objects in visual experience simply disregard the missing aspects of objecthood in what is really smelled there, particularly the missing spatial structure. To attribute such aspects to pure olfactory experience then would mean to fall for the supremacy of vision and to only infer the particular source object by the smelled odour from memory or recollection. The main goal of my talk will come down to contrasting the so reproached visuocentricism of a source-object-theory of olfactory objects with the visuocentricism within the view of olfactory austerity itself, as it is still at work at the very core of this approach in that the criteria of ‘objecthood’ are obviously stipulated by means of the ordinary objects in visual perception. What is at stake in this comparison is to extrapolate visuocentricism as a crucial structure of perceptual consciousness – at least for the sighted – and hence accounting for the supremacy of vision as a fact instead of a fallacious bias.   BIO: From 2007 to 2015 I studied philosophy, sociology and communication science at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. I received a bachelor's degree in 2011 with a thesis on the theory of causes in Plato's Phaedo and a master's degree in 2015 with a thesis on Kant's criticism of Berkeley's immaterialism. Since 2016 I have been a research assistant at the Institute of Philosophy in Landau where I hold seminars and am writing a dissertation on the phenomenology of olfactory perception. In this context, I also organized a small international conference on perception and the senses in continental and analytic philosophy last year.   The ‘British Society for Phenomenology Annual Conference 2019 – the Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’ was held at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK, 5 – 7 September, 2019: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference/   You can check out our forthcoming events here: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/events/   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/