Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a presentation from David Deamer

 

Abstract:

Luisa Rey is reading the letters of a dead man: ‘I’m trying to understand’, she says, why ‘we keep making the same mistakes over and over’. Somewhat abashed, Adam Ewing recites a question from 12 memory, ‘how do we know what we can change, and what things must remain sacred and inviolable?’ Sonmi-451 is in magnetic shackles facing the Archivist. Fabricants, she responds accusingly, ‘have just one possible future’. Zachry listens in dread to the Abbess; possessed, she warns him of the dangerous days ahead: ‘Bridge a broken, hide below. Hands a bleedin, can’t let go. Enemy’s sleepin, don’t slit that throat’. In a cheap hotel, Robert Frobisher signs a letter to his lover with ‘Yours Eternally’, then shoots himself with a stolen Luger. Timothy Cavendish beams. After all the awfulness of the last few days, yes, ‘tomorrow life can begin afresh, afresh, afresh!’ Cloud Atlas (Wachowskis, Tykwer | 2012) concerns six very different characters traversing very different times and very different spaces across the world over some 500 years. These vectors are a loop composed of a disjunctive mosaic of images rendering a complex narration of disparate genres and tones, where the life of each character is captured in the crisis of their present while synchronously effecting and affecting the future vector. Accordingly, I argue, Cloud Atlas has a narrative that sees futurity as polysemous – a perspectival simultaneity of stasis and flux; anticipation, destiny, and novelty; circularity, progress, revolution, and decay. To make this argument I employ Nietzsche, expressly Beyond Good and Evil (1886), sub-titled as it is Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future. Such resonance with the film, in turn, provides a lens on Nietzsche’s text, as staging the problems of the subject, society, drives, bodies and will in the present as a concern of a fundamental philosophy of the future: beyond brute oppositions of open or closed, static or dynamic, freedom or necessity (§2;§24).

 

Biography:

Dr David Deamer is a free scholar whose research focuses upon cinema, culture, and the philosophy of Deleuze, Bergson, and Nietzsche. He is the author of two books on Deleuze (EUP 2016; Bloomsbury 2014). His most recent essay is ‘Deleuze’s Three Syntheses Go to Hollywood’ (2019), written for Film-Philosophy and shortlisted for the journal’s Annual Article Award 2020 (losing out to something far better). Deamer irregularly appears at conferences and invited seminars, tries to maintain a couple of blogs, and is co-presenter of the philoscifiz podcast (exploring on-screen sci-fi and philosophy). He has been working on a book on Nietzsche and cinema for some time.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

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 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a presentation from J. Reese Faust

 

Abstract:

Frantz Fanon closes his two major works with appeals to alter the flesh of the social world: Black Skin, White Masks pleas for a “sloughing off” of one’s skin (« un dépouillement »), while The Wretched of the Earth calls for us to “make a new skin” (« faire peau neuve »). Despite the clear influence that his notion of the body schema had on Fanon, it is surprising that Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the “flesh of the world” (« le chair du monde ») does not feature more frequently in scholarship—particularly so given Fanon’s sociogenic account of collective meaning-making. In this paper, I will read the diplopic ontology of Merleau-Ponty alongside the similarly deferred ontology that Fanon tacitly uses in Wretched of the Earth. I will argue that reading Fanonian sociogeny in terms of the flesh of the world renders his ethical and political demands all the more pressing, because it renders the future already pre-figured—although not totally determined—in the present. On this account, if the present quite literally consists in the socio-ontological grounding for any possible future, then embodied activity constructs and delimits those futures as part of the same ethico-ontological totality. In this sense, I argue that the future cannot be a “given,” since our embodied, intersubjective activity is what constitutes the horizons against which we act toward/in light of those futures. Since the ethical demands of the determinable future redound back onto those of the present, (in)capability is equivalent to futurity. I conclude by reflecting on how this reading alters Sylvia Wynter’s Fanonian call to (re)fashion the future of humanness, through (re)conceptualising “being human as praxis.”

 

Biography:

J. Reese Faust is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at The University of Memphis. His primary areas of research are philosophy of law/critical legal theory and contemporary Continental philosophy, with interests in decolonial thought and social and political philosophy. He is currently writing a dissertation articulating a critical legal hermeneutic, using embodied phenomenology and Ronald Dworkin’s notion of dignity.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

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 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a presentation from Isabel Rocamora

 

Abstract:

My current moving image project, The Deep, focuses on Scotland’s rich and coveted natural resources to consider the impacts of human actions and technologies on the environment and local communities – groundwater contamination, air and sound pollution, the fracturing and depletion of the earth’s integrity – alongside the vitalising connection between human life and the forces of nature. The aim of this paper is to share concrete ways in which Heidegger’s mid-30s’ Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event) and “The Origin of the Work of Art” inspire and inform the conceptual frame, structure and aesthetic principles guiding my creative process. I do this in three moves. I first place factual research findings in dialogue with a Heideggerian ‘Ethics of the Earth’, which I locate in the interplay (or strife) between the sense of “emergency” (Polt 2006) characterising our anthropogenic epoch (for Heidegger the “abandonment” of being and nature in “machination” and 39 surface experience) and the originary “emergence” of being, nature and world (Storey 2015). This oscillating event – thought by Heidegger as one of appropriation, ereignis – helps me imagine an artwork that, while remaining mindful of “the background” that makes our world meaningful, offers an open (because interruptive) site for the intensification of thinking and questioning, in realtime. For me, after Heidegger and in dialogue with Zabala (2017), this means summoning in the viewer “shock and diffidence” – trauma and awe, emergency and emergence – through visual treatments of scale, juxtaposition, rupture and temporality. I illustrate my process with photographic experiments that, placing the ancient geologies of the low-lying Outer Hebrydes alongside gigantic decommissioned North Sea oil rigs today berthed in Cromarty Firth, aim to plunge us into a sense of “deep time” (Wood 2019), attuning us to self and world in a present moment from which a sustainable future on Earth may be freshly envisaged.

 

Biography:

Isabel Rocamora is a moving image artist and scholar working at the intersections of ethics, aesthetics and phenomenology. She received her AHRC-funded PhD on relations between experimental cinema and Heidegger’s early ontology from the University of Edinburgh (2019) and is presently a visiting scholar-artist at Pompeu Fabra University, Center for Vattimo’s Philosophy and Archives. Isabel’s multi-awarded moving image works have been widely exhibited, e.g.: Palazzo Strozzi, Florence; National Museum of Photography, Copenhagen; Koffler Gallery, Toronto; Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Israel; Austrian Cultural Forum, NYC; and Channel 4 UK. Recent publications include a practitioner essay in Cinematic Intermediality (EUP).

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

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 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a presentation from Aanastasios Dimopoulos

 

Abstract:

Among the various effects of the recent pandemic was the need to adapt the means of delivering mental healthcare in the community. The use of online platforms which were already there as possibilities to use sparingly, suddenly became the self-evident norm to adopt. Very soon it became clear that remote consultations will not be an interim measure, relegated for the period during the pandemic. The voices suggesting that they are the future of healthcare became dominant. Advantages such as “increased patient access” were illustrated as obvious benefits to maximise available resources. The language of resource is dominant in healthcare that considerations about what cannot be measured are neglected. This is not a wilful neglect but rather an emergent self-evident attitude that appropriated in its ontological presuppositions enframes its intentional horizon in a discourse aimed to identify resources and optimise their outcomes. If the premise is right, then what will be the impact in mental healthcare. The articulation of clinical judgement in psychiatry relies heavily in the expertise gained in the context of embodied encounters between patient and clinician. What Polanyi calls the demonstrative elements that give rise to an act of recognition of something as a particular case belong to a space of encounter that is constitutionally different. Furthermore, this “difference” is still in its infancy. Intuitively, this “difference” is grasped mostly as “absence of habit” that is supplemented by pre-existing embodied encounters and of an increased reliance on ready-made theoretical constructs. This act of “filling in” will likely fade away over time 13 because it will lose the ability to flexibly understand distinctions in the phenomena. New implicit rules will take their own form, not yet possible to capture theoretically. In the coming decades, this is likely the Event with the most transformative potential and happens with Care mostly silent.

 

Biography:

Dr Anastasios Dimopoulos works as a Consultant Psychiatrist in the NHS and in the private sector. Currently, he is involved with the Community Transformation Project that aims to change the way mental health services are delivered in the community. He is trained in Daseinsanalysis and is a member of the International Federation of Daseinsanalysis. Furthermore, he holds an MA in Philosophy of Mental Health at UCL. His special interest is the introduction of philosophy to medical education in mental health, to address complexity and uncertainty. He has recently been elected chair of The Philosophy SIG of the Royal College of Psychiatry.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

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 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a presentation from Tomás Lally

 

Abstract:

In this paper I want to flip the conference theme and privilege the living present. The integratedness of temporal consciousness is such that this flipping is possible. The conference theme emphasises concerns about the future in the present moment but I want to emphasise how what is happening now will be a future concern. We cannot change the past but we can act in the present to effect change in what will be considered part of the past tomorrow. Right now in the midst of the COVID 19 pandemic previously unthinkable measures may be necessary, but that this does not invalidate critique. Humanity is experiencing a collective trauma, we are sacrificing our rights and freedoms for the sake of an uncertain future, a future in which we will experience to a greater or lesser extent what we might describe as COVID-lateral damage. This paper will show, drawing on Merleau-Ponty how in the present crisis the dialogue of touch has been undermined, we are virtually present but bodily absent, bodily present but distant, the face of the other is masked, an ethical demand (Levinas) muted, the other’s status as autonomous subject has been recast as potentially infectious object (the Sartrean other). This paper will argue on the basis of Arendt’s account of the gap between past and future that in the living present we have a duty to mitigate future regrets and future trauma. In privileging the present as a future concern we emphasize its existential possibility for responsible autonomous ethical action. This is a requirement lest we arrive in a post COVID future framing a retrospective narrative about powerlessness and lack of autonomy, proffering the Nuremberg defense. This thesis has application not only in the present but in every future present.

 

Biography:

Tomás Lally completed degrees in Philosophy in the 1980's, B.A (NUIM), B.Ph. (Pont. Univ. Maynooth.) and M.A, (University of London). I returned to academia after an absence of 30 years in 2017 to commence a practice based PhD in English and Philosophy. He combines his interest in philosophy with his interest in creative writing. His PhD project consists of a Philosophy thesis exploring the origin and development of Self in an intersubjective context. He is also writing a Novel on the theme of new beginnings which explores how received narratives define character and the possibility of deconstructing these narratives.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

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 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a presentation from Ruth Irwin

 

Abstract:

Knowledge and memory are closely entwined. The advent of technologies such as the written word, clay tablets, paper, and the printing press, have transformed knowledge transmission from the oral tradition. Technologies have been highlighted as crucial to the formation of exosomatic memory and increasingly sophisticated human knowledge by Leroi-Gourhan, Derrida, Stiegler and others. Technologies interrupt the need for immediate experience or direct transmission from elders to youth. This positions technologies such as writing, art, and more recently, cinema, and computers at the forefront of cultural transmission, knowledge production, and education. Stiegler follows Leroi-Gourhan (1945) and Martin Heidegger (1927) to examine technology and exosomatic memory from the Palaeolithic to the modern. Heidegger’s critique of technology as the enframing of modern thought is at play. Heidegger argues that people have become alienated from the natural environment, as everything, from human subjectivity to the historical and ecological context are understood as consumable resources, waiting in standing reserve. The presumptions of technology as a moderator and catalyst of exosomatic memory has failed to understand how the natural environment was incorporated into indigenous modes of knowledge and epistemology as an exosomatic tool. Stiegler argues that technology is accelerating beyond the capacity of brain synapses to keep up. Consequently, the human mind has become passively receptive rather than dynamic and creative. Artificial Intelligence directs research pathways and creates community ‘bubbles’ where alternative viewpoints are uninteresting and excluded. With an increasing lack of exposure to alternative viewpoints, people are participating less in their wider community and this has impacts on democratic participation and the ability to forge compromise and new understanding. Diversity is still present but its exposure is less prolific. The apathy and passivity generated by the screen is cultivating an avoidance of engagement, like a late modern ‘opiate of the masses’ that allows the capitalist forces producing climate change to continue. Perhaps reevaluating how indigenous exosomatic memory engages with the environment rather than alienating it, may help us to creatively overcome the acceleration of technology and its consequences in consumerism.

 

Paper part of pre-constituted panel with Joff P.N. Bradley:

 

‘Interrogating Stiegler on Determinism and the Anthropocene’ – Stiegler's work on technology and the Anthropocene takes in Heidegger's critical account of modern determinism, the enframing of epistemology as consumer demand. Stiegler follows Heidegger's lead by seeking a more originating approach to technology, in the earliest palaeolithic record, right up to the contemporary technology of quantum computing and robotics. Paleaolithic techne evolved devices such as cave art that shape knowledge with exosomatic memory. Stiegler's route traverses the thermodynamic economics of Georgescu-Roegen from which he develops his important concept of neganthropy. Stiegler's compelling work signals searching for a diluted 'phamakon' for emerging from the eschatological Anthropocene and forging a possible future. The enframing of the technological Gestell is maintained and exacerbated with accelerated technology. Both Kropotkin and Maori philosophy, in vastly different ways, create a foil to this determinism, throwing up alternatives that counter the modernist epistemological framework. Futures cannot abandon the savvy technological innovation of late modernity when there is 7.7 billion people to nourish, but indigenous and literary modes of knowing merge wild ecologies and anarchic concepts to global culture, opening up modernity beyond its consumerist framework.

 

Biography:

Ruth Irwin is an Adjunct Professor at RMIT and writing climate change policy for local government in Sydney. She is working on a new book, called Economic Futures, which will come out with Routledge shortly. Her earlier books include Heidegger, Politics and Climate Change, (2008) Bloomsbury, and Climate Change and Philosophy (2010), Bloomsbury, amongst others

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

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 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a presentation from Daire Boyle

 

Abstract:

In his 1913 work Ideas I, Edmund Husserl stated that “[c]ertainly an incorporeal and, paradoxical as it may sound, even an inanimate and non-personal consciousness is conceivable” (§54). This quote, understood in context, serves to underline the irreducibility of consciousness even after the world is “nullified” or “annihilated”. That this annihilation could happen is due to the phenomenological reduction; Husserl does not wish to deny the existence of the natural world, but simply wishes to consider the consequences of putting our naturalistic understanding of it out of play. In the context of artificial intelligence this assessment of consciousness is impossible to overlook; Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity, as outlined in Ideas I, describes what consciousness truly is like no other philosophical movement. Many thinkers use Husserl’s phenomenological understanding of consciousness as a roadblock for machine consciousness – how could machines, created by man, ever have access to the specifically non-naturalistic mechanism of consciousness? We argue that there is another way to interpret Husserl’s work, and support this by analysing strands of his argumentation that can be characterised as open to the possibility of artificial consciousness. We further argue that Husserl’s transcendental subjectivity, as method, must be broadened in assessing technologies arising out of a rapidly-changing world in order to prepare ourselves for the future of AI research and its potentialities. The philosophical anthropology of Max Scheler is suitable for this task, especially given Scheler’s appreciation of Husserl’s phenomenological project. Breakthroughs in artificial intelligence research from computer science will continue at an exponential rate, therefore we must use the insights of Husserl and Scheler to presage this coming new epoch and deepen our understanding of what it means to be conscious.

 

Paper part of pre-constituted panel with Susan Gottlöber and Dave O'Brien:

 

”The World as Technological Advancement” – Perspectives from Philosophical Anthropology and Phenomenology on Transhumanism, Consciousness, AI, and our future concerns’ This panel will assess three contemporary and future issues that are of serious imminent concern to philosophy; namely, transhumanism, machine/artificial consciousness, and consciousness in light of rapid technological advancements. Each panel member's paper shall address these concerns with reference to philosophical anthropology as foundational paradigm, while phenomenological methods shall be employed to better analyse and evaluate said concerns. The link between philosophical anthropology and phenomenology shall be emphasised and concepts from Max Scheler, in particular, will be examined in phenomenological terms.

 

Biography:

Daire Boyle is a 3rd-year PhD candidate at Maynooth University and is currently studying in KU Leuven. He is also a graduate teaching assistant at Maynooth University, and has experience of guest lecturing. Daire completed a BSc in Computer Science, Mathematics, and Philosophy in 2017, and an MA in Philosophy in 2018, both at Maynooth University. His current work, and PhD thesis, 7 seeks to utilise Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology as an answer to modern debates on consciousness and machine consciousness. This is an interdisciplinary project and the thesis considers contemporary results from computer science in assessing the possibility for artificial consciousness.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

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 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a presentation from Javier Moscoso Cala

 

Abstract:

‘A New Humanism? The Precarious Condition of the Human in Judith Butler’ To be qualified as human is a troubling matter after anti-humanistic critiques to humanness. Despite this, some thinkers such as Judith Butler have returned to using the term "the human" to refer to 30 something more than a universal whose production is exclusionary. In this paper I propose to deem the human in terms of a precarious condition intertwined in the midst of animal life and nature. This human life is persistently exposed to violence as derealisation of life and humanness. This refurbishment of the human allows us to think of it as a process open to the future. The movement of the human is characterised by a dynamic of catachresis, subversive reiteration and performative contradiction. The possibility of reiteration and performative contradiction is made possible when derealisation lives unexpectedly speak to the human on its own terms. This point refers to the instability of every form that the universal of the human takes, its attributes and its movement. Yet it is still possible to wonder about the condition of precariousness in which the universal of the human always takes place. The unstable relation of the human to the natural, the animal, life and technology leads to unstable limits of what is recognisable as human. The possibility of violence intrinsic to the human reveals its inevitable condition of vulnerability, whereby not only is any life exposed to injury but also to no longer being considered a human life. Judith Butler is an author who manages to restore the human by thinking on its condition and not on its attributes. The condition of crisis and precariousness of the human, made and unmade by language, its multiple relations and normativity, opens every figure of the human to a future that is yet to come.

 

Biography:

Javier Moscoso Cala is a Postgraduate Researcher at University of Malaga. His interests are vulnerability and the human in contemporary philosophers Adriana Cavarero and Judith Butler. He recently published "Apuntes para una política precaria del duelo en tiempos de covid-19", in Nacho Escutia, María Begoña Fleitas and Teresa Oñate (ed.) Pandemia, Globalización, Ecología, Madrid, Fénix-UNED, 2020, 85-94. He presented several papers in local and international conferences in Spain and is in charge of Derivas. Seminario Permanente de Estética at Complutense University of Madrid with three other colleagues.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

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 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a presentation from Panos Theodorou

 

Abstract:

Generally speaking, these naturalised renderings of Phenomenology aspire to show that intelligent behaviour in living beings is grounded in that they are embodied and embedded in a world that they enactively constitute. Intentionality of the mind and its meaning-giving essence are understood in such a context. Meaningfulness of cognition and behaviour, however, presuppose the organisation and the synthesis of sensory and other elements in a horizon of temporality. But how is the opening up of this horizon made possible in the living being? Quite a few ideas have been offered to this effect (Varela 1999, van Gelder 1999, Lloyd 2002, Grush 2006, 2017). They attempt to ‘transplant’ Husserl’s account of temporality into the neuronal substructure of the living organisms. These attempts, however, have notable defects. In our paper we develop a detailed but concise critique of the aforementioned views and proposals. We show that they wrongly assimilated Husserl’s analysis of inner time consciousness as one concerning timing rather than temporality (Varela, van Gelder, Lloyd) or as concerning prediction of hyletic data rather than temporal flow (Grush). We argue that either their ideas regarding the specific neuronal networks and functions that give rise to the opening up of the temporal horizon show toward irrelevant directions (Varela, van Gelder, Lloyd) or they lack any successful positive suggestion (Grush). We present and develop the novel idea that the lived-through temporal horizonality resides in the orectic (appetitive-desirative) character of basic functions of the living organism. We offer a classification of the orectic phenomena in the different levels of the living beings. We appeal to Panksepp’s behavioral neuro-ethological findings regarding the presence of a SEEKING system in interconnected dopaminergic circuits in the subcortical frontal brain. Finally, we interpret these results in a way that suggests how this system makes possible the opening up of the primordial temporal horizon. Paper co-authored by Anna-Irene Baka, Costas Pagondiotis, and Constantinos Picolas.

 

Biography:

Panos Theodorou is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Crete (Greece). He is author of the books Perception and Theory as Practices (Kritiki, 2006; in Greek), Husserl and Heidegger on Reduction, Primordiality, and the Categorial (Springer, 2015), Introduction to the Philosophy of Values (Kallipos, 2016; in Greek). He has translated in Greek and commented the corpus of the texts written by Husserl and Heidegger for the ‘Britannica Artikel’ project (Kritiki, 2005) and Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences (Parts I and II) (Nissos, 2012). Articles of his, on Phenomenology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of emotions and values, appear in international journals and volumes.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

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 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern.

 

This episode features a presentation from Cătălina Condruz

 

Abstract:

The event of birth has been a topic of concern for the phenomenological tradition and remains up to date since birth represents our starting point in life, just like dead is generally considered the last point reached. However, it’s still an event which involve us, even if it does not happen to us (Marion). The birth event makes us vulnerable, totally overwhelmed by the extraordinary fact of being thrown in the world. In Marion’s terms, we are passive subjects (adonnés) receiving ourselves from the saturated phenomenon of the birth event. Unlike Marion, Claude Romano’s evenimential hermeneutics proposes a different account according to which birth is the original event that opens the advenant’s world and draws upon a temporality more original than the Heideggerian one. The present paper goes beyond the paths followed by both Jean-Luc Marion and Claude Romano, by dissecting the question of testimony and outlining as accurately as possible its fundamental role in framing the temporal dimension of the birth event. Firstly, my main objective will be to analyse in detail the two philosophical positions briefly mentioned above, namely the phenomenology of givenness of Marion and the evenimential hermeneutics of Romano. Secondly, in order to clarify my position, I will refer to the relation between analyst and analysed and I will show that it can be interpreted as an event featuring the birth of the one (the analysand) witnessed by the other (the analyst). This comparison will help me show that both events incapsulate the future, releasing it in degrees of givenness. Moreover, it will help me bring to the fore that the passive subject that I am in the moment of my birth is witnessing not only my factuality, but is witnessing also the future because is setting up a gaping fissure that will be always opened.

 

Biography:

Cătălina Condruz is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Philosophy, University of Bucharest, under the supervision of Dr. Lect. Cristian Ciocan. In her thesis, she is reconstructing the philosophical framework of intersubjectivity within Marion’s phenomenology of givenness, taking as point of departure the notion of counter-intentionality. During her second year of PhD, Cătălina was involved in Erasmus programme and spent a semester at University of Rouen (France), working under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Natalie Depraz.

 

Further Information:

This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date.

 

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/