Episodes

Saturday Aug 01, 2020
Marco Di Feo - The Human Right to Family Reunification
Saturday Aug 01, 2020
Saturday Aug 01, 2020
Our podcast turns to a paper from Marco Di Feo, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University of Milan. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: All people, to the extent that they wish, have the right to be fully integrated into the social world in which they live, regardless of their institutional status (citizen, immigrant, refugee, etc.). The integration is a very complex process, which includes at least three essential levels of the social life: the community one, that is, the level of interpersonal bonds (i.e. sentimental, friendship, etc.); the territorial one, that is, the level of social interactions (i.e those that depend on a social role, or a profession, etc.); and the political one, that is, the possibility of taking part in the collective political life (expressing opinions, voting, etc.). The phenomenological analysis of the essential forms of social interaction shows the peculiarity of each different level of integration. The crucial point on which I intend to pay attention is the following: each democratic country that welcomes an immigrant must create the conditions for her/his fully successful social integration. The hospitality of the immigrants is intrinsically connected to the duty of making them members of the society, at all three levels of the social life. I specifically intend to deal the theme of family reunifications within this conceptual horizon. Since family ties are the central nucleus of the community weaving, and since every person has the right to live in relation to her own reference community context, then the family reunification must be considered an inalienable right of every person who is welcomed in a new country. This right cannot be subordinated to any other type of evaluation, of economic, bureaucratic or political nature, because it is a human right. Only by guaranteeing a family context of belonging, institutions can avoid situations of social degradation, which are linked to conditions of loneliness and social isolation.
BIO: I was born in Milan, Italy, 46 years ago. Philosophy has always been my passion, but before dedicating myself to it, I felt the need to grow. I worked in a bank; then I changed radically my life, going to work in a social farm. Ten years ago I moved to Switzerland to work as social worker. During these years I achieved my degree with a thesis on the collective subjects from a phenomenological perspective. Actually I am working with young refugees and ending my second year of PhD. In my life path work and study are linked and grow together.
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 Jul 25, 2020
Botsa Katara - Reassessing the Super-crip Stereotype
Saturday Jul 25, 2020
Saturday Jul 25, 2020
Season four of the BSP Podcast continues with a paper from Botsa Katara, Durham University. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: The term “super-crip” can be construed as a misleading twist on the derogatory term crippled. The latter signifies the dire condition of human frailty, limitations of embodiment, and a life without possibilities, while the latter is emblematic of overcoming those limitations to such a preposterous extent that not only demonises, and annihilates the experience of living with physical disabilities but also heralds an insidious discourse of superlative athletic vigour, and prowess. This paper aims to demonstrate that to reduce the body into a functional machinery which might be repaired and augmented is to disavow the intricate mechanisms of the body-mind connect that are orientated towards intentionality, affectivity, attunement, proprioception, and kinesthesis. Under the theoretical lens of Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, Gallagher’s How the Body Shapes the Mind, and Carel’s Phenomenology of Illness, this paper shall analyse of the depiction of physical impairments in literary fiction, and memoirs. Following Carel’s conception of “epistemic injustice” it shall delineate the exigent need to incorporate felt experiences of disability in the wider cultural domain, thereby promulgating an informed and empathetic approach towards disability that adheres neither to the derogatory conception of the crippled nor the superhuman creation of the super-crip.
BIO: My name is Botsa Katara, second year PhD in English literature and Medical Humanities, from Durham University. My research focuses on the depiction of impaired movement in the literary works Beckett, Coetzee, and Kelmann. I am also looking at graphic memoirs, and life writings of amputees, and prosthetics that serve as counter narratives to the contemporary culture of the ‘super-crip’. I hold a Master’s degree in Modernity and Literature from the University of Edinburgh where my thesis focussed on identity conflict, desire, and domination in cancer patients. I have worked as a trainee at a prosthesis centre in New Delhi, India, where my work centered on closely observing young amputee rehabilitation.
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 Jul 18, 2020
Saturday Jul 18, 2020
Our podcast turns to a paper from Pablo Fernandez Velasco, Institut Jean Nicod, Département d’études cognitives, ENS, EHESS, CNRS, PSL; and University College London. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: The present paper explores the phenomenology of disorientation and its relationship with self-consciousness. Section 1 discusses previous literature on the links between self-location and self-consciousness and proposes a distinction between minimal self-location (which requires only an ego-centric frame of reference) and integrated self-location (which requires the integration of egocentric and allocentric frames of reference). The double aim of the paper is, on the one hand, to use this distinction (between minimal and integrated self-location) to deepen our understanding of spatial disorientation and, on the other, to use the phenomenology of disorientation to elucidate the role that self-location plays in shaping self-consciousness. Section 2 starts by looking at the experience of being “turned around”, which is a common experience of disorientation, and then expands to disorientation episodes related to the other two egocentric axes: experiences of being “left-right reversed”, and of being “turned upside-down”. This leads to the conclusion that integrated self-location is transmodal and depends on all three egocentric axes, and that disorientation destabilizes this integrated self-location. Section 3 explores a corpus of reports of disorientation episodes and highlights four key characteristics of these experiences (anxiety, vulnerability, confusion and diminishment) and their links to self-consciousness, focusing on the transformations in both the lived body and the experience of space. This phenomenological analysis reveals that during disorientation, the body-space shrinks, and the horizon of experience becomes more uncertain, leading to anxiety and a feeling of unfamiliarity. The central thesis of this paper is that during disorientation a destabilization of integrated self-location results in a diminished form of self-consciousness. Section 4 concludes with a summary of the key points of the paper and points to future directions of research.
BIO: The central aim of my current research is to explore the varieties and different dimensions of disorientation from the subjective side, in order to produce a characterisation of the phenomenon that is compatible with both empirical data and data about the subjective experience of disorientation, and to use disorientation as a vantage point to understand some of the complexities of spatial cognition and of the human mind at large.
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 Jul 11, 2020
Saturday Jul 11, 2020
Season four of the BSP Podcast continues with a paper from Andreas Sandner, Department of Philosophy at University of Koblenz-Landau. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: It is widely held in analytic philosophy of mind and cognition that olfactory perception – first and foremost – represents odours if it represents anything at all. Despite some controversies on the very nature of those odours we encounter in olfactory perceptual experience, the vast majority of today’s philosophers hold that the intentional objects of olfactory perception are the odorous emanations of so-called source objects – ordinary concrete things. So, broadly speaking, most discussants account for some version of the principle of ‘olfactory austerity’: When we smell we perceive nothing but odours, and never do we (directly) smell particular objects. After depicting the main reasons for adopting such a view especially within a chiefly representationalist framework, I will examine one of the alleged benefits a bit more carefully. Namely I will address the anti-visuocentricism in austere theories of olfactory objects. It has been argued frequently that the view of olfactory austerity reveals our visuocentric biases and guides us to overcome them in theorising perception. In short, the idea goes pretty much as follows: Those who think that we could smell ordinary objects in olfactory experience just like we can see these objects in visual experience simply disregard the missing aspects of objecthood in what is really smelled there, particularly the missing spatial structure. To attribute such aspects to pure olfactory experience then would mean to fall for the supremacy of vision and to only infer the particular source object by the smelled odour from memory or recollection. The main goal of my talk will come down to contrasting the so reproached visuocentricism of a source-object-theory of olfactory objects with the visuocentricism within the view of olfactory austerity itself, as it is still at work at the very core of this approach in that the criteria of ‘objecthood’ are obviously stipulated by means of the ordinary objects in visual perception. What is at stake in this comparison is to extrapolate visuocentricism as a crucial structure of perceptual consciousness – at least for the sighted – and hence accounting for the supremacy of vision as a fact instead of a fallacious bias.
BIO: From 2007 to 2015 I studied philosophy, sociology and communication science at the Friedrich-Schiller-University Jena. I received a bachelor's degree in 2011 with a thesis on the theory of causes in Plato's Phaedo and a master's degree in 2015 with a thesis on Kant's criticism of Berkeley's immaterialism. Since 2016 I have been a research assistant at the Institute of Philosophy in Landau where I hold seminars and am writing a dissertation on the phenomenology of olfactory perception. In this context, I also organized a small international conference on perception and the senses in continental and analytic philosophy last year.
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 Jul 04, 2020
Saturday Jul 04, 2020
The BSP Podcast turns to a paper from Matteo Valdarchi, who has studied philosophy at the Pontificial Gregorian University and at the University of Roma Tre. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: Since his early stages, the young Heidegger embraced with fervour the Husserlian phenomenological method (at least the one contained in the Logische Untersuchungen), although he immediately kept his distance from it, introducing a new way of doing phenomenology, independent and more fundamental. Not surprisingly, the phenomenological project that arises from his early works is called «Ursprungswissenschaft». But where can we find the seeds of this “science”? Usually, those can be identified in the course of the Kriegsontsemester (1919). The aim of this paper is to show that the very beginning of this project is, instead, in his post-doctoral dissertation, Die Kategorien- und Bedeutungslehre des Duns Scotus. The Habilitationsschrift unfolds a movement that starts from the exclusion of the Aristotelian-scholastics “metaphysics” from the question of categories (namely, of being), in favour of the immanence of the subjectivity in the judgement. With this first movement, the meaning of ‘being’ is radically transformed, changing from “being that actually exists” to “being that’s valid” [gilt] of the copula. The second movement (or counter-move) shows the intentional disposition of the logical setting, enlightening the material principle that determines logical forms: the categories of meaning that weave the sphere of language. It is at this level that the young Heidegger, although adopting the teaching of the IV research, already allows the origin of the logic to emerge from a more fundamental field, that is language, in which ‘being’ neither it’s a “is” nor it is valid, but it means. However here the language isn’t entangled in the theoretical (“circular” in 1919) subjectivity’s tangles, but it opens the way to a new understanding of the subjectivity, of the «historischer Geist». In conclusion, Heidegger’s original appropriation of the phenomenological method lies in understanding of the essence of language, as field of the subjectivity’s historically living movement.
BIO: Matteo Valdarchi studied philosophy at the Pontificial Gregorian University (until 2016) and at the University of Roma Tre (until 2018). His research area includes phenomenology and hermeneutics, particularly Heidegger's thinking. He has taken part in two national conferences, at the 62° and at the 63° Convegno di Ricerca Filosofica organized by Centro Studi Filosofici di Gallarate.
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 Jun 27, 2020
Saturday Jun 27, 2020
Season four of the BSP Podcast continues with a paper from Katherine Burn, Manchester Metropolitan University. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.
ABSTRACT: Contemporary British fiction is situated within a moment of flux, ‘made from a different fabric and holds a different elasticity’ (Boxall, 2013). Recent advancements in shame studies address the philosophical turn towards a phenomenological understanding of the emotion as ‘everyday life feels increasingly uncanny’ (Hinton and Willemsen, 2018). The intersection between shame and contemporary fiction connects within the nascent field of metamodernism in which we can identify ‘a structure of feeling that emerges from, and reacts to, the postmodern’ (Van den Akker and Vermeulen, 2017). We are living in shameless times wherein it is possible to feel a second-hand shame towards those whose politics shamelessly exploit us as subjects of late capitalism, impacting our impression of everyday life and reconstructing our sense of the authentic. Yet, this space of the shame of shamelessness has largely remained ‘invisible’ (Weiss, 2018) within contemporary literary studies even though our actions ‘inevitably reverberate beyond ourselves affecting not only others but also the larger society in which we live’ (Weiss, 2018). To fully understand this ontological position, we must utilise Heidegger’s fundamental ontology to reorient our understanding of the everyday nature of autonomous shame and its representation within Tom McCarthy’s Remainder and Eley Williams’ Attrib. Reflecting on Rudi Visker’s claim that, ‘shame can thus be seen to occupy a structurally similar place – a topos – to anxiety in Heidegger’s ontology’ (Visker, 2004), this paper seeks to explore a Heideggerian notion of shame as disclosive mechanism between ‘unowned existence’ (Stolorow, 2011) and authentic individuation. Twenty-first century British fiction thus reveals the reconstructive force within moments of self-evaluation accompanying autonomous shame as radical witnesses against the shameless composition of the contemporary moment, fortifying the alignment between phenomenology and literary theory.
BIO: Katherine Burn is in the second year of her AHRC funded PhD at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research focuses on the intersection between shame and metamodernism, utilising traditional phenomenology to investigate the reconstructive force of shame in terms of form and periodisation of the novel. Katherine has continuously presented as part of the AHRC Metamodernism network and has recently been appointed postgraduate representative of the national English Shared Futures conference due to take place in 2020.
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 Jun 20, 2020
Dylan Trigg - Who is the Subject of Birth?
Saturday Jun 20, 2020
Saturday Jun 20, 2020
Welcome back to the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast. Season four now continues with recordings from our 2019 Annual Conference. To kick off, here is a recording of one of our keynotes, Dylan Trigg, FWF Lise Meitner Senior Fellow in the Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna
ABSTRACT: In this talk, I attempt a phenomenological analysis of childbirth as a strange event using Merleau-Ponty’s concept of anonymity. The concept of anonymity in Merleau-Ponty refers to how our bodily existence is constituted by a Nature outside of ourselves. Such a formulation allows him to explain how perception is both general and singular in the same measure, how temporality can be contemporaneous and immemorial, and how the body is both one’s own while at the same time marking a prehistory that is never entirely my own. My point of departure for thinking through the issue of birth and anonymity begins from the conviction that Merleau-Ponty’s account of anonymity tends to privilege themes of integrity and synthesis while neglecting how anonymity can serve as a threat or rupture to the unity of selfhood, especially in the context of limit-experiences, not least childbirth. I contend that the concept of anonymity helps us to understand how childbirth is an irreducibly strange event. This is evident in at least two claims that tend to populate accounts of childbirth. First, the strangeness accompanying the sense of leaving one’s body behind, or, otherwise letting the body do its own thing. Second, the sense of strangeness accompanying the first encounter with the baby upon successful delivery. I take both of these aspects of childbirth seriously, treating them here phenomenologically as being instructive not only of uniqueness of childbirth but also telling us something important about bodily life more generally, especially in terms of who the subject of perceptual life, and thus childbirth, is.
BIO: Dr Dylan Trigg is an FWF Lise Meitner Senior Fellow at University of Vienna, Department of Philosophy. He has previously held research and teaching positions at the University of Memphis, University College Dublin, and Husserl Archives, École Normale Supérieure. He earned is PhD at the University of Sussex (2009), MA at the University of Sussex (2005), and BA at the University of London, Birkbeck College (2004). Trigg is the author of several books, including: Topophobia: a Phenomenology of Anxiety (2016); The Thing: a Phenomenology of Horror (2014); and The Memory of Place: a Phenomenology of the Uncanny (2012). With Dorothée Legrand, he is co-editor of Unconsciousness Between Phenomenology and Psychoanalysis (2017). His research concerns phenomenology and existentialism; philosophies of subjectivity and embodiment; aesthetics and philosophies of art; and philosophies of space and place.
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/

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/

