BSP Podcast

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a presentation from Martin Ritter

 

Abstract:

From the perspective of the past, the future is now: tomorrow never comes – it is already here. Walter Benjamin draws attention to this fact and his late, politically engaged thought strives to do justice to it. In contrast to prevailing traditions of revolutionary theories oriented predominantly on the future (i.e. on changing the world for the sake of the future better one), Benjamin puts emphasis on human relation to the past. Whereas Heidegger identifies the forgetfulness of being as the source of our misery, Benjamin is worried about our forgetfulness of the barbaric side of the tradition we live in: about the suffering it was, and still is, built on. The past, with its suppressed hopes, is not simply gone: it reaches for the present, or, as Benjamin himself puts it, it “has a claim” on us. It is in this (uncomfortable) sense that, as Husserl would have it, both the future and the past are “parts” of the present. And we need to do justice to this experience not (only) out of respect for past generations but (primarily) because without our doing so everything threatens to remain the same, or as it has – traditionally – been. In other words, we are – and need to be – responsive to and responsible for the past not (only) for the sake of the past itself but for the future’s sake, or simply for the sake of the present. It is our relation to the past which makes us sensible, according to Benjamin, to the future in the present, calling us to break through the tradition and to reconstruct, or reimagine, its different future. This way, we save the future, not as something which will happen, but as a possibility in the present.

 

Biography:

Martin Ritter is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. From 2007 to 2020, he taught continental philosophy at the Charles University in Prague. Currently, he realises a two-years research project at the University of Vienna (http://oskf.flu.cas.cz/technology-as-medium). Martin specializes in phenomenology and critical theory. He edited (and translated) three volumes of the Czech Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin. Recently, he has published two monographs: To liberate the future by an act of cognition. Walter Benjamin's theory of truth; Filosofia 2018, in Czech), and Into the World. The Movement of Patočka’s Phenomenology (Springer 2019).

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.

 

About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/

 

About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a presentation from Alexandra S. Ilieva

 

 

Abstract:

If taking “the future as a present concern” is to generate tangible effects regarding our responsibilities towards the future— in light of the ecological and humanitarian crises facing the world today—it warrants utopian thinking. Such a claim emerges when we bring together the distinct socio-historical-cultural perspectives of the Madhyamaka school of Buddhism and the Pragmatist Richard Rorty. Despite their temporal distance, both share pragmatically-oriented dialectical styles and complementary utopian visions—whether they be Rorty’s liberal utopia or the Buddhist soteriological aspiration to eliminate the suffering of all sentient beings—which together reveal that discussions of ‘the future’ are only relevant in their pragmatic relation to our specific economic and political goals and humanitarian visions for the future. Indeed, Buddhism is often accused of being world-renouncing, yet the Madhyamaka provide a useful example of how a utopian vision, even if “otherworldly”, can provide an ethically rigorous framework that can guide us to make changes in the here and now. It also suggests that discussions of the future and its relation to the present need not be underpinned by a linear model of time, as the Buddhist belief in the cyclical existence of the material world does not preclude them from offering a distinct utopian vision with direct, pragmatic implications for our present conduct. Indeed, on these intercultural planes, what emerges is that “the future is a present concern” means nothing more than “there are pragmatic steps we can take to get closer to the goal of eliminating cruelty and suffering across the globe”. The upshot of such an intercultural approach is that it can help guide discourse in both external (political, economic) directions, but also internal (ethical, spiritual) paths. How exactly to achieve this end is for further discussion, but I hope the present paper at least opens this conversational door.

 

Biography:

Alexandra is a final year PhD candidate at the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge. She received her BA from New York University in Philosophy and Psychology. Her MA '22 was in ‘Transcultural Studies’ at the University of Heidelberg, where she focused on early Buddhist philosophy. Her current research examines the intersections between Rortyan Pragmatism and Madhyamaka Buddhism in relation to their peculiar non-positions relative to philosophical dialectical spaces. She is interested in the promotion of ‘fusion’ philosophy, and is especially concerned with reconceptualising what ‘philosophy’ means in light of intercultural investigations and Pragmatist critiques.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.

 

About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/

 

About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a keynote presentation from Dr Alessandro Salice

 

Abstract:

A spectre is haunting the phenomenological community—the spectre of phenomenological realism. All the powers of old phenomenology have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Sartre, post-structuralist radicals and analytic spies.

 

But what is phenomenological realism? The talk aims at answering this question in three steps.

 

In the first part, I give a brief historical overview of the Munich and Göttingen circles of phenomenology, while highlighting some methodological considerations on how to approach the study of this complex tradition of philosophy.

 

In the second part, I focus on phenomenological realism as a metaphysical position consistently embraced by the members of the two circles. I argue that phenomenological realism is characterized by (a specific form of) correlationism and by essentialism and I show how these two principles have informed some specific positions in phenomenological psychology and social phenomenology.

 

Finally, the last part rejects various attempts to assess realist phenomenology in relation to its convergence or divergence with the Husserlian project. Realist phenomenology, so the claim goes, deserves to be assessed in its own right because it is a unique, fertile, and autonomous form of phenomenology. Doing that—i.e., philosophically engaging with early phenomenologists, while historically uncovering their insights—promises to impact different strands of the current philosophical debate and to substantially enrich the received picture of the phenomenological movement.

 

 

Biography:

Alessandro Salice is Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy of University College Cork and a Research Associate at the Center for Subjectivity Research (CFS) in Copenhagen. Previously, Alessandro held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Graz, Basel, Vienna, and at the CFS. He mainly works at the intersection of phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and moral psychology, by paying particular attention to the social capacities of the mind.

 

Alessandro has edited The Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality. History, Concepts, Problems (2016), together with Hans Bernhard Schmid. He is co-editor of Journal of Social Ontology and his papers have been published in several journals including: Emotion Review, European Journal of Philosophy, Frontiers in Psychology, Frontiers in Psychiatry, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences, Philosophical Psychology, and Synthese.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.

 

About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/

 

About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a keynote presentation from Prof. Sara Heinämaa

 

 

Abstract:

In The Crisis, Husserl argues that transcendental phenomenology must be understood as a scientific vocation with radical philosophical aims. However, The Crisis also gives a curiously ambiguous characterization of the phenomenological vocation which emphasizes its similarities with other life vocations but, at the same time, problematizes this analogy. On the one hand, Husserl argues that we can conduct phenomenological inquiries in the same manner as we manage other projects, scientific and non-scientific. On the other hand, he also argues that phenomenology requires a radical and fundamental abandonment of all worldly interests – theoretical as well as practical, positive scientific as well as critical. If this holds, phenomenology cannot be practiced in the manner of any worldly projects (everyday, scientific or philosophical). So, we find a fundamental tension in Husserl’s characterization of his own philosophy: it seems that phenomenology must be understood as a dual vocation which, on the one hand, allows periodic practicing like worldly vocations but, on the other hand, demands a permanent abandonment of everything that is worldly. My presentation gives a novel account of Husserl’s understanding of the phenomenological vocation, one that helps us understand and alleviate this tension. I will argue that Husserl’s conceptualization of phenomenology as a scientific vocation must be understood in the light of his theory of the habituation and institution of intentional acts, and that special attention must be paid to the habituation of the conative acts of willing. For this purpose, I will offer explications of Husserl’s concepts of habituation and institution and introduce the main parameters of his analysis of the intentionality and temporality of volition.

 

 

Biography:

Sara Heinämaa is Academy Professor (2017–2021 Academy of Finland) and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She specialises in phenomenology, existentialism, philosophy of mind and history of philosophy, and has published extensively in these fields, especially on normativity, emotions, embodiment, personhood, intersubjectivity and gender. She is an expert of Husserlian phenomenology but has also contributed broadly to our understanding of existential phenomenology and its methods, especially the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir and Sartre.

 

Heinämaa is co-author of Birth, Death, and Femininity (2010) and author of Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference (2003), and has co-edited several volumes, including Why Method Matters: Phenomenology as Critique (forthcoming 2021), Phenomenology and the Transcendental (2014), and Consciousness (2007)

 

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.

 

About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/

 

About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a keynote presentation from Prof. Shaun Gallagher

 

 

Abstract:

How should we act to address climate change, racism, sexism …? These are large important problems that call for serious actions on both individual and collective scales. To think about actions on these scales one needs to think about future or distal intentions – that is intention formation that involves deliberation, action planning and decision, much of which can involve communication with others. My aim is not to address these large questions – so I won’t be offering any advice about how we should address climate change, etc. My aim is rather to dig down into the phenomenology of the possibility of taking action, and indeed the possibility of deliberating, planning, decision-making and communicating – all of which are themselves actions. My analysis will address a version of what has been called the ‘scaling up’ problem.

 

I will argue that in regard to processes on the scale at which Husserl addresses time-consciousness – which I want to call intrinsic temporality, because it applies not just to consciousness, but to action and performance, and perhaps to life processes in general – the rule is not passivity, as a sort of waiting for the future to happen, but enaction. We enact the future on the most basic scale, and if this were not the case, we would not be able to take action, to deliberate, to decide, or to communicate, or solve any of the problems concerning climate, racism, or sexism. The latter processes involve a narrative scale. I’ll argue, however, that rather than ‘scaling up’ to narrative (understanding it as higher-order cognition), one should think of ‘scaling out’, and understanding narrative as a kind of performance. In this regard, although this kind of formal analysis does not give us any answers to these larger questions, it should tell us how it’s possible to act.

 

 

Biography:

Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a Professorial Fellow at the School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong.  He was a Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Fellow (2012-18), and has held Honorary Professorships at Tromsø University (Norway); Durham (UK) and Copenhagen (DK), and visiting positions at Cambridge, Lyon, Paris, Berlin, Oxford and Rome.

 

His areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of mind, embodied cognition, social interaction, self/personal identity and hermeneutics. His publications include Action and Interaction (2020); Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (2017); A Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder (2015); Phenomenology (2012; new edition 2021); The Phenomenological Mind (with Dan Zahavi, 3 rd  edition 2021); How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005); editor: Oxford Handbook of the Self and Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.

 

About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/

 

About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a keynote presentation from Fiona Hallinan

 

Abstract:

Ultimology refers to the study of endings, or that which is dead or dying. This presentation will propose darkness as one of a set of thematic concerns for the concept. An introduction to the background of the project of Ultimology will outline a set of contexts where the concept has been applied, and will illustrate some ways artistic research practice can be used to explore new models of record making, specifically looking at darkness as an affective tool. Darkness will be presented in this paper as a site of potential and transformative encounter through examples of its application in a number of contexts. The paper will be accompanied by a set of directions for listeners.

 

 

Biography:

Fiona Hallinan is an Irish artist and artistic researcher undertaking a doctoral project at LUCA School of Arts KU Leuven, researching the performative coming-into-being of Ultimology, a concept that proposes the close examination of endings as a site for transformative encounter. In collaboration with curator Kate Strain, this project was previously in residence at CONNECT, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications.

 

She hosts On Death, an interdisciplinary reading group, recently co-wrote a BAI funded radio essay for RTE radio and is on residency at Kunstencentrum Vooruit looking at the worker's canteen as an endangered entity. Her work takes the form of writing, drawing, discursive events and rituals. She has exhibited at Grazer Kunstverein, Kerlin Gallery, IMMA, Parsons Paris and Brown University.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.

 

About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/

 

About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a keynote presentation from Prof. Rebecca Braun

 

Abstract:

This lecture sets out how literary texts both engage with methods that are central to futures studies – notably forecasting and back-casting – and are themselves a method for linking past, present and future in new, socially-meaningful ways. Because narrative plots routinely upend any straightforward chronological understanding of causality, literature can itself be seen as a tool with practical application for work in social futures. Accordingly, I provide a broad survey of how canonical literary texts and genres have developed blueprints for different ways of living in the world that draw alternately on forecasting and back-casting methods, and then work through the specific example offered by one of the founding novels of the European canon, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605/1615). In so doing, I show how literary texts allow their readers to reposition themselves in relation to multiple possible worlds and sketch out distinct plans of action, for both themselves and others, that are informed by powerfully imagined lived experience. Literature provides valuable insight into the different kinds of agency and resilience that are needed to sustain such future-forming activity and which other, more technocratic models of scenario planning tend to overlook.

 

 

Biography:

Rebecca Braun joined NUI Galway in 2021 to take up the position of Executive Dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences & Celtic Studies. Before then, she was Professor of Modern Languages & Creative Futures at Lancaster University in the UK, where she was also Co-Director of the Institute for Social Futures from 2017-2020. She has held further lectureships and research fellowships at the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester and Oxford in the UK and at the Freie Universität Berlin. She grew up in West Cork and Tipperary.

 

Rebecca's work explores how literary texts can drive new ways of thinking about the future, both as objects of analysis (traditional literary criticism) and as a co-creative process (practice-focused workshops using creative writing techniques). This futures work builds on a deep understanding of the power of people and stories, which she has traced in numerous books on authorship, world literature, transnationalism, and cultural value. Most recently, these include World Authorship, co-edited with Tobias Boes and Emily Spiers (Oxford: OUP, 2020) and Transnational German Studies, co-edited with Benedict Schofield (Liverpool: LUP, 2020).

 

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.

 

About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/

 

About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 begins with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a keynote presentation from Prof. Andrew Benjamin, University of Technology, Sydney and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, Melbourne

 

Abstract:

In Walter Benjamin’s review of Junger’s edited collection War and Warrior, Benjamin links the possibility of the future to the overcoming of myth and magic. He writes in relation to the essays comprising the book that, Until Germany has broken through (gesprengt hat) the entanglement of such Medusa- like beliefs that confront it in these essays, it cannot hope for a future (eine Zukunst erhoffen).

 

While the term ‘breaking through’ occurs in this passage, a similar strategy is at work in terms such as ‘divine violence’, ‘destruction’ and ‘caesura’. What is significant about them is that they define the future in terms of the openings created by the suspension of dominant logics. The aim of his paper is to investigate this particular conception of the future.

 

 

Biography:

Andrew Benjamin is the Distinguished Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Technology, Sydney (and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, Melbourne).

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.

 

About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/

 

About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 7 concludes with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.

 

This episode features a presentation from Matthew Menchaca of City University of New York, United States

 

 

Abstract:

There are two sub-theses to the Embodied Mind’s (1991) core five theses which I contend Engaged Phenomenology needs to reconcile: phenomenology and autopoiesis. In particular, how is what is revealed in experience (phenomenology) connected to the neuro-immuno-cognitive-networks that make us living (autopoiesis)? In Evan Thompson’s 2007 book Mind in Life, he provides a history of autopoiesis and a genealogy of phenomenology which attempts to provide such an answer. In later work, Giovanni Colomobetti, in the book The Feeling Body (2013), views autopoiesis as too restricted a concept for the purposes of characterizing the features of a field she has invented (for the purposes of better understanding the intersubjective reality of emotions): Dynamic Affective Science. In this essay, I present the core features of autopoiesis, give examples of failed attempts to artificially generate such living structures, and situate the sub-concepts on the conditions of life and meaning of “adaptation” (according to autopoiesis) against evolutionary theory. In particular, I suggest that the autopoietic formulation of “adaptation” properly understood is what Colombetti describes in her genealogy of phenomenology (Chapter 2) as “primordial affectivity”. Thus an engaged phenomenology premised on shared life-worlds, in particular in their affective complexity, can rely on autopoietic criteria to ensure their phenomenology is of the living.

 

 

Biography:

Matthew Menchaca is a 4th year Ph.d student in philosophy at City University of New York (CUNY). A pipeline mentor and himself of minority descent (Mexican and Native American), he most recently presented at Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science (DUCOG) 2021 Linguistic and Cognitive Foundations of Meaning, applying Devitt and Kripke’s causal theory of reference to the acquisition of “standard” arithmetic. Currently at the prospectus stage, he is looking forward to writing a dissertation at the intersection of phenomenology and cognitive science

 

Further Information:

 

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.

 

About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/

 

About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.

 

This episode features a presentation from Chu Ming Hon of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China

 

Abstract:

The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to suggest that phenomenological studies of worldliness are crucial for dream research; second, to indicate that dream research can in return enrich our understanding of world-consciousness. Dreaming is a rare theme in the classics of phenomenology. It is not easy to determine the nature of dreaming in the light of other kinds of experience. As Jean Héring has neatly summarized, phenomenologists are divided by two opinions: dreaming is either perception or representation. However, as this paper aims to show, subsuming dreaming under either category is equally perplexing, for it will then become either a special case of perception, or a special case of representation. A solution is thereby proposed, according to which oneiric phenomenon should be studied in the light of its presumptive worldliness. Dreaming is special so long as it opens a field of experiences encompassing our being-there, to the extent that dream appears as if a reality. A phenomenology of dreaming therefore focuses on the borderline between dream and reality, in order to ascertain how far they can be confused. Such a study is preceded by controversies over the worldliness of dreams. For example, while Edmund Husserl and Theodor Conrad affirm that dreaming implies immersion in a dreamworld, for Jan Patočka and Jean-Paul Sartre dreams essentially involve the privation of worldly structure. Provided that worldliness is a minimal condition of the position of reality, determining whether dreams are worldly (welthaft) or worldless (weltlos) is decisive for determining how far dreams resemble reality. Phenomenological debates on the nature of dreaming will also prove crucial to dream research in general. Despite advanced methods of observation, pioneering dream researchers are still fundamentally divided regarding the experiential characters of dream. And a significant portion of their disagreement lies in the presumptive worldliness of dreams.

 

Biography:

I am a doctor candidate in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. My research focuses on the motivations of phenomenological reduction, and extends to altered states of consciousness. In 2020, I have published a book on dreaming, titled Formen der Versunkenheit.

 

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.

 

The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.

 

About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/

 

About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/