Giovanna Colombetti is professor of philosophy, University of Exeter, UK.

‘Varieties of incorporation: beyond the blind man’s cane’

In post-phenomenology and other disciplines, “incorporation” refers to the assimilation or integration of tools into the body. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty had already discussed examples of tool-incorporation—including, famously, the example of the blind man and his cane. Merleau-Ponty's analysis refers to what he called the “body schema”: our prereflective awareness of ourselves in terms of what we can do and perceive in the world. Subsequent discussions of incorporation have similarly focused on the integration of tools into the tacit (or even unconscious and sub-personal) sensorimotor body. In my talk I want to draw attention to the fact that we can incorporate tools in other ways, too, because we experience ourselves not just as tacit sensorimotor bodies. First, we can also incorporate tools into the so-called “body image”—the experience of our body as an intentional object of awareness, which can itself be distinguished into various (sub)experiences. Second, we can incorporate tools into our “lived seen body”—our sense of how we appear to others. I will illustrate these distinctions with examples and empirical evidence, and conclude with some reflections about the relationship between experiences of incorporation and the much discussed notion of the “extended mind”.

Giovanna Colombetti is Professor of Philosophy in the Department of Social and Political Sciences, Philosophy, and Anthropology of the University of Exeter (UK). She was educated in Italy and the UK, and after receiving her PhD from the University of Sussex in 2004, she was a postdoctoral researcher at the universities of York (Canada), Trento (Italy), and Harvard. Since 2007 she has worked and lived in Exeter, temporarily visiting various research centres in Europe, Asia, and Australia. At Exeter she is also member of EGENIS (The Centre for the Study of the Life Sciences), where she leads the Mind, Body, and Culture research cluster. She is further affiliated with the University of Southern Denmark, where since 2021 she has been Adjunct Professor in Philosophy at the Faculty of Health Sciences, and collaborates with its research cluster on Movement, Culture, and Society. She is also Associate Editor of Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Her primary research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy of cognitive science (especially embodied and situated cognition), philosophy of emotion, phenomenology, and material culture studies. She has worked the notions of emotion and affectivity, and on their relation to theories of cognition, embodiment, enaction, and extended mind. She is the author of several articles and book chapters in which she argues that, from an embodied-enactive perspective, cognition and emotion are not separate mental faculties, and rather emotion is a primordial and all-pervasive dimension of the mind. In 2010-2014 she was Principal Investigator of a Starting Grant funded by the European Research Council, titled “Emoting the Embodied Mind”, during which she wrote her monograph The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind (MIT Press, 2014). Since then, she has worked mainly on the notion of “situated affectivity” and is currently writing a second monograph on how we use objects to influence our affective life.

Ullrich Haase is principal lecturer in philosophy, Manchester Metropolitan University, UK.

‘Is Heidegger’s Other Thinking necessarily an Ecological Thinking? Reflections on the Absence of Nature and the Destiny of Technology’

This year saw the 50th anniversary of The Limits of Growth, the publication by the Club of Rome, which for many was the trigger of the birth of climate activism. The message was that action on global warming now was necessary immediately – but nothing much happened until the Fridays for Future movement, which appeared as if it just occurred to us that there might be a problem. About a decade after the publication of The Limits of Growth, parts of the ecological movement wondered why nothing happened and turned towards the critique of technological rationalism, following Nietzsche and Heidegger, to provide an explanation for that inaction and to open the way for a more radical ecological thinking. While the insight that nothing would change as long as ecology would either be swallowed up by the same technological rationalism that caused the crisis, nor by some middle-class Europeans ‘moving off grid’, did give rise to more than a decade of engagement, what in turn has happened to this movement, which claimed that ecology can only be meaningful when joining postmodernism’s turn to language, while also claiming that postmodernism is essentially an ecological thinking? Again, nothing. Instead, all we wonder about today is whether Heidegger was an antisemite or not. In this talk I will reflect on the reasons for which Heidegger’s other thinking has become so unpalatable in our age and why these reasons are the same that should still engage us with the problems of global heating and globalization and the critique of the feverish search for technical solutions to the problem of technology.

Ullrich Haase is Head of Philosophy at the Manchester Metropolitan University. His research centres on 19th and 20th Century German and French Philosophy, especially Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida and Blanchot. He served as the editor of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology from 2005 to 2020.