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This podcast is for the British Society for Phenomenology and showcases papers at our conferences and events, interviews and discussions on the topic of phenomenology.
Episodes
Saturday Dec 12, 2020
Saturday Dec 12, 2020
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/
Saturday Dec 05, 2020
Saturday Dec 05, 2020
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/
Saturday Nov 28, 2020
Saturday Nov 28, 2020
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/
Saturday Nov 21, 2020
Saturday Nov 21, 2020
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/
Saturday Nov 14, 2020
Saturday Nov 14, 2020
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/
Saturday Nov 07, 2020
Saturday Nov 07, 2020
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/
Saturday Oct 31, 2020
Saturday Oct 31, 2020
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/
Saturday Oct 24, 2020
Saturday Oct 24, 2020
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/
Sunday Aug 23, 2020
Sunday Aug 23, 2020
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/
Saturday Aug 22, 2020
Saturday Aug 22, 2020
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/