BSP Podcast

Matthew Kruger-Ross - What can Heidegger teach us? After the Black Notebooks

This episode of our podcast is a paper from Matthew Kruger-Ross (West Chester University of Pennsylvania). This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.

 

ABSTRACT: Martin Heidegger, a remarkable philosopher who turned phenomenology upside down, was also a committed teacher for almost six decades. An extended reflection on teaching as a manner and way of inspiring further philosophical reflection remains an unattended narrative within philosophical scholarship. To be sure, in addition to our treatises and manuscripts, our livelihood as philosophers depend on our ability to inspire future philosophers via our lectures and pedagogical conversations and relations in our professional capacities as teachers. How often do we allow others to explore our innermost thoughts and planning document as we craft our thinking and teaching? The Schwarze Hefte provide a unique portal into Heidegger the teacher between 1931 and 1943, based on the existing published notebooks into English. Heidegger’s reflections on education, teaching, learning, students, and instruction are chronicled in this proposed manuscript devoted to extending existing scholarships into Heidegger and the philosophical study of education. Such work promises to extend existing analyses relevant to Heidegger’s thinking of meditative thinking (as a contrast to calculative thinking), historiological ways of thinking and philosophizing, and the role of education in learning to think. Who is the “elementary school teacher” that Heidegger references so often in the Notebooks to provide a counterweight to his philosophical arguments related to thinking? This presentation and paper propose to address this exact gap in the conversation surrounding Heidegger and teaching, learning, and education, broadly considered.

 

‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Other papers presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference have been reworked and published as essays in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/

 

The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Gülben Salman - From Pseudos to Falsum: Heidegger on Truth

We continue season four of the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast with a paper from Gülben Salman (Ankara University). This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.

 

ABSTRACT: Following the period when the first Black Notebooks were written (1931-1941), Heidegger delivers a class on Parmenides and Heraclitus at the University of Freiburg (1942-1943). The lecture notes of this class were later published under the title Parmenides. In his Black Notebooks one can see that he had been contemplating common concepts like beginning, truth, concealment/unconcealment, mythos/logos, oblivion, science, etc. It seems rewarding to consider as complementary his lecture notes on Parmenides and his Ponderings in order to understand thoroughly the question of the history of being. It is important because he claims that “philosophy creates the concealment” and tries to “keep itself hard to the wind of its own storm”. This is visible in the class of 1942, when Heidegger makes a distinction between pseudos and its misleading Roman translation as falsum. For him, these are two different ways of understanding what does not belong to the realm of truth. He later indicates that the polis is the realm of aletheia/pseudos, while on the other hand the veritas/falsum distinction is a part of a Roman imperial mindset. This presentation will elaborate Heidegger’s ideas about the Greek and Roman way of thinking “wrong” in accordance with his Ponderings. There is a change in the essence of truth, and this can be made visible in the order of the polis and the imperial organization of the Roman political milieu as res publica. Heidegger is quite interested in the confrontation with antiquity, “the beginning” in a different nuance than its modern version. This chasm clarifies the transformation in the History of Being. 

 

‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Other papers presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference have been reworked and published as essays in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/

 

The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Niall Keane - The World as Natural or Abysmal? The Threat of Naturalism and the History of Beyng

Season four of the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast continues with a paper from Niall Keane. This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.

 

ABSTRACT: This paper will trace the theme of the naturalisation of the world from Heidegger’s early lectures up until and including the Black Notebooks. It will take the theme of Heidegger’s critique of the naturalization of the world as its starting point and show how the problem of naturalism and its forgetting of the phenomenon of the world is a guiding thread when it comes to understanding the intensification of the same critique in his later analysis of the darkening of the world as the increasingly impeded ability to interrogate the question of the history of beyng.

 

‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Other papers presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference have been reworked and published as essays in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/

 

The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Babette Babich - Heidegger on Nietzsche’s ‘Rediscovery’ of the Greeks: Machenschaft and Seynsgeschichte in the Black Notebooks

We continue season four of the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast with a keynote presentation from Babette Babich (Fordham University and University of Winchester). This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.

 

ABSTRACT: One of the outcomes of the publication of the Black Notebooks has been to invite scholars to rethink their understanding of Heidegger’s thinking, including what is named Heidegger’s ‘world-historical anti-Semitism’, his relation to war and politics, via Schmitt and Jünger, as well as Heidegger’s thinking on machination/motorisation/calculation. Other possibilities include the university (education) in addition to Heidegger’s anxieties regarding the reception of Being and Time in the framework of the history of Beyng/Seyn. Echoing Heidegger’s lecture courses, we read that Nietzsche adumbrates “the end of metaphysics” yet remains nonetheless entangled in metaphysics. Heidegger’s reflections on the beginning of Western thought with Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides are matched here with his insistence that it is a “fable that Nietzsche rediscovered ‘pre-Platonic philosophy’”, destined one day “to be revealed in all its fabulosity [Fabelhaftigkeit]”. For Heidegger, “Nietzsche thinks purely in the Roman way” whereby Nietzsche’s “own metaphysics could never grasp the Greek beginning of Western thinking”. Inasmuch as Nietzsche “plays out the essence of being to a combat of power positions and power relations”, as Heidegger invokes typically bellicose interpretations of will to power, this powerplay consummates the “abandonment of beings by being, the abandonment that gained sovereignty in the history of metaphysics”. Given the contrast between historiology and history in Nietzsche’s meditation on history (apt and inapt) for life, as this bears on Machenschaft and the whole of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Heidegger’s opposition to Nietzsche’s putative ‘re-discovery of Pre-platonic philosophy’ yields a further question: “in what single sense is Nietzsche a transition, i.e., a preparation for another beginning of the history of beyng?”

 

‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Babich’s paper, as well as others presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference, has been reworked and published as an essay in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/

 

The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Ullrich Haase - How can the Black Notebooks Enlighten us about the Question for the History of Being?

Welcome back to the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast. We kick off season four with recordings from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019). This conference was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’. To begin, here is the opening paper from Ullrich Haase, who was editor of the journal from 2005 to 2019, standing down in the wake of this conference and the publication hitting its landmark year.

 

ABSTRACT: This talk will introduce a broad array of questions arising from Heidegger’s turn towards the question for the history of being. While also introducing some of the strands of questioning that will arise in the other contributions to the conference, it will take its lead from the claim in the Call for Papers, namely that the works bound together by the title of the question for the history of being belong to the most promising that philosophy has to offer itself and that the shape of this thought can find a clearer definition in the Black Notebooks. The talk will thus try to give some preliminary answers as to what Heidegger has to say about four of the most pressing questions of our times, namely that for the destruction of the world through Global Warming, the question for the destruction of civil society in the movement of Globalization, about Nietzsche’s question of European Nihilism and, last but not least, about Merleau-Ponty’s Nightmare from which there is no awakening.

 

‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Haase’s paper, as well as others presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference, has been reworked and published as an essay in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/

 

The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/

Zeigam Azizov – Without Origins: Husserl’s ‘temporal objects’ in the light of nonessentialist thinking

Here is the last of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Zeigam Azizov’s paper is titled ‘Without Origins: Husserl’s “temporal objects” in the light of nonessentialist thinking’.

 

Abstract: “I will talk about Husserl’s initial search for the ‘essence’ in his earlier work and his realising the persistence of culture as a non-determinate entity towards the  latest period of his philosophical activities. In his lecture given at the Vienna Kulturbund in May 1935 Husserl spoke of “the crisis as a pathological sickness of which the dominant characteristic is a fall into passivity (Passivitat)”. In both cases Husserl wanted to find an answer to the question of the lost contact of people with the sense of their activities, of their mode of knowledge. 

 

By taking Husserl’s initial understanding of ‘a temporal object’ and his later critique of ‘passivity’   I would like to reactivate this question for the world of full of objects like ours. ‘Passivity’ of subjects inhabiting the “Lebenswelt” is connected to the world consisting of fuzzy objects. This is the reason why even without having no proper education of numbers and words anyone who is attracted to new media can learn how to become a hacker. It may be explained as in a sensual human activity-knowledge translated from the brain and extended to other senses.  The recognition of ‘a natural attitude’ in a particular reality takes place in this manner on the grounds of intersubjectivity. Objective idealities transcend s to subjects and potentially perceivable as without origins.

 

I claim that ‘re-activating’ of the lost contact is possible through the understanding of objects of the world as they are non-essential . Any object has a quality of the quasi-object and therefore in the state of fuzziness. In order to problematize  this inquiry further and to provide a novel understanding of Husserl’ work I will reflect on the theory of ‘fuzzy logic’ by the Azeri-American computer scientist Lotfi Zadeh and its development for my own understanding of non-essential existence of objects.”

 

The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/

Tingwen Li – What If We Exclude Ready-mades from the Artworld?

Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Tingwen Li is from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, and the paper is titled ‘What If We Exclude Ready-mades from the Artworld?’

 

Abstract: “Ready-mades had formed a significant challenge to the tradition of art. While analytic aestheticians have been devoted to solving the problem of ready-mades, phenomenological aesthetics had paid little attention to this issue before the 1990s. John Barnett Brough, an American Husserlian philosopher, is among the earliest phenomenologists who were to combat the question of ready-mades. In his early discussion, unlike most of the phenomenological aestheticians who attend to art through aesthetic experience, Brough’s concern is more with the “classificatory” sense of art by interpreting Dickie’s and Danto’s institutional formulations from the perspective of late Husserl’s “Cultural World,” claiming that “a work of art is an artifact created against the horizon of the artworld and presented to an artworld public for its contemplation.” However, in the work published three years later, Brough seemed to change his idea of the analytic approaches by pointing out what they have to sacrifice for accommodating ready-mades in the artworld: Dickie would have to make a difficult choice between the artifactuality of artworks and “unaided” ready-mades, whereas Danto would pay the full cost of losing the whole classic world of art, which is also argued by James Foster who contrasts Gadamer to Danto in terms of their justifications for modern works of art. As a result, Brough is about to save the artworld by abandoning the ready-mades, albeit there is also expense of excluding them: not only of becoming philosophically disreputable, but also of thrusting a potential risk onto the artworld that has already been. For one, it refers to how we tolerate, involve, or assimilate a subverted event that has already been admitted by a tradition. For another, it is related to the flaws of Husserl’s views of historical sedimentation upon which Brough builds his phenomenology of artworld.”

 

The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/

Tarjej Larsen – Husserl's Circularity Argument for the Epoché

Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Tarjej Larsen is from the University of Stavanger, Norway, and the paper is titled ‘Husserl's Circularity Argument for the Epoché’.

 

Abstract: “According to Husserl, epistemology is possible only as phenomenology. In my paper, I assess one of his arguments for a crucial part of the considerations he offers in support of this claim.  

Husserl takes the central problem of epistemology to be “the problem of transcendence”, or the problem of the possibility of transcendent cognition – very roughly, justified judgements about objects that do not form part of the judging subject’s consciousness. And he argues that any form of cognition by means of which this problem – and, by extension, any other genuine epistemological problem – can be solved must satisfy a number of methodological requirements, which, he maintains, only phenomenological cognition satisfies.  

 

Chief among these is that any attempt to solve the problem of transcendence must involve the performance of an “epistemological epoché”, by which Husserl means a general refraining from making cognitive use of transcendent cognition. He offers different arguments for this requirement, the arguably most important of which is that attempting to solve the problem of the possibility of transcendent cognition by means of transcendent cognition would be viciously circular.  

 

Despite its significance for Husserlian metaepistemology, this argument has not really been assessed by commentators, who, to the extent that they have considered it, have tended merely to reiterate it. Seeking to remedy this, I claim that there is strong reason to believe that the argument fails.  

Acknowledging that employing transcendent cognition to solve the problem of transcendence would be circular, I argue that it’s far from clear that it would be viciously so, if account is taken of the fact that, as Husserl insists, the problem at issue is how transcendent cognition is possible, not whether it is possible. I end by briefly considering the consequences that the failure of the circularity argument would hold for Husserl’s conception of epistemology.”

 

The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/

Rona Cohen – “Taking Flesh” in Heidegger: On Dasein’s Bodying Forth

Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Rona Cohen is from Tel-Aviv University, and the paper is titled ‘“Taking Flesh” in Heidegger: On Dasein’s Bodying Forth’.

 

Abstract: “In discussing the phenomenology of the body in the Zollikon seminars, Heidegger draws a distinction between the spatiality of Dasein and its body. According to Heidegger, Dasein is not spatial because it is embodied. Rather, “its bodiliness is possible only because Dasein is spatial”. Here, Heidegger puts into service the distinction between spatiality and embodiment to draw a distinction between the ontological and the ontic: the spatiality of Dasein is prior to Dasein’s embodiment, which is to say, Dasein is ontologically spatial and ontically embodied. In another of the Zollikon seminars, Heidegger addresses the phenomenology of the body by invoking Husserl’s distinction between Korper [“the corporeal thing”] and Leib [“the body”]. However, Heidegger gives this distinction a spatial interpretation. He claims that the corporeal thing stops with the skin, nevertheless noting that, “phenomenologically, Dasein always exceeds the corporeal limit […] when pointing with my finger toward the crossbar of the window over there, I [as body] do not end at my fingertips”. According to Heidegger, the bodily phenomenological limit extends beyond the corporeal spatial limit. Owing to this, he explains, the two “limits” do not coincide. How, then, is this argument compatible with Heidegger’s former claim that Dasein’s spatiality is its mode of being and the body is “ontic”? In this lecture, I present this dilemma in Heidegger’s text vis-à-vis Merleau-Ponty’s distinction between body and flesh in The Visible and Invisible. I suggest that Heidegger’s (little-known) notion of bodying forth [Leiben] introduced in this seminar could supply a solution to this dilemma.”

 

The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/

Rhoda Ellis – Being, the Gallery and Virtual Reality: An Artist’s Take on Building

Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Rhoda Ellis’ paper is titled ‘Being, the Gallery and Virtual Reality: An Artist’s Take on Building Immersive Artworks’.

 

Abstract: “Dreyfus was right when he told computer scientists they were wrong during the first wave of virtual reality (VR). While technology companies continue to turn to cold, hard, objective, neuroscience to ‘trick’ the body into a sense of immersion, the recent resurgence of VR has also seen a wider acknowledgment of the body and the increased prevalence of phenomenology in discussions about VR. We may no longer be dreaming that extropian dream in quite the same way anymore, but we’re making artworks in and for virtual reality with a-whole-new approach.

 

Through practice-led research into the making, and recreating, of sculptural artworks, I have found it more meaningful to draw on the aesthetic tradition and art theory – from Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty and Benjamin, up to contemporary thinkers like Noë and Paterson. As a sculptor I work in 3D space, rather than as a 2D image maker, and have found aesthetics that relies too heavily on the visual has left me questioning. Here I focus on two of my artworks that were made with movement, touch and atmosphere very much in mind. Both were designed to be experienced in an art gallery setting, within all the traditions that entails, by interacting via the HTC Vive headset and moving within the artwork at life-scale. The mixed reality piece Being-in-the-Gallery explored embodiment of the immersive experience and the aura of the virtual art object – with the viewer-participant invited to touch an original sculpture while seeing it veiled in a virtual copy. In Virtual Halls I was commissioned to remake an artwork by the late video artist David Hall in VR, leading to questions of authenticity in the methodology, preservation and experience. The line of my argument shows the passage of my engagement with a number of philosophers and how they continue to influence my practise.”

 

The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/about/