Bsp Podcast

Season five of our podcast features presentations from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. In this episode we release one of our keynote talks, that of Professor Dan Zahavi. Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy, University of Copenhagen, Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford, and Director of the Center for Subjectivity Research (CFS).   ABSTRACT: At its core, phenomenology is a philosophical endeavour. Given its distinctly philosophical nature, one might reasonably wonder whether it can offer anything of value to positive science. Can it at all inform empirical work? There can, however, be no doubt about the answer to these questions. For more than a century, phenomenology has provided crucial inputs to a variety of disciplines in the social sciences and the humanities, including psychology, sociology, and anthropology. Within the last few decades, phenomenology has also been an important source of inspiration, not only for theoretical debates within qualitative research but als

Welcome back to the British Society for Phenomenology Podcast. Season five features presentations from our 2020 annual conference: ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ Online. We begin, however, with an interview given by Professor Luna Dolezal, the host of the event. Dolezal is associate professor in Philosophy and Medical Humanities in the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. The interview was recorded in August of this year, and first released to conference attendees. The interviewers are Jessie Stanier and Hannah Berry from the event team.   In the interview Dolezal talks about what the theme of ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ means to her, as well as how she got into phenomenology and her research interests, her love of yoga, and how phenomenology can inform activism. Performance artist Marina Abramović also gets a look in.   BIOS:    Professor Luna Dolezal is associate professor in philosophy and medical humanities, the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of He

Season Four of British Society for Phenomenology Podcast concludes with one of the keynotes from our 2019 Annual Conference. Keith Crome is Principal Lecturer in Philosophy, and Education Lead for the Department of History, Politics and Philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University; as well as the BSP Impact Director.    ABSTRACT: While schooling is a serious business, and education requires discipline, we are often told by educationalists, and also by our students, to make learning fun. There is an obvious extrinsic justification for doing this. As John Dewey noted a century ago in Democracy and Education (1916), experience has shown that allowing pupils to play makes going to school a joy — or at least provides relief from the tedium and strain of regular school work — and management less of a burden. Nevertheless, the link between education and play, familiar to us all (who hasn’t learnt by playing?), is fundamental. The aim of this talk is to explore this connection and its implications for a radical c

Season four of the BSP Podcast continues with a paper from Hannah Berry, University of Liverpool. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.   ABSTRACT: When considering and reflecting on language, do we empathise with the interlocutor by simulating thoughts, feelings and actions? Do we project ourselves into the narrator’s shoes via simulation? Does this, then, create a boundary between the listener’s understanding, the person’s actual experience and their communication of the experience?  This paper will steer away from traditional literary-linguistic themes of stylistic analysis and will approach interdisciplinary narratives from phenomenological descriptions of experience and empathy. Lay understanding of the term ‘empathy’ suggests that you “put yourself in someone else’s shoes” when considering another person’s experience. However, no-one else’s “shoes” fit in the same way and this creates a border between narratives. The traditional approach t

The BSP Podcast turns to a paper from Francesca Brencio, University of Seville, Spain. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.   ABSTRACT: Phenomenology has recently contributed to illuminate medicine and in setting up different theoretical frameworks. The scope of applying phenomenology to healthcare is not to select symptoms in view of a nosographical diagnosis, rather is to recover the underlying characteristic modification that keeps the manifold of phenomena meaningfully interconnected in the life-world of the person. This contribution intends to show how the phenomenological method applied to psychiatry implies a new understanding of psychopathological phenomena, conceived as a coherent way of being in the world, and its peculiarities lie in recovering the underlying characteristic modification that keeps the manifold of phenomena meaningfully interconnected in the life-world of the person, in describing and understanding the inner experienc

Season four of the BSP Podcast continues with a paper from William Large, University of Gloucestershire. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.   ABSTRACT: This paper offers a broad historical analysis of atheism and a new conceptual definition. It describes three kinds of atheism: atheism of being, atheism of the idea, and atheism of the word. The first is an atheism of a metaphysical order and science; the second an atheism of morality; and the third an atheism of the community and the word. Each atheism comes in an historical sequence but are conceptually distinct. In terms of the traditional divisions of philosophy, the first atheism is ontology, the second is ethical, and the third is aesthetic and political. This historical sequence is not a necessary one, but contingent, and because each atheism is conceptually distinct, they can emerge at any time. Cutting across this horizontal historical series of atheism, is a vertical distinction betwe

Our podcast turns to a paper from Pablo Andreu, University of Zaragoza, Spain, and University College Dublin (UCD), Ireland.. The recording is taken from our 2019 Annual Conference, ‘The Theory and Practice of Phenomenology’.   ABSTRACT: The following paper aims to open the reader to a comprehension of death from a phenomenological and hermeneutical point of view. Set against the background work of Max Scheler and Martini Heidegger’s analysis of the phenomenon, we adopt Paul Louis Landsberg’s interpretation of death as an “ontological infidelity”. Such definition of death deals with a fundamental and original predisposition to believe, which we recognize as faith. This faith, which stand as a complete openness to the other, is an essential constituent of human existence, without which we cannot understand Heidegger’s Angst. As such, we postulate that this faith is ontologically prior to Heidegger’s anxiety. As Landsberg says, “the anguish of death, and not only the pain of dying, would be incomprehensible o

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 cruci

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 P

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-consciousne

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 framew

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

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

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 syn

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

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 rectorat

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 appropriat

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? Th

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 creat

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’ (Vol