BSP Podcast

Christopher Eagle – Brain Stories: On the Limits of Neuro-Fiction

Here is the second of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 workshop 'Embodied Subjects: Phenomenology, Literature, and the Health Humanities'. Dr Christopher Eagle is Senior Lecturer in Health Humanities, Emory University in the Druid Hills neighbourhood of the city of Atlanta, Georgia, United States. His paper is titled ‘Brain Stories: On the Limits of Neuro-Fiction’. The workshop took place in Manchester, UK, during the summer of 2018, and gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners to discuss the significance of embodiment for the health humanities. More information about the workshop can be found at:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/embodied-subjects-workshop/

 

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/

Raymond Tallis - The Embodied Subject and Objects in the Weighty sense

This is a recording of a paper given from our 2018 workshop on the title 'Embodied Subjects: Phenomenology, Literature, and the Health Humanities'. This workshop gathered philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners to discuss the significance of embodiment for the health humanities. More information about the workshop can be found at:

https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/embodied-subjects-workshop/

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.

Jack Lovell Price - Max Scheler, Critic of Phenomenology

This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk

A careful reading and interpretation of Max Scheler’s work highlights a thinker concerned with the diversity and multiplicity of human life. As a vehement critic of reductionism, determinism and the focus of phenomenology on the individual subject, Scheler offers trenchant insights and arguments which retain their power today.

This paper begins by outlining Scheler’s conception of the human being, highlighting its distinction from a classical Husserlian model. For Scheler, it is wrong to conceive of the mind as reason alone. Instead, he offers a broadly tripartite division of mind into the drives and instincts common to the lowest forms of life, habitual and adaptive intelligent behaviours developed by higher animals, and finally self-reflective, rational spirit as the specifically human achievement. Perceptions, and especially intentions, operate on a pre-rational level. Pure experience, free of intentionality and interpretation, is therefore impossible: meanings are hardwired into any conscious experience and any attempt to bracket them away will fail.

Sympathy likewise works at a pre-rational level; it is, for Scheler, the means through which we come to know ourselves. We recognise the other as an individual, and it is through our interaction with them (in particular, through love) that we come to be an individual ourselves. ‘Our’ world is therefore not our own. It is given form and substance by our social–cultural environment and the interactions we have with others. The problem of other minds, which so plagued Husserl, is thereby dissolved. We have, for Scheler, simply got it the wrong way around.

Evaluating Scheler’s arguments, I conclude that it is important not only to see Scheler as a contributor to the grand phenomenological tradition, but to appreciate his role as an original and insightful critic of that tradition, with much to contribute to current problems.

Marek Pokropski: Practicing Phenomenology in Cognitive Sciences: Toward Theoretical Integration with Mechanism

This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk

Phenomenology entered the field of cognitive sciences in the early 90s of the 20th century (Varela 1993). Since then, several proposals for introducing phenomenology to the cognitive sciences have been produced e.g. front-loaded phenomenology (Gallagher 2003), formalization of phenomenological description (Marbach 2010), neurophenomenology (Lutz & Thompson 2003). In my paper, I would like to propose another approach, namely non-reductive theoretical integration with mechanistic explanations.

Mechanistic explanations are applied widely in life sciences especially in biology (e.g. Craver & Derden 2013). However, in recent years there have been attempts at introducing mechanistic thought to cognitive sciences (e.g. Bechtel 2008, Craver 2007) including an attempt to mechanistically explain consciousness (e.g. Oizumi et al. 2014). I will argue that this attempt is doomed to failure due to its phenomenological naivety. However, it can be improved by incorporating a phenomenological approach.

In my paper, firstly, I will discuss the background of practicing phenomenology in the cognitive sciences. Secondly, I will characterize mechanistic explanations and show why the mechanistic naturalization of consciousness will fail if it refuses to incorporate phenomenology. Then, in order to prove that phenomenology can be integrated with mechanistic explanations, I will argue for a new reading of Husserlian phenomenology, namely that it can be read as a kind of functionalism. The main objective of Husserlian phenomenology was to give adequate descriptions of the functions of consciousness. Furthermore, phenomenologically described functions of consciousness are congruent to some extent with a mechanistic approach - they are autonomous, multi-level, and decomposable. Finally, I will argue that phenomenological practice can be inspiring and deliver explananda to researchers working on mechanistic explanation of consciousness.

Mike Martin - The Application of Phenomenology to Explore Pre-Service Teachers Experience of Placement in School

This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk

This paper reports on the practical application of phenomenology in exploring the experience of pre-service teachers during their school placement as part of their course of teacher education. Whilst there has been much written about teacher education as a whole, there is relatively little research focused specifically on the experience of pre-service teachers as they work through their time in school. For this study, individual interviews were carried out with eleven participants on three separate occasions as part of doctoral work into the development of their subject knowledge. The paper will begin with an overview of the context of school experience where individuals enter new environments, developing relationships with staff and pupils, get to grips with unfamiliar systems and routines as well as acquiring new knowle dge about their subject(s). The paper will then critique some of the existing ways of looking at placement such as community of practice, activity theory and social constructivism that all frame the experience within relatively pre-determined structures. This paper then highlights the value of phenomenology in bringing new insights about what takes place, and the experience of the individuals. It will also discuss the importance of making appropriate choices, based on value judgments about which phenomenological traditions and perspectives might prove fruitful. One of the most significant challenges for the study was in making choices about the processes of data explication given the various traditions within phenomenology and the significant figures such as Husserl and Heidegger who have come to represent seemingly different approaches. For researchers new to phenomenology it is necessary to develop a full understanding of this and the paper will highlight some of the challenges met. Finally the findings of the research study will be presented and ideas for further study discussed.

 

Jeffrey McCurry - The Therapy of Putting Essences Back Into Existence: Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, and Phenomenology as a Way of Life

This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk

Phenomenology is often taken as a philosophy involving knowledge or representation of experience: a reflective, descriptive, scientific logos about structures of phenomena. But what if phenomenological discourse, just as such, could also be applied to life as a kind of ethics? What if phenomenology can be a hortatory discourse inviting us into a certain way of life?

For the reflective meaning of phenomenology presupposes a more concrete meaning signifying a form of lived experience itself: a phenomenon with a certain logos or form to it, within it, and as it, which can go on to be represented as knowledge. Here phenomenology is fundamentally and firstly a way of life: life is phenomenological when it goes in a certain way that flows from, stays with, and lives into the natural grain of spontaneous, immediate, embodied experience.

If life can be phenomenological, however, life can also not be. Life with the grain of experience can be dangerous and difficult, so human life rebels against it with a gamut of theoretical and practical fantasies that are all versions of “metaphysics.” Life with metaphysics is self-contradictory, is inauthentic, and vitiates experience, but it promises us simulacra of safety in purporting to distance us from the threats and challenges we fear in the plane of experience.

Hence phenomenology needs to be seen not only as descriptive but also as evocative of a way of being human. Through meditating on Wittgenstein’s notion of philosophy as “therapy” and Merleau-Ponty’s idea that phenomenology means “putting essences back into existence,” I hope to show how phenomenology can be much more than knowledge. Engaging Wittgentsein and Merleau-Ponty helps us see phenomenology as a therapeutic, evocative discourse, an art of living, an ethics, meant to reconnect us with phenomenological life—meant to invite us into phenomenology as a way of life.

Rachel Coventry: Are the sunglasses a metaphor? Some Heideggerian Considerations of the Essence of Sunglasses

This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk

In The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger moves from the example of van Gogh’s painting of the peasant’s shoes to Meyer’s poem Roman Fountain. We are told that the painting is not merely a faithful representation of something present at hand but rather it reproduces the shoes in their essence. Next, Heidegger considers Meyer’s poem. He points out that although the poem is a fairly straightforward poetic description, it is not “a reproduction of the general essence of the Roman fountain.” It would seem that, in the poem, truth is set to work symbolically or metaphorically. However, for Heidegger, great poetry cannot be considered metaphoric because it transcends the sensuous/nonsensous dichotomy at the heart of Western metaphysics. Instead, we must say that the fountain in the poem ‘things’ or opens up the fourfold in a way that is different to the peasants shoes. Heidegger claims that in the technological age truth withdraws or things stop ‘thinging.’ Despite this, a good deal of contemporary poetry is preoccupied with things as metaphors, perhaps demonstrating Heidegger’s thesis that in the technological age the possibility of great art is threatened. This paper will show how Heidegger’s account can bring us towards a new understanding of contemporary poetry. This is worked out in terms of a pair of sunglasses as an example of a ‘thingless’ consumer object. If Heidegger’s account of technology warrants serious consideration, the question becomes do such objects have essences and if not how are contemporary poets to respond to them? The paper will consider the poem american sunglasses by Sam Riviere. It can be argued that sunglasses are enframed in the poem as there are no other options are open to the poet. In other words, what is the role of the poet in a time where essences withdraw?

Maria Jimena Clavel Vazquez - Naturalizing Heidegger (Against his Will)

This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk

The question regarding the pertinence of using Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein as a guide for empirical research arises from contemporary attempts to bring Heideggerian phenomenology and cognitive science together. I will focus on one of the main figures behind these attempts, Hubert Dreyfus. I will start by showing that Dreyfus argues in favour of the idea that Heideggerian phenomenology can be naturalized and made continuous with scientific research on the basis of two implicit premises: (a) the interpretation of the analytic of Dasein as a regional ontology; and (b) an account of the relation between phenomenology and science as a relation that holds between two disciplines of the same kind, but that stand at different levels. The aim of this paper is to show that it is not possible to defend these premises on Heideggerian grounds. I will do so by analysing Heidegger’s considerations regarding anthropology, psychology, and biology, and their difference with the analytic of Dasein. I will argue that the main difference can be found in Heidegger’s definition of phenomenological concepts (i.e. formal indications). Finally, I will argue that, although Dreyfus fails to take into account the nature of phenomenological concepts as a relevant methodological matter, his project of naturalization raises a valid concern regarding the possibility of taking Heidegger’s ontology back to a relation with the ontic sciences.

Pasi Heikkurinen: Ecophenomenosophy - A Response to the Anthropocene

This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk

 

According to Earth sciences, the planet has entered a new geological epoch. This epoch, referred to as the Anthropocene, is characterised by a significant human impact on nature and its processes. While humans have not equally contributed to the destruction of the non-human world, the dominance of this species calls for questioning the contemporary human condition. What is (now) wrong with ‘us’? The on-going widespread damage caused to the natural world, including the humankind, dates back (at least) to Industrial Revolution. The 19^th century transition to new manufacturing processes and its existential relevance is well captured in Heidegger’s critique of technology. Heidegger notes that, in its essence, modern technology is a mode of revealing (Gestell) that takes humans further away from being itself. Albeit successful in challenging the technological frame of the modern human, classic phenomenology, however, does not provide tangible alternatives to think about being in also ecological terms. This paper argues that in order to respond to the undesired anthropogenic changes in the Earth’s biosphere – e.g. rising greenhouse gas levels, ocean acidification, deforestation and biodiversity deterioration – phenomenology needs to go ‘green’. In the Anthropocene, investigations on the human condition cannot be separated from (the question of) nature and its non-human processes. Dasein is not only connected to nature but also embedded in it, as well as unfolding from it. In this paper, I will conjoin elements of (mainly late) Heidegger’s phenomenology with some key tenets of ecophilosophical thinking to reconsider the human place vis-à-vis the rest of nature. As a response to the problems of the Anthropocene, I will outline an ‘ecophenomenosophy’ that rejects human–nature dualism, challenges the idea of progress, and calls for a non-anthropocentric approach to phenomena in the age of humans.

Aoife McInerney - Practical Thinking

This is one of the papers from our 2017 Annual Conference, the Future of Phenomenology. Information and the full conference booklet can be found at www.britishphenomenology.org.uk

One understanding of the division between ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ implies a gap between the spheres of thinking and acting that needs bridging. At the core of the matter lies a standoff between the contingency of acting and the enduring nature of thinking. However, this dichotomy conceals the interdependent nature of theory and practice in which thinking itself is an activity and manifests itself in the world through the inter-action of human beings.

No philosopher dissolves this gap between theory and practice as convincingly as Hannah Arendt in her reflections on both the vita activa and ‘the life of the mind’. By way of phenomenological method, Arendt reveals how engaged action opens a space for appearances and encounters, making the political domain her main phenomenological concern. However, this is not a critique of theory for the sake of it. Arendt also champions a way of thinking, specifically practical thinking, which is intricately connected to the political. Such thinking informs and culminates in worldly action and is concerned with phenomenality. The real issue, then, is not the division between theory and practice, but rather their more nuanced collocation.

After examining such a collocation, this paper will analyze how Arendt’s practical thinking is concretized in the idea of solidarity. Solidarity deals with the abstract values of human rights, while also entailing an essentially performative element. Arendt shows how essential it is to the integrity of this principle for there to be a political interaction. This paper aims to capture Arendt’s phenomenological insights into the interdependent nature of thinking and acting. I contend that an Arendtian account of solidarity allows us to move concretely beyond the seeming opposition between theory and practice, by showing how she argues that there is something wrong with the very framework of ‘applying theory in practice’.