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Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Adam Davidson of University of South Florida, United States   Abstract: I seek to bridge an experiential and representational chasm between people with significant disabilities and their caregivers by exploring the intercorporeal connections between my son and me on a walk through our neighborhood. Through the materiality of the wheelchair, I consider the embodied knowledge we share of the spaces we traverse and how the contours of those spaces shape our knowledge(s) of our bodies thereby informing my knowledge of disability as both a social construct inscribed on my son’s body and as a shared lived experience.  Starting with Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the body as the “point of view upon the world” and utilizing his notion of “flesh,” I reflect upon the connections and exchanges between our bodies and with the world of our walk, all mediated through the simple technology of the manual wheelchair. The rhythms and anticipations, the obstacles and mishaps, and the transformation of the visual all give rise to knowledge of the disabled body, disability experience, and of disabling structures in the world. Through my contact with him and his chair and with the world, I discover my own experiential connections to his experience of disability. This phenomenological reading of our walk recenters the body in discourse on disability that often locates disability in social structures and institutions and risks marginalizing the lived experience of people with significant impairments. This work also offers a counter-narrative that foregrounds the interdependence and intercorporeality of caregiving and disability experience and opens up new possibilities for representation. Finally, my account reinforces phenomenological connections between the disabled body and the technologies that support and facilitate life and movement in and with the world. I challenge conceptions of technology as the new, digital, or innovative and reinforce the everydayness of fleshly contact between bodies and a simple machine.   Biography: Adam is an adjunct faculty member in the Judy Genshaft Honors College at the University of South Florida (USF) and writer on disability issues and parenting. In 2020, he co-led a semester study abroad program for USF students to the University of Exeter. His educational and research background includes musical performance, popular music studies, cultural studies, and Christian theology. He teaches courses on knowledge and ethics, popular music, and walking and civic engagement. His current research interests include parenting and caregiving for children with significant disabilities, conceptions of fatherhood, and walking as a cultural and creative practice.     Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Rhona J. Flynn (University of Vienna, Austria) & Martin Huth (Messerli Research Institute, Vienna / Department of Philosophy, University of Vienna, Austria)   Abstract: This talk will highlight classical phenomenology’s epistemic and ethical pitfalls in how it conceives of disabled and non-normate embodiment. Because Merleau-Ponty uses non-normate bodies primarily as contrast foil he runs the risk of misrepresenting non-normate embodiment and reinforcing ableism. The famous example of the blind man’s cane illustrates this well: (1) In imagining blindness as mere lack of sight, rather than a “world-creating” form of embodiment (Reynolds, 2017), Merleau-Ponty gets blindness wrong. Although Merleau-Ponty’s broader account provides us with the means to theorize any form of embodiment as full-blown existence, in misrepresenting blindness, and failing to account for variegated forms of embodiment with particular, non-normate capabilities, he tacitly falls prey to ableism and oculocentrism. (2) The description of the white cane as being included in the body schema mistakes object annexation or extension for incorporation (Reynolds, 2018); this is the result of an imaginative failure by a sighted agent regarding how visually impaired people relate to the world, their own embodiment, and how they use assistive technology. (3) Merleau-Ponty underestimates the social world in which the visibility of assistive technology can expose the body to others as non-normate and, thus, to stigmatization. In omitting “the social dimensions of disabled experiences” (Shew, 2020), he misses important aspects of how disabled people relate to assistive technology precisely because of that sociality. These investigations serve as a starting point for a reconsideration of phenomenology’s potential for the analysis of disability. Imaginative failures can perpetuate ableist stereotypes about disability and lead to epistemic failures. A more plural understanding of the body as vehicle of our being toward the world will recognize the ableist underpinnings of classical phenomenology, and build on the perspectives and experiences of disabled people.   Biography: Rhona J. Flynn is prae-doc with the FWF-funded research group “The Limits of Imagination: Animals, Empathy, Anthropomorphism” at the Messerli Research Institute (Vienna), and a member of the Vienna Doctoral School of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Their current research brings into contact feminist epistemology, philosophy of mind, and critical disability theory, to consider whether empathy (or something like it) could be considered a social-epistemic practice.   Martin Huth has been graduated from the University of Vienna with a dissertation on biomedical ethics from a phenomenological perspective. Since 2008 he is a lecturer at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna. Until 2011 he has also been working with people with cognitive disabilities and mental illnesses. In 2011 he became a Post Doc at the Messerli Research Institute in Vienna. His research interests comprise theories of vulnerability, empathy, political theory, disability studies, biomedical ethics and animal ethics. Since 2021 he is PI of the third-party funded project The Limits of Imagination: Animals, Empathy, Anthropomorphism.     Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Riad Alarian of The University of Toledo, United States   Abstract: The deployment of nostalgia as a neutral term of expository proportions has become common in political discourse. The promise of objectively analyzing the persuasions and activities of modern subjects for whom the past is apparently important largely explains the term’s discursive appeal. But it is not clear that the political deployment of nostalgia can be “neutral” in the way users hope for at least three reasons: (1) because debates over the term’s exact meaning remain central in enduring tensions over the boundaries of “modernity,” (2) because the term typically functions, in practice, to offer a partisan diagnosis of others’ memoric standpoints, and (3) because the term’s use seems to encompass a particular imagination of the “modern self” and the “un-modern other.” This paper probes these contentions by interrogating recent discourses on so-called Muslim nostalgia. I focus on these discourses for the simple reason that we live today in the age of the Muslim question which, in the words of the political theorist Anne Norton, is a time when “the figure of the Muslim has become the axis where questions of political philosophy and political theology, politics and ethics meet.” I argue that the diagnosis of “Muslim nostalgia” presents one of the clearest expressions of the term’s pejorative deployment, and I claim, in conclusion, that this allegedly neutral use of the term is not only encumbered by a variety of political impressions about time, history, memory, and modernity, but also works to corroborate a certain story about the world and the nostalgic subject’s place in it. Such discursive deployments of nostalgia act not only to dismiss the nostalgic subject’s claims in and about the world, but also to affirm the epistemic regime of a provincial form of modernity—often in the endeavor to deny the desire for radical transformation.   Biography: Riad Alarian is a part-time lecturer in philosophy at the University of Toledo. He holds an MA in philosophy from the University of Toledo, an MSc in political theory from the University of Edinburgh, and a BA in philosophy from the George Washington University.     Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Teresa Fazan of the University of Warsaw, Poland   Abstract: I would like to propose a contribution discussing the phenomenology of resistance that emerged in 2020 after the Constitutional Tribunal de facto banned abortion in Poland from the perspective of analysis of participants’ affects and emotions. First, I wish to discuss the current situation of abortion in Poland and familiarise listeners with social mobilisation defending reproductive justice, which emerged during the All-Poland Women’s Strike. Then, I wish to engage in a deepened analysis of the interviews I conducted with the protesters during the mobilisation at the break of 2020 and 2021. At the time, I interviewed them in order to understand how singular acts of resistance gained social and political meaning, granted agency to the participants, and helped understand the ends of the movement (Bennet & Segerberg 2012, Korolczuk 2018, Majewska 2021). For this particular presentation, I want to look at how the interviewees described their emotions and shifts in their changing attitudes, how they experienced the relationship between the bodily presence at the site of the protests, personal affects, and collective action with its broader meaning-making processes (Butler 2015, Fraser 1990, McNay 2000). The very specific situatedness of their experiences exposes the power dynamics between different agents (government bodies, police force, activists, citizens), the different strategies of resistance, and the way new possibilities for expression and opposition emerge during lived protest action. In my analysis, I wish to employ a feminist approach to phenomenology in order to treat affects and emotions as political tools shaping attitudes and mobilising agents to take stands and engage in the social movement.     Biography: Teresa Fazan — a Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Warsaw. I studied philosophy and gender studies at the University of Warsaw and Central European University in Vienna. In my research, I am particularly interested in feminist philosophy, postcolonial studies, and issues regarding the politics of reproduction.   Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Sepehr Razavi of University of Edinburgh, UK   Abstract: A breakthrough conceptual distinction in the interdisciplinary research on self-conscious emotions concerns the difference between shame and guilt: whereas guilt concerns circumscribed deeds, shame is a negative evaluation of the self as a whole (Lewis 1971; Tangney 2002; Cavell 2003). This has drawn the interest of classical phenomenologists from Scheler, Levinas, and Sartre to more contemporary ones such as Felipe León, Dan Zahavi, and Luna Dolezal insofar as this distinction grounds a robust understanding of the self. Although disagreements emerge at the level of assessing the degree of social mediation involved in shame and whether the “ugly feeling” can lead to self-improvement (Tangney and Dearing 2004, 3, 55; Deonna, Rodogno, and Teroni 2012, 35), shame’s reflexive function in face-to-face and social encounters has been stressed by the phenomenological tradition. However, an instance of shame that has been far less studied within this tradition, especially in light of a reflexive dimension, is in shame as the triadic object of collective intentionality. As a case study, I will elaborate on the national shame following the Truth and Reconciliation Commission reports on the state violence towards Canada’s indigenous population in “residential schools.” What will transpire is that empirical testimonies show ambiguity and cross-contamination where research had tried to neatly delineate between emotions of a common semantic field that includes embarrassment, denial, shame, and guilt, among other negative emotions (Regan 2011, 55). However, these mixed emotions are demonstrative of a process of narrative identity that ties the non-native population of Canada as standing opposed to first nation communities.   Biography: Sepehr Razavi is an MSc student in Mind, Language and Embodied Cognition at the University of Edinburgh. Using the frameworks of classical and contemporary phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, he is interested in the concept of normality as it relates to research on emotions and pathologies.       Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Sarah Pawlett Jackson of the University of London and St Mellitus College, UK   Abstract: In this paper I will explore a phenomenology of the menstrual cycle, focusing on the cycle’s rhythm as a form of lived temporality. This is an underexplored area of phenomenological and philosophical analysis yet is of far-reaching empirical and social significance. I will consider ways that the subject can be alienated from this rhythm as a result of a dominant cultural narrative of ‘linear time’. Whilst most phenomenological analyses of temporality have majored on Husserl’s ecstatic time-consciousness, Henri LeFebvre focuses on a conceptual and phenomenological analysis of temporality as rhythmic, where this is ‘founded on the experience and knowledge of the body’ (LeFebvre 2004, 78). In a similar vein, Thomas Fuchs (2018) lays out a series of ways that human embodiment is cyclically rhythmed. This fundamental cyclicity, he argues, finds itself in discordance with ‘the linear conception of time [that] finds its shape in the scientific-technological advances of modernity’ (Fuchs 2018, 48). Neither LeFebvre nor Fuchs look specifically at the embodied rhythm of the menstrual cycle. Nor do they look in any significant detail at how different bodies may disclose different rhythms. Building on their insights, I will consider aspects of a variable but identifiable rhythm through the lived experience of the ‘seasons’ of pre-ovulation, ovulation, pre-menstruation and menstruation. In this I will draw on the insights of the ’menstrual cycle awareness’ movement – a practice of attending to the lived experience of moods and energies in each quadrant of the cycle (Pope & Hugo Wurlitzer 2017). I will argue that the lived rhythm of the menstrual cycle is a specific form of Fuchs’ ‘cyclical time of the body’ that finds itself in tension with modernity’s ‘linear time’. I will argue further that this dissonance between the menstrual body and the social and political world tends to be compounded by a lack of ‘menstrual literacy’ in education and culture. This analysis therefore hopes to bring phenomenological analysis into conversation with normative and socio-political issues, contributing to the idea that the phenomenology of temporality is a feminist concern (Schües, Olkowski & Fielding, 2011).   Biography: Sarah Pawlett Jackson is a Tutor at the University of London and a Lecturer at St Mellitus College. She has also lecturers and tutored at Heythrop College, The Department for Continuing Education, University of Oxford and the University of Roehampton. Her primary research to date has been on the phenomenology of intersubjectivity. Her other research interests include embodiment and 4E cognition, phenomenology of emotion, ethics and philosophy of religion.     Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Nicole Miglio of the State University of Milan, Italy   Abstract: In this talk, I examine the process of pregnancy as a sense-making experience, taking seriously its significance both for the gestating self and for the fetal-other. Drawing on recent developments in phenomenology of pregnancy (e.g., Depraz, 2003; Heinämaa, 2014; Lymer, 2016; Miglio, 2019), as well as the flourishing interest in cognitive science (e.g., Ciaunica et al. 2021), my talk aims to show how in utero tactile and olfactory experiences are original to the being-in-the-world of the human self. In the womb, the subject experiences a unique co-constitution together with their environment, which is, at the same time, the “inside” of another self (the pregnant person).  In considering the gestational experience, I argue that the concept of intercorporeality allows us to grasp a common feature of the human being – namely, the fact that our own embodiment is not a private affair, but originally intercorporeal (cf Moran, 2017) The human self finds themselves in an intercorporeal dimension even before their own birth, and conversely the gestating self has some experiences of the fetal-other as living organism inside her – namely kicking, moving, and being with(in) her.  By challenging a widespread spatial conception of human pregnancy (in terms of “container” and “inside” see e.g. Dolezal, 2018), my analyses seek to open up a way to address the subject which starts from the phenomenological reality that we are not born as adult and indipendent subjects. Keywords: pregnancy; critical phenomenology; touch; intersubjectivity.     Biography: Nicole is a Postdoc Fellow at the Department of Philosophy, State University of Milan. She earned a Ph.D. in Feminist Phenomenology at the Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (Milan), during which she did research visiting stays in the US (George Washington University) and in the UK (University of Exeter). After her Ph.D. discussion in September 2021, she held a postdoctoral position at the Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Haifa. Dr. Miglio’s main research areas are contemporary aesthetics, critical phenomenology, and feminist philosophy. She is currently publishing her first monograph, “Gestational Phenomenology. The Radical Intercorporeality of Pregnancy” (forthcoming with Lexington Books).     Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/ 

Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality.   This episode features a presentation from Julia Zaenker of the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, Denmar     Abstract: In the last decades, 4E approaches to cognition have made a strong case for the premise that our social perception originates from our interactions and hence presupposes an inherently engaged perspective. To make this case, embodied and situated cognition are thought of as complementary programmes: Situated cognition is embodied, embodied cognition situated. Depending on the authors and, more crucially, the phenomena under study one has been emphasized over the other. However, these programmes are only meaningful tools for analysis if it is clear how they are different and how they relate to one another. Recent work in critical phenomenology has helped to bring politically and ethically relevant phenomena to the attention of 4E-cognition research. In light of these “critical issues”, it has been argued that situatedness needs to be taken (more) seriously (Maur). What does this imply for the relation of situated and embodied cognition? In what sense, if at all, should situated cognition become the primary concern? To address these questions, I draw on Iris Marion Young’s phenomenological contributions to feminist and political theory. Her work should be of interest for 4E-cognition research because Young maintains a nuanced balance between the notions of embodiment and situatedness across her phenomenological work. For example, her seminal paper ‘Throwing Like a Girl’ emphasizes situated embodiment over situatedness, while ‘Gender as Seriality’ highlights the role of experiences of anonymity due to situatedness. I argue that Young’s perspective on situatedness and embodiment is not straightforward and brings out a genuinely phenomenological and political perspective of what it is like to experience situatedness and situated embodiment. I advocate that this perspective can enlighten critical 4E-cognition approaches: Firstly, because it emphasizes the importance of a multifaceted approach to situatedness. Secondly, because it can highlight potential limits of addressing critical issues within an exclusively cognitive-epistemic framework.   Biography: Julia Zaenker has studied Philosophy and Chemical Engineering in Edinburgh, Darmstadt and Copenhagen and is currently a PhD-Fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. In her PhD project, she investigates the interrelation of second-personal engagement, communicative engagement, reciprocity and recognition with communal and collective experiences. She is affiliated with the ERC-advanced grant project “Who are We?” directed by Dan Zahavi.   Further Information:   This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds.   The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast.   About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with the final of four recordings of book panels from our Annual Conference held at University College Dublin. These book discussion panels allowed recent monograph authors to present their work in conversation with a respondent.   In this episode, Aengus Daly presents his recent monograph Heidegger's Metaphysics: The Overturning of 'Being and Time' (2024) in conversation with Georgios Petropoulos of the University of Galway   Abstract:  Heidegger’s Metaphysics explores how Heidegger continued the project of Being and Time, developing a new kind of metaphysics through a critique of Kantian transcendental philosophy. Drawing on Heidegger’s published work, lecture courses, drafts, and correspondence from the late 1920s, it reconstructs the philosophical justification for this project and its implications for Heidegger’s phenomenology of time and his understanding of philosophical concept formation. Daly proposes that Heidegger’s project neither failed nor remained indebted to a Kantian transcendental framework and challenges the widespread interpretation of Heidegger as a critic of metaphysics. This work examines a wide range of themes that have been largely neglected in discussions of Heidegger’s work, including a phenomenology of the mythical world (in dialogue with Ernst Cassirer’s work), the origin of religious concepts, the development of a temporality of thrownness, and Heidegger’s critique of Kantian transcendentalism. It finishes by challenging the separation of Heidegger’s philosophy from his politics and asks what we can retrieve from his project today.     Biography:  Aengus Daly teaches philosophy and is a researcher at the Institute for Transcendental Philosophy at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany. He has also translated philosophical works and numerous articles from German and French into English.     About this event: https://sites.google.com/view/licdublin2025   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with the third of four recordings of book panels from our Annual Conference held at University College Dublin. These book discussion panels allowed recent monograph authors to present their work in conversation with a respondent.   In this episode, Matthew Barnard presents his recent monograph Heidegger's Conception of Freedom: Beyond Cause and Effect (2024) in conversation with  Felix Ó Murchadha, University of Galway.   Abstract:    This book provides a thorough exploration of Martin Heidegger's distinctive understanding of freedom, examining how it departs fundamentally from traditional metaphysical conceptions rooted in causality. Heidegger's conception positions freedom not merely as the absence of constraints or the capacity to choose among alternatives, but rather as an existential phenomenon intimately bound up with the structures of human existence itself. Drawing deeply on Heidegger's key texts, the analysis reveals freedom as fundamentally tied to authenticity, possibility, and the temporal unfolding of Being.     By disentangling Heidegger’s notion of freedom from the conventional binaries of determinism and free will, the book illustrates how Heidegger locates freedom in the existentiality of Dasein, its destiny as the ultimate ground of all of its meaning and being as the abyssal locus of guilt. Crucially, freedom emerges as the condition that enables meaningful existence and genuine engagement with the world, thereby redefining human agency beyond mere cause and effect. Further, the volume argues against the consensus that Heidegger’s writings on freedom from 1927-1930 offer multiple changing conceptions of freedom, demonstrating instead that these writings work together to clarify and elaborate one unified conception of freedom.   Biography:    Matthew J. Barnard is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University and serves on the Executive Committee of the British Society for Phenomenology, as well as founder and editor of their podcast. His primary research has focused on Kant, Bergson, and Heidegger, culminating in his recent book, Heidegger’s Conception of Freedom: Beyond Cause and Effect (Palgrave, 2024). He is currently developing work on two new projects: the role and implications of generative AI in higher education, and the philosophical contributions of traditionally excluded early modern women philosophers. About this event: https://sites.google.com/view/licdublin2025   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/  

Season 7 continues with the second of four recordings of book panels from our Annual Conference held at University College Dublin. These book discussion panels allowed recent monograph authors to present their work in conversation with a respondent.   In this episode, Laura Jane Nanni presents her recent monograph The Porosity of the Self: Husserl's Philosophy of Self and Personhood (2024) in conversation with  Associate Professor Timothy Mooney of University College Dublin   Abstract:  The Porosity of the Self delivers an original interpretation of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology and one of the most important philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This recently published book challenges one-dimensional accounts of self and personhood that fail to capture the intricate double-sidedness of how we experience ourselves, others, and the world. The book demonstrates how Husserl's philosophy offers an important alternative account of the self as porous - a notion that emerges through a thematic reconstruction of Husserl's conceptions of embodiment, habituality, temporality, relationality, personhood, intersubjectivity, and sociality. Here, the case is made that the self should be understood as multidimensional, dynamic, and complex by highlighting its fundamentally permeable nature. The main argument of the book is that no one element of the self is experienceable in isolation, and that Husserl's understanding can equally accommodate the uniqueness of subjective experience as well as social, cultural, and historical inflections, without yielding constitutive priority to one dimension over the other. The book offers a renewed way of engaging with Husserl's philosophy and demonstrates how it can provide a rich supplementary perspective for fields such as critical phenomenology and feminist philosophy, as well as theories of self and personhood.   Biography:    Dr Laura Jane Nanni holds a PhD in philosophy from UCD where she currently works with the Centre for Ethics in Public Life. She is an APPA certified philosophical counsellor, a philosophical facilitator on "Thinking Changes" project (funded by the Irish Government Department of Foreign Affairs), and a member of the "no bump no care" non-profit network. Her area of expertise is in the field of classical, critical and applied phenomenology, and her current research focuses on the embodied lived experience of childbirth and infant-maternal relations within the obstetric led, and midwife managed medical model of maternity care in Ireland.   About this event: https://sites.google.com/view/licdublin2025   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 7 opens with the first of four recordings of book panels from our Annual Conference held at University College Dublin. These book discussion panels allowed recent monograph authors to present their work in conversation with a respondent. In this episode, Susi Ferrarello presents her recent monograph Phenomenology of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood (2025) in conversation with Professor Tanja Staehler of the University of Sussex   Abstract: The Phenomenology of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood is a recently published book that provides an ethical, social, and psychological investigation of the process of becoming a mother. Through a phenomenological analysis that engages with feminist philosophy, medical ethics, philosophy of care, and phenomenological psychology, I unravel the intricacies of this transformative phase of life to shed light on layers of lived experiences that impact the well-being of the woman. This book addresses the complexity of common lived-experiences characterizing this transition; the overarching period from the first to the fourth trimester, issues concerning maternal-fetal bonding, breastfeeding, PDAM, loss of identity and coming back to work. Enriched by case studies from my philosophical counseling practice, the book provides a compassionate and insightful exploration of the struggles, triumphs, and moments of self-revelation that mothers encounter in their daily lives. By exploring the heart of the maternal experience, this book shows the often-unspoken realities faced by women as they strive to balance their roles as caregivers, partners, and individuals. The book offers a powerful means for everyday reflection on early motherhood and the ethical, as well as practical, dilemmas it raises. This text explores phenomenology, ethics, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology, making it valuable for therapists and professionals interested in the complexities of pregnancy, motherhood, and women’s mental health.   Biography: Susi Ferrarello, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, East Bay. She specializes in phenomenology, bioethics, feminist philosophy, and mental health, with a focus on perinatal care and the ethical implications of technology in healthcare. She has authored and edited several books, including Phenomenology of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood, The Ethics of Love, The Origin of Bioethics and Human Emotions and Bioethics and Technoethics. Beyond academia, she is the co-founder of NoBumpNoCare (U.S.) and Slancio (Italy), nonprofits dedicated to perinatal care and social solidarity. She actively mentors students and healthcare professionals and organizes international conferences on bioethics and philosophy. She works also as a philosophical counselor and writes for Psychology Today.    About this event: https://sites.google.com/view/licdublin2025   About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Mariia Galkina, Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris.  Mariia Galkina 'Towards a phenomenology of environmental shame'  Abstract: This contribution aims to study the phenomenon of environmental shame and its role in awakening of ecological consciousness. It starts with the problem of asymmetry of human power that marks the current ecological transition. On the one hand, the growing ecological footprint testifies to excess of human power over the environment which leads to the sixth mass extinction and endangers planetary balance. On the other, facing ecological crisis, human, paradoxically, finds himself more powerless than ever. Powerless to slow down and to challenge his daily production and consumption practices by refusing to take their consequences into account. In a word, powerless to suspend his own power. One should ask then how to catalyze this suspension. My argument is to consider shame as such a feeling that turns an excess of human power over the environment into “potential-not-to”. Making use of this ontological concept developed by Agamben in order to think the negativity of human power that shame activates, the paper elaborates a phenomenology of “environmental shame”. Since suspending power requires to challenge its ethical justification by measuring the extent of its destructive consequences for other species, it is nothing but shame where freedom becomes aware of its murderous character that answers the need of self-limitation of human power over the environment. My concept of “environmental shame” develops Levinasian approach that defines shame as a discovery of injustified facticity of power and freedom, but rethinking it from the human relation to other endangered and vulnerable living beings. Shame, I argue, is a revolutionary feeling able to operate a conversion of environmental consciousness and transform our manner of being in the world by actualizing the “potential-not-to”, i.e. the negative potential that allows inoperativity of human power.  Bio: Maria Galkina is a pre-thesis student in philosophy at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris (PSL). Her research interests cover phenomenology of emotions and environmental ethics. Her Master's thesis (2021, ENS-PSL) focused on the dialectic of negativity and creativity of shame, namely analyzing the works of Levinas, Agamben and Dostoevsky. Next year Maria starts her PhD thesis under the supervision of Dr. Marc Crépon (Archives Husserl Laboratory, ENS-PSL). thesis will propose a phenomenology of environmental shame making use of both phenomenological and psychological methods and mobilizing, among others, the conceptions of Levinas and Günther Anders.  This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.  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? 

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Paul Tuppeny, University of the Arts, London (Chelsea College of Art).  Paul Tuppeny '“I didn't want their past to be a mark on them.”(R. Rauschenberg): A Sculptor's Investigation into the Phenomena of Objective Age'  Abstract: It is in the nature of the world to be a place of constant change and transformation; trees grow, skin wrinkles and paint discolours. Every state of being is finite and all opportunity is fleeting.   In his insistence that his 1951 White Paintings be regularly overpainted, the artist Robert Rauschenberg recognised how such ‘natural' processes of change not only generate affect in our interpretation of physical objects but, in doing so, can make us ‘feel' time. Intrinsic to the apparatus of perception are pre-cognitive judgements concerning the transformative processes that define our world and which we experience as ‘age'; through these perceptual intuitions, derived from momentary observations, we are able to ‘chronicle' the flux and stabilise our environment . The paper sets down hypotheses concerning the mechanisms that underlie age phenomena, developed through a doctoral research project pairing traditional literature-based research with the practice of sculpture, proposing routes by which these structures adjust meaning and generate affect. Convergent aspects of several phenomenological primary sources, including Aristotle, Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, are interwoven to illuminate our interaction with the material-temporality of the world. Throughout the research, this relationship is given physical expression through three-dimensional artworks. Central to our experience of age are the processes through which we assimilate the changing nature  of entities (biographic mental object-files) around temporal-archetypes, the states in which objects carry greatest meaning, significance or use for us. Clearly an informed understanding of our experience of objective age is crucial not just for artists like Rauschenberg, but for anyone engaged with the physical world. Armed with a structured view of how age ‘moves' us we can progress toward being culturally comfortable with the phenomenon, both in ourselves and the things around us, leading to relationships within our society which displace damaging predispositions toward the young and the new.  Bio: Formerly an architect, Paul Tuppeny completed his MA Fine Art in 2016, also receiving an award in the National Sculpture Prize that year. He was longlisted for The Ruskin Prize in 2017 and 2019 and has exhibited across the UK with outdoor venues including Broomhill and Cotswolds Sculpture Parks. Gallery exhibitions include Atkinson Gallery(Street), Sluice Art at Oxo Tower, Edge Gallery(Bath), ING Discerning Eye, Jubilee Library, Grand Parade Gallery(Brighton), and Murmuration Gallery and De La Warr Pavilion(Bexhill). Paul was invited to join the Royal Society of Sculptors in 2017 and is currently researching his PhD at Chelsea College of Art(UAL).  This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.  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? 

Season 6 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Adam Takacs, Eötvös Loránd University Budapest.  Adam Takacs 'Ageing Being: Temporality, Corporeality, and Shared World'  Abstract:   “The objective world is incapable of sustaining time”, writes Maurice Merleau-Ponty in the Phenomenology of Perception, and almost the entire phenomenological tradition seems to echo this thesis from Husserl to Heidegger and beyond. Besides the fact that this claim appears to be at odds with the findings of historical science, and archaeology in particular, it also blocks the way to explore a phenomenological possibility. The possibility of looking at the experience of temporality not in terms of ecstatic subjectivity, but in terms of material and corporeal ageing. This paper sets out to develop two arguments: 1) The first is that the phenomenon of “ageing” – taken as a synonym of temporal change or becoming – can be meaningfully presented in a phenomenological framework as a general ontological condition that is shared by all material and corporeal beings, including the human subject. 2) The second is that the manifestation of the shared nature of ageing can reveal implications for a new phenomenological understanding of already familiar experiential qualities. I will argue that the experience of growing old with things and with the material environment disclose a disposition that informs a common horizon of memory, empathy, and corporeality.   Bio:   Adam Takács is Senior Lecturer in philosophy and humanities at Eötvös Loránd University Budapest, and currently Visiting Professor at the University of Alberta, Canada (2021-2023). His publications include Le fondement selon Husserl (Paris, 2014), Traces de l'Etre. Heidegger en France et en Hongrie (Paris, 2016), and more recently “Time and Matter: Historicity, Facticity and the Question of Phenomenological Realism”, Human Studies (vol. 41, no. 4: 661-676.).  This recording was taken from our recent conference. The British Society for Phenomenology 2022 Annual UK Conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality' (30 August – 1 September), convened by the University of Exeter, in person and online. This event was co-sponsored by the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health, Egenis, the Shame and Medicine research project, the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project, and the British Society for Phenomenology; and included two special panel series from the Shame and Medicine research project and the Imagining Technologies for Disability Futures (itDf) research project.  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?