Episodes
Friday Jun 12, 2020
Friday Jun 12, 2020
Here is the final of our recordings from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’. The paper comes from Prabhsharanbir Singh (University of British Columbia & University of the Fraser Valley).
ABSTRACT: “Dear Bill,” Edward Said once said to William Spanos, “you’re a good critic, but why do you weaken your originative criticism by Heideggerianizing it?” And Spanos responded, “Edward, I think you’re a good critic, too, but why do you limit possibilities by not attending to Heidegger’s destructive ontology?” This exchange shows that an Auseinandersetzung between Heidegger’s thinking and colonialism is still waiting to happen. This paper will be a modest step toward such confrontation. Auseinandersetzung as an onto-poetic confrontation with the other is not reducible to mere conflict. It is an originary strife with roots in Heraclitus’ thinking of polemos, the source for the origin of “history”. Colonialism, understood in Heideggerian terms, is a progressive ‘darkening of the earth’ by modern technology. The essence of this technology is Enframing, which converts everything that exists into standing-reserve, a resource waiting to be exploited. The conversion of Eastern spiritualities into New Age mysticism is one example of this process. Heidegger understood the planetary domination of modern technology in the form of Western imperialism as an ontological event in the History of Being. Consequently, he also understood the futility of programmatic responses to such an event. Everything that is programmable remains within the realm of calculative reason, the driving force behind modern technology. Perhaps that is why, in his later writings, especially the Contributions and the Black Notebooks, Heidegger constructs a philosophical theology, which dwells upon the Other Beginning and the Last God. I argue that Heidegger’s philosophical-theological project failed because he was oblivious toward other beginnings, beginnings lying outside the pale of ‘Western Humankind,’ he was so (obsessively) concerned with. He writes in the Black Notebooks, “Our thinking does not need to be “international” or even European; but it must indeed be Western and metaphysical if it is to fathom more originarily the ground of our history out of the essence of beyng, i.e., out of the “between” of the encounter of gods and humans.” His insistence that the Other Beginning must arise from within the West is problematic. However, I do not believe that other cultures, cultures colonized by the West, have this Other Beginning, for it is not something that any culture can possess as a definite quality. But I do believe that this Other Beginning, in the aftermath of the colonial event, might lie somewhere in the encounter, in the interstices of the Auseinandersetzung with the non-Western Other that Heidegger, unfortunately, missed. My own being, as a post-colonial ‘subject,’ is a battleground between Sikh spirituality and the drive towards Enframing by modern technology. The other beginning, if it is possible at all, might emerge out of crevices that this strife has created. This paper is an attempt to initiate an Auseinandersetzung between Heidegger’s History of Being and the still unEnframed remnants of Sikh spirituality.
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Prabhsharanbir Singh’s paper, as well as others presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference, has been reworked and published as an essay in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Thursday Jun 11, 2020
Thursday Jun 11, 2020
This episode of our podcast is a paper from Salvatore Spina (University of Messina). This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: Taking Heidegger’s Black Notebooks as a starting point and moving beyond it, the aim of my paper is to show that the question of sacrifice has in Heidegger’s philosophy an ontological meaning. At the beginning we will start analyzing the religious and political meanings of the concept ‘sacrifice’ and try to show how they represent in Heidegger’s thought only a preliminary characterization. The first part of my work will demonstrate how Heidegger, despite his religious education, releases the interpretation of sacrifice from its Christian characterization. In his own words: “Opfer freilich klingt prahlerisch und christlich. Anderes ist gemeint” (GA 94, p. 373). At the time of his rectorate at the University of Freiburg, Heidegger uses the word sacrifice in a political meaning: it names the way to think a university’s renewal. In the Black Notebooks he writes: “Die neue Universität kommt nur, wenn wir uns für sie opfern” (GA 94, p. 111). After the resignation from the rectorate of Freiburg university and his progressively more critical stance to the Nazi Party, and in conjunction with the ontologization of Heidegger’s thought, the concept of sacrifice assumes a new characterization, thereby losing its political meaning. Now it has an ontological meaning and names the way of the relationship between the human being (Dasein) and Being (Sein). Sacrifice is the name used by Heidegger to indicate one of the moods (Stimmungen) of the human being in relation to Being and its Event (Ereignis des Seins). In this paper I will try to show the development of the concept of sacrifice in Heidegger’s philosophy and to underline its ontological characterization.
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Other papers presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference have been reworked and published as essays in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Wednesday Jun 10, 2020
Wednesday Jun 10, 2020
We continue season four of the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast with a paper from Lin Ma (Renmin University). This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: In one of his Ponderings, Heidegger remarks, “the courage for philosophy is the knowledge of the necessary going-under (Untergang) of Da-sein.” Although the ponderings on going-under remain rather cryptic and fragmentary, one can discern a thematization of going-under throughout Heidegger’s six non-public meditations on the history of Beyng from 1936-1942. In the Contributions [1936-1938], going-under primarily bespeaks of the proper disposition or attunement the human being should have in order to be appropriated by Beyng, instead of remaining content with beings. The going-under is also the most intimate proximity to the refusal in which the appropriating event (Ereignis) bestows itself on the human being. In his Ponderings, Heidegger also speaks of the going-under as “the transition into the other inception.” This is the second role of the going-under for, or rather, from out of the history of Beyng. This aspect receives lengthy treatments in Heidegger’s other non-public writings composed after the Contributions. In Mindfulness [1938/1939], Heidegger points out that phusis in its essence entails going-under, which is not the end but rather is the “rounding of the beginning.” It is in On the Inception [1941] that Heidegger fully articulates the Beyng-historical significance of going-under. Here going under is “identified” with Heidegger’s most fundamental Beyng-historical notions, such as the appropriating event and inception. My paper is devoted to an examination of the multiple senses of going-under, in particular its double role in the history of Beyng.
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Other papers presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference have been reworked and published as essays in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Tuesday Jun 09, 2020
Matthew Kruger-Ross - What can Heidegger teach us? After the Black Notebooks
Tuesday Jun 09, 2020
Tuesday Jun 09, 2020
This episode of our podcast is a paper from Matthew Kruger-Ross (West Chester University of Pennsylvania). This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: Martin Heidegger, a remarkable philosopher who turned phenomenology upside down, was also a committed teacher for almost six decades. An extended reflection on teaching as a manner and way of inspiring further philosophical reflection remains an unattended narrative within philosophical scholarship. To be sure, in addition to our treatises and manuscripts, our livelihood as philosophers depend on our ability to inspire future philosophers via our lectures and pedagogical conversations and relations in our professional capacities as teachers. How often do we allow others to explore our innermost thoughts and planning document as we craft our thinking and teaching? The Schwarze Hefte provide a unique portal into Heidegger the teacher between 1931 and 1943, based on the existing published notebooks into English. Heidegger’s reflections on education, teaching, learning, students, and instruction are chronicled in this proposed manuscript devoted to extending existing scholarships into Heidegger and the philosophical study of education. Such work promises to extend existing analyses relevant to Heidegger’s thinking of meditative thinking (as a contrast to calculative thinking), historiological ways of thinking and philosophizing, and the role of education in learning to think. Who is the “elementary school teacher” that Heidegger references so often in the Notebooks to provide a counterweight to his philosophical arguments related to thinking? This presentation and paper propose to address this exact gap in the conversation surrounding Heidegger and teaching, learning, and education, broadly considered.
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Other papers presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference have been reworked and published as essays in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Monday Jun 08, 2020
Gülben Salman - From Pseudos to Falsum: Heidegger on Truth
Monday Jun 08, 2020
Monday Jun 08, 2020
We continue season four of the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast with a paper from Gülben Salman (Ankara University). This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: Following the period when the first Black Notebooks were written (1931-1941), Heidegger delivers a class on Parmenides and Heraclitus at the University of Freiburg (1942-1943). The lecture notes of this class were later published under the title Parmenides. In his Black Notebooks one can see that he had been contemplating common concepts like beginning, truth, concealment/unconcealment, mythos/logos, oblivion, science, etc. It seems rewarding to consider as complementary his lecture notes on Parmenides and his Ponderings in order to understand thoroughly the question of the history of being. It is important because he claims that “philosophy creates the concealment” and tries to “keep itself hard to the wind of its own storm”. This is visible in the class of 1942, when Heidegger makes a distinction between pseudos and its misleading Roman translation as falsum. For him, these are two different ways of understanding what does not belong to the realm of truth. He later indicates that the polis is the realm of aletheia/pseudos, while on the other hand the veritas/falsum distinction is a part of a Roman imperial mindset. This presentation will elaborate Heidegger’s ideas about the Greek and Roman way of thinking “wrong” in accordance with his Ponderings. There is a change in the essence of truth, and this can be made visible in the order of the polis and the imperial organization of the Roman political milieu as res publica. Heidegger is quite interested in the confrontation with antiquity, “the beginning” in a different nuance than its modern version. This chasm clarifies the transformation in the History of Being.
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Other papers presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference have been reworked and published as essays in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Sunday Jun 07, 2020
Sunday Jun 07, 2020
Season four of the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast continues with a paper from Niall Keane. This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: This paper will trace the theme of the naturalisation of the world from Heidegger’s early lectures up until and including the Black Notebooks. It will take the theme of Heidegger’s critique of the naturalization of the world as its starting point and show how the problem of naturalism and its forgetting of the phenomenon of the world is a guiding thread when it comes to understanding the intensification of the same critique in his later analysis of the darkening of the world as the increasingly impeded ability to interrogate the question of the history of beyng.
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Other papers presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference have been reworked and published as essays in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Saturday Jun 06, 2020
Saturday Jun 06, 2020
We continue season four of the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast with a keynote presentation from Babette Babich (Fordham University and University of Winchester). This recording comes from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) which was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: One of the outcomes of the publication of the Black Notebooks has been to invite scholars to rethink their understanding of Heidegger’s thinking, including what is named Heidegger’s ‘world-historical anti-Semitism’, his relation to war and politics, via Schmitt and Jünger, as well as Heidegger’s thinking on machination/motorisation/calculation. Other possibilities include the university (education) in addition to Heidegger’s anxieties regarding the reception of Being and Time in the framework of the history of Beyng/Seyn. Echoing Heidegger’s lecture courses, we read that Nietzsche adumbrates “the end of metaphysics” yet remains nonetheless entangled in metaphysics. Heidegger’s reflections on the beginning of Western thought with Anaximander, Heraclitus, and Parmenides are matched here with his insistence that it is a “fable that Nietzsche rediscovered ‘pre-Platonic philosophy’”, destined one day “to be revealed in all its fabulosity [Fabelhaftigkeit]”. For Heidegger, “Nietzsche thinks purely in the Roman way” whereby Nietzsche’s “own metaphysics could never grasp the Greek beginning of Western thinking”. Inasmuch as Nietzsche “plays out the essence of being to a combat of power positions and power relations”, as Heidegger invokes typically bellicose interpretations of will to power, this powerplay consummates the “abandonment of beings by being, the abandonment that gained sovereignty in the history of metaphysics”. Given the contrast between historiology and history in Nietzsche’s meditation on history (apt and inapt) for life, as this bears on Machenschaft and the whole of Nietzsche’s philosophy, Heidegger’s opposition to Nietzsche’s putative ‘re-discovery of Pre-platonic philosophy’ yields a further question: “in what single sense is Nietzsche a transition, i.e., a preparation for another beginning of the history of beyng?”
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Babich’s paper, as well as others presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference, has been reworked and published as an essay in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Friday Jun 05, 2020
Friday Jun 05, 2020
Welcome back to the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast. We kick off season four with recordings from the ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019). This conference was held in celebration of fifty years of the ‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology’. To begin, here is the opening paper from Ullrich Haase, who was editor of the journal from 2005 to 2019, standing down in the wake of this conference and the publication hitting its landmark year.
ABSTRACT: This talk will introduce a broad array of questions arising from Heidegger’s turn towards the question for the history of being. While also introducing some of the strands of questioning that will arise in the other contributions to the conference, it will take its lead from the claim in the Call for Papers, namely that the works bound together by the title of the question for the history of being belong to the most promising that philosophy has to offer itself and that the shape of this thought can find a clearer definition in the Black Notebooks. The talk will thus try to give some preliminary answers as to what Heidegger has to say about four of the most pressing questions of our times, namely that for the destruction of the world through Global Warming, the question for the destruction of civil society in the movement of Globalization, about Nietzsche’s question of European Nihilism and, last but not least, about Merleau-Ponty’s Nightmare from which there is no awakening.
‘Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Special Issue – Heidegger and the Black Notebooks’ (Volume 51, Issue 2, 2020). Haase’s paper, as well as others presented at JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference, has been reworked and published as an essay in this special edition: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/jbsp-volume-51-issue-two-2020-heidegger-special-issue/
The ‘JBSP 50th Anniversary Conference: On the History of Being – After the Black Notebooks’ (2019) celebrated 50 years of the journal. The British Society for Phenomenology held a three-day conference at the International Anthony Burgess Foundation, Manchester, UK from 31 May to 2 June, 2019. The aim of the event was to examine the contribution of Heidegger’s Schwarze Hefte (Black Notebooks) to an understanding of the question of the history of being: https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/anniversary-conference-2019/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. Why not find out more, join the society, and subscribe to our journal the JBSP? https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/
Friday Aug 02, 2019
Friday Aug 02, 2019
Here is the last of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Zeigam Azizov’s paper is titled ‘Without Origins: Husserl’s “temporal objects” in the light of nonessentialist thinking’.
Abstract: “I will talk about Husserl’s initial search for the ‘essence’ in his earlier work and his realising the persistence of culture as a non-determinate entity towards the latest period of his philosophical activities. In his lecture given at the Vienna Kulturbund in May 1935 Husserl spoke of “the crisis as a pathological sickness of which the dominant characteristic is a fall into passivity (Passivitat)”. In both cases Husserl wanted to find an answer to the question of the lost contact of people with the sense of their activities, of their mode of knowledge.
By taking Husserl’s initial understanding of ‘a temporal object’ and his later critique of ‘passivity’ I would like to reactivate this question for the world of full of objects like ours. ‘Passivity’ of subjects inhabiting the “Lebenswelt” is connected to the world consisting of fuzzy objects. This is the reason why even without having no proper education of numbers and words anyone who is attracted to new media can learn how to become a hacker. It may be explained as in a sensual human activity-knowledge translated from the brain and extended to other senses. The recognition of ‘a natural attitude’ in a particular reality takes place in this manner on the grounds of intersubjectivity. Objective idealities transcend s to subjects and potentially perceivable as without origins.
I claim that ‘re-activating’ of the lost contact is possible through the understanding of objects of the world as they are non-essential . Any object has a quality of the quasi-object and therefore in the state of fuzziness. In order to problematize this inquiry further and to provide a novel understanding of Husserl’ work I will reflect on the theory of ‘fuzzy logic’ by the Azeri-American computer scientist Lotfi Zadeh and its development for my own understanding of non-essential existence of objects.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal:
Friday Jul 26, 2019
Tingwen Li – What If We Exclude Ready-mades from the Artworld?
Friday Jul 26, 2019
Friday Jul 26, 2019
Here is the latest of our recordings from The British Society for Phenomenology’s 2018 Annual Conference ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’. Tingwen Li is from the Faculty of Law, University of Cambridge, and the paper is titled ‘What If We Exclude Ready-mades from the Artworld?’
Abstract: “Ready-mades had formed a significant challenge to the tradition of art. While analytic aestheticians have been devoted to solving the problem of ready-mades, phenomenological aesthetics had paid little attention to this issue before the 1990s. John Barnett Brough, an American Husserlian philosopher, is among the earliest phenomenologists who were to combat the question of ready-mades. In his early discussion, unlike most of the phenomenological aestheticians who attend to art through aesthetic experience, Brough’s concern is more with the “classificatory” sense of art by interpreting Dickie’s and Danto’s institutional formulations from the perspective of late Husserl’s “Cultural World,” claiming that “a work of art is an artifact created against the horizon of the artworld and presented to an artworld public for its contemplation.” However, in the work published three years later, Brough seemed to change his idea of the analytic approaches by pointing out what they have to sacrifice for accommodating ready-mades in the artworld: Dickie would have to make a difficult choice between the artifactuality of artworks and “unaided” ready-mades, whereas Danto would pay the full cost of losing the whole classic world of art, which is also argued by James Foster who contrasts Gadamer to Danto in terms of their justifications for modern works of art. As a result, Brough is about to save the artworld by abandoning the ready-mades, albeit there is also expense of excluding them: not only of becoming philosophically disreputable, but also of thrusting a potential risk onto the artworld that has already been. For one, it refers to how we tolerate, involve, or assimilate a subverted event that has already been admitted by a tradition. For another, it is related to the flaws of Husserl’s views of historical sedimentation upon which Brough builds his phenomenology of artworld.”
The British Society for Phenomenology’s Annual Conference took place at the University of Kent, in Canterbury, UK during July, 2018. It gathered together philosophers, literary scholars, phenomenologists, and practitioners exploring phenomenological theory and its practical application. It covered a broad range of areas and issues including the arts, ethics, medical humanities, mental health, education, technology, feminism, politics and political governance, with contributions throwing a new light on both traditional phenomenological thinkers and the themes associated with classical phenomenology. More information about the conference can be found at:
https://www.britishphenomenology.org.uk/conference-2018/
The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, conferences and other events, and its podcast. You can support the society by becoming a member, for which you will receive a subscription to our journal: