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.

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.

In this paper I argue for a critical reduction of the philosopher’s natural attitude in order to alter habitual affective attachments that impact the way phenomenology is done. Building on Lisa Guenther’s notion of “emotional work” in the phenomenological method as a transformative practice of self-awareness, I argue for an embodied form of phenomenological reflection that I call “curiosity work’ to keep phenomenologists open to new modes and contents of inquiry while also nurturing a situated relation to canonical figures, texts and methods.   In Section I, I turn to Bonnie Mann’s identification of the “affective problem of reverence” that prevents feminist phenomenology from embracing new methodologies. I consider how phenomenologists can reconfigure their implicit reverential habits, what Mann refers to as a “historical stubbornness” towards the white male canon in phenomenology. In Section II, I synthesize Michel Foucault’s notion of curiosity as critique and his work on aesthetic practices of self-production in order to re-imagine critical aesthetic practices that can bracket this reverential natural attitude in scholarship. I consider skills of letter writing and “self-writing” as forms of emotional work that utilize autoethnographic writing in publication practices. I outline a method of reading first-person phenomenological accounts of experience that I take from education theory; this reading method fosters curiosity about and responsiveness to one’s otherwise unreflected affective attachments. In Section III I call for ‘curiosity work’ as a political practice in which phenomenologists, especially those underrepresented in philosophy, can co-cultivate their affective sense capacities through these self-transformative methods. Drawing upon Shiloh Whitney’s notion of affective injustice I conclude by emphasizing the obstacles to this engaged phenomenology. I note how reverential modes of phenomenological inquiry can dull the lived affective counterknowings that otherwise illuminate possibilities about what phenomenology can and should be and do, and for whom.   

I am a first year philosophy PhD student at Stony Brook University. My research lies at the intersection of phenomenology, feminist philosophy, philosophy of emotion and contemporary French philosophy. I am currently interested in studying methodology in phenomenology, with a specific attention to interdisciplinarity and critique. I have a BA in philosophy from Fordham University and an MA from NYU Gallatin School of Individualized study, where I worked on engaged phenomenological approaches to critical phenomenology in philosophy, literary studies, performance studies, clinical psychology and neuroscience.   

Co-author: Erman Örsan Yetiş

The act of designing involves the creation and implementation of products, services and systems for users, through increasingly critical approaches such as design for social innovation, participatory design, transition design, which emerged over the past couple of decades to challenge mainstream design practice.  Nonetheless, defining a hierarchically conspicuous design problem that frames the design outcomes remains a crucial aspect of designing, which is inherently eliminative and reductive and results in exclusionary products and services. The outcomes of such processes inevitably pose various forms of domination, inequality and injustice, concomitant with gender-blind, gender-biased practices. A robust, inclusive and intersectional gender lens needs to be incorporated into designing to address such exclusionary practices, and the totality of the design experience (i.e., the act of designing, design outcomes and how they are experienced) should be interpreted accordingly. Most importantly, phenomenological perspectives that are highly benefitted in gender theories can prove beneficial in this endeavour, enabling a multi-faceted perspective to address the design process and outcomes while presenting potentials to enable designers to grasp different aspects of subjectivity rather than just seeing users as ‘social objects’. Especially, the queer phenomenology of Sara Ahmed, with the concepts of orientation, disorientation and reorientation, helps us understand the subjectivity beyond the restrictive definition of user, within temporality and spatiality and how subjects turn toward certain objects and away from others – which helps define the overall design experience. ‘Queer’ here enables not only defining the disorientation of subjects – experienced as discomfort, alienation and being lost – but also their reorientation – towards subversive yet constructive and exploratory. Thereby, the act of designing readily orientated within pre-defined, closed systems can be disorientated and reorientated while unveiling critical, socio-political, and open-ended potentials. In this path, being disoriented would be cherished to explore these multi-faceted potentials of the act of designing and thus prevent the eliminative and restrictive defining of design problems.  

Yekta Bakırlıoğlu is an Assist. Prof. Dr. at the Department of Industrial Design, Middle East Technical University, Turkey, and an EU MSCA-TUBITAK CoFund CoCirculation2 Fellow. He received his PhD from the same institution, during which he was visiting researcher at NODUS Sustainable Design Research Lab, Aalto University, Finland. After his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Limerick, Ireland, and Koç University, Turkey. His research interests include open design, design (education) for sustainability, and gender-sensitive design. 

Many topics and methodologies for investigating subjectivity that have become widespread in the social sciences – for example, an emphasis on ‘lived experience’ – have been significantly developed by applied phenomenologists. Yet phenomenology’s own commitments often bring it into tension with giving full voice to its subjects. For example, the ‘bracketing’ of prejudices may not take into account how those prejudices are constitutive of the subject herself. Furthermore, researchers are rarely trained to self-reflect on how their own history – cultural, sexual, professional – might colour their interpretation of a subject’s ‘bracketed’ responses. A risk therefore is that a subject’s experience be distorted by the researcher’s own interests. But at the same time, the latter’s immersion in a broader investigative discourse offers insights to which their subject may have little access. My paper examines this tension as it manifests in an ongoing interdisciplinary research project, working with improvising musical ensembles. Centred on the co-creation of a ‘hermeneutic circle’ between artwork, artist, and analysts, the project aims not only to render the research process itself transparent, but to consciously blur the distinction between researchers and research subjects, treating subjects as partners in a creative process in which all participants have a voice and an opportunity to learn/grow. After briefly outlining our methodologies, I dig deeper into the problems of truth and interpretation that this process exposes, namely: – At what points do ‘lived experience’ accounts reach limits that might be better informed by critical distance or historical consciousness? – Is it essential to reconcile contradictions between levels of analysis? If so, how do we give weight to values like truth while doing justice to different lived realities? If not, can we avoid reperpetuating power imbalances between researcher and subject? I examine these questions with reference to particular case studies, while suggesting potential generalisable conclusions. 

Joshua Bergamin is a philosopher at the University of Vienna and co-PI of the interdisciplinary artistic research project (Musical) Improvisation and Ethics, funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF). He has a PhD from Durham University, where he worked as an ‘applied phenomenologist,’ an MA from the University of Queensland for work on Heidegger and cognitive science, and BAs from the University of South Australia. His academic work is supplemented by training and practical experience as a physical artist and musician (mostly percussion), and he has choreographed and performed at many festivals and immersive events. 

Co-authors: Havi Carel; Jamila Rodrigues 

The Covid-19 pandemic has had far-reaching and life-changing consequences for many people, including the loss of loved ones, livelihoods, and life milestones. The risks associated with a potentially life-threatening virus such as Covid-19 have been widely discussed from an epidemiological or otherwise scientific perspective. Whilst this is vitally important for understanding how the virus transmits and behaves once inside the body, it cannot tell us how the pandemic has changed people’s lived experience of the world and of their bodies. In this paper, we use theoretical frameworks from social anthropology (Douglas 1966, 1970, 1992) and phenomenological philosophy (Carel, 2016, 2018) to analyse qualitative data drawn out of a large-scale anonymous survey focusing on adult populations in the UK, Japan, and Mexico. This study asks: How has the Covid-19 pandemic changed people’s experience of their bodies and the world? We unpack this further by asking the following sub-questions: What effect has the lockdown and other countermeasures against the virus had on the way people perceive their bodies and other people’s bodies? What cultural and symbolic meanings are attached to the body and if so, how did they change? To what extent do the risks associated with the Covid-19 virus threaten people’s sense of bodily security and safety? To address these issues, we present a conceptualisation of a pandemic body captured into five main themes, these are: Fear and Danger, Bodily Doubt and Hypervigilance, Risk and Trust, Adapting and Enduring, Changes in Perspective. These themes emerged from qualitative survey data and show how different aspects of the pandemic experience have been embodied through people’s narratives. Through a detailed analysis of these issues, we conclude that the pandemic has forced people to rethink their relationship with their bodies, other bodies, and the world around them. 

Kathryn Body is a PhD student in the Department of Philosophy, at the University of Bristol. She received her MA in Medical Ethics and Law from King’s College London, where she researched epistemic injustices toward people with disabilities through the lens of the Mental Capacity Act 2005. Her current research project combines theoretical frameworks from phenomenological philosophy and embodiment theory in anthropology to analyse qualitative survey data on people’s lived experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic. This research will help inform perspectives on how protective strategies, including national lockdowns and physical distancing, have affected people from different cultures and social groups. 

One receives feedback from outside sources to confirm or discover one’s own beliefs, attitudes, dispositions, and often what group (and its features) to which one belongs. Yet cognitive biases and the source’s social status can influence our evaluations of feedback from outside sources. Since evidence suggests introspection is not an entirely reliable epistemic practice, I present what I call “transformative shared experiences” (TSEs) as way to understand how feedback from others shapes the way a person see themselves as a moral agent. I argue that TSEs take place on cognitive, personal, and cultural levels by drawing from developmental neuroscience, moral psychology, and Confucianism. To conceptualize TSEs, I use research on shared intentionality that occurs when we engage in cooperative activities as individuals or as a society. Shared intentionality or agency involves individuals not just sharing goals but also cognitive representations of multiple actions, roles, and perspectives. Successful shared intentionality has both joint cooperative attention and activity as well as similar representations of how things are going and should go. Research on the nature of “cultural cognition” shows that, at a young age, children are able to create a “shared fictional reality” with others through games which consist in rules, norms, representations, and narratives about what the world is and what it should be like. This construction of social reality is ongoing as this natural tendency is what leads us to create institutions, policies, and other structures to maintain our cultural traditions and values. Feedback about oneself, such as how one should identify as a person, is found within this shared reality. By exploring TSEs, we can better understand how transformation, good and bad, emerges from exchanges of feedback and experiences that shape not just perspective but one’s ability to relate to oneself and others. While we need to seriously consider the ways they can go wrong, I argue that TSEs with a diversity of sources is one way to help combat self-ignorance and the epistemic injustice we commit towards others when discrediting their feedback due to identity prejudice.  

Dr. H. Bondurant (they/them) recently completed a Ph.D. in Philosophy at Duke University in May 2021. They specialize in social epistemology with particular attention to issues at the intersection of self-knowledge and epistemic injustice. Their work often draws from moral psychology, feminist philosophy, and bioethics. 

It has been argued that internet-based forms of communication such as video conferencing and instant messaging, when used as the only or primary means to interact with others – as it has been the case for many during the pandemic of Covid-19 – have negative effects on emotional and mental health. However, a body of first-person reports suggests that, often, people with a lived experience of mental illness have perceived improvements to their wellbeing during the period in which social activities were moved ‘online’.   In this paper, I explore the possibility that some of these perceived improvements are due to the partial “disembodiment” of emotions facilitated by internet-mediated interaction. In particular, I consider the phenomenology of social anxiety disorder (SAD) and how it may be impacted upon by encountering others primarily through the medium of internet-enabled technology.   I will start by reconstructing a phenomenological account of social anxiety to which disruptions of bodily experience are central (e.g. Tanaka 2020). I will highlight how those with a diagnosis of SAD tend to experience a heightening of reflective self-consciousness, an integral aspect of which is an increased awareness of one’s body as an object of observation for others.   I will then move to consider how the experiential dynamics that are particularly prominent in SAD can be weakened when communicating with others via video calls, instant messages, and social media more broadly. I will suggest that this is the case due to the diminished visibility of the body online, and the higher degree of control and agency over one’s experience that can be exercised in this context.   Finally, I will argue that the weakening of social anxiety through internet-mediated contact exemplifies some of the processes which are key to emotion regulation more widely, thus suggesting that communication and interaction online could have a positive effect on a wider range of affective disturbances. 

Anna Bortolan is a Lecturer in Philosophy at Swansea University. Prior to taking this role in January 2020, she was a Lecturer and a Teaching Fellow at the University of Aberdeen, and a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at University College Dublin. Her research interests lie primarily at the intersection of phenomenology, philosophy of psychiatry, and philosophy of emotion. Some of her most recent work concerns the way in which the experience of emotions and mental ill-health may be impacted upon by the technologies and ways of communication and interaction that mark life in the digital age. 

Our age is indeed the age of the refugee, the displaced person, mass immigration. Exile is "the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home“, as E. Said claims. But if true exile is a condition of terminal loss“ (E. Said) or of "a mutilated life“ (Th. W. Adorno) we have to ask ourselves what is here lost or mutilated: It is about the loss of attachment, not only to our roots, to our native place, to a community and to our collective identity, but to language and the possibility of a dialogue as well. But above all, it involves the very possibility of acknowledging the personhood or even the humanity not only of the other, but of ourselves. The vulnerable subject, in M. Fineman’s terms, i.e. the body-self, is the one whose being is broken, as E. Levinas states: Hence, a comprehension of the endangerment of the other is the basis for any vulnerability-based ethics, an ethics that should be both universal, constructing the disembodied ethical subject as a moral person, and particular, accounting for an embodied subject who is capable of responsibility and is open to love. Husserl's early ethics, while being both universal and particular and guided by reason, leaves crucial questions open, which I intend to develop with recourse on J. Butler, M.A. Fineman, A. MacIntyre and M.C. Nussbaum: 1) the full recognition of affectivity and vulnerability for ethical intersubjectivity, 2) the development of a material axiology. I contend that a proper recognition of our bodily vulnerability and of the concomitant absolute value of self-preservation involves both the development of a proper material axiology and the cultivation of emotions and virtues within a community bound by love, reason and the pursuit of happiness. 

Degree in Architecture (1988) and in Philosophy (2003) from the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), Argentina. 2012: PhD in Philosophy from the Bergische University Wuppertal (BUW), Germany. 1988-2002: Lecturer, then Professor for Architectural Design and Theory at the UBA. 2012 to mid 2017: Lecturer for Theoretical Philosophy and Phenomenology at the BUW. 2019: DAAD scholarship, research on the reception of the German philosophical Anthropology in Argentina. Pesently working on mentioned research subject, with the support of the BUW. 

In philosophical considerations of disgust, one consistent problem has been how to define physical disgust and moral disgust in a way that does justice to their differences while also allowing them to occupy the same category of emotional reaction. Aurel Kolnai (2004) and Sara Heinämaa (2020) each give a phenomenological account of what this connection might be, and in doing so suggest that there is a way that we can pick out some formal object of disgust that we intentionally aim/are aimed at when feeling disgusted, either physically or morally. In this paper, I evaluate these decidedly non-derivative models of physical and moral disgust, specifically with respect to instances of disgust that are based in racial and/or ethnic prejudices. I first raise what I take to be problems with Heinämaa’s adverbial model of moral disgust. I’ll then take up Sara Ahmed’s (2015) writing on disgust as something that “spreads” via acts of reiteration to develop a derivative account of moral disgust that retains Kolnai and Heinämaa’s phenomenological insights even as it demonstrates that objects of disgust need not always share some formal object. I argue that there are good reasons for thinking that some objects of disgust are derived from previous ones, but that we need to be careful in mapping out this derivative relationship. Finally, I use this derivative model of disgust to analyze examples of both physical and moral disgust from the writings of Audre Lord (2007) and Alia Al-Saji (2008), respectively. This will allow us to understand such instances of disgust as 1) real instances of disgust that, nonetheless, do not not entail that the objects of disgust are inherently or essentially disgusting and 2) morally reprehensible and dangerous precisely because they do not involve a “mistake,” but accurately reflect the disgusted subjects' prejudices. 

Ken Bruce is a PhD student at Fordham University in his second year. His main areas of interest are in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty and critical phenomenology, especially as it overlaps with critical philosophy of race and feminist philosophy. His current research involves looking at phenomenological accounts of racialization as they occur at the aural register, both in addition to and in distinction from the visual register, and investigating what insights might be gained from centering such a perspective. 

Co-presenter: Danielle Petherbridge

The notions of what constitutes self and personhood are philosophically disputed, with different accounts focusing on narrative construction, others on a pure identity pole, or different phenomenological accounts pointing to a minimal or experiential notion of self in contrast to personhood, which includes habitual, social and culture aspects. In this paper, we problematise these various accounts based on the consequences for persons with neurological illnesses, such as dementia. The paper, however, has a more important aim. We draw on research arising out of engaged phenomenological workshops conducted with carers and persons with dementia to investigate the implications of assumptions about what constitutes the self and personhood in health care settings. In recent years, the ‘person-centred’ approach to dementia, first developed by Tom Kitwood (1997), has gained prominence within healthcare settings. However, we identify ways in which the person-centred approach to dementia is limited and potentially problematic. In many settings, it relies on a narrative construction of personhood, whether prior to memory loss or reconstructed from family members (McGreevy, 2015). We suggest persons with dementia should be considered to maintain personhood even after the onset of memory loss or seeming loss of narrative and linguistic capacities. We reflect on the ways in which our engaged phenomenological workshops have informed new understandings of: i) persons with dementia as dynamic and developing persons capable of expressing themselves in embodied ways; ii) the ramifications of defining what constitutes persons in the context of dementia in terms of narrative selves iii) how such reassessments might inform the practice of carers. This research will demonstrate that a shift away from understanding persons merely as narrative constructions and equipping carers with an embodied understanding of personhood can shift some of the power and dignity back to the patient.     

Natalia Burakowska is a PhD student in Philosophy at University College Dublin and an Irish Research Council postgraduate scholar. She works in the areas of phenomenology, philosophy of mind and applied philosophy. Her doctoral work is focused on a phenomenological approach to dementia that conceptualises it as both a cognitive and bodily condition, taking account of the lived experience of dementia, vulnerability and forms of ethical responsiveness and care. 

In Against Ethics, John Caputo produces a phenomenological account of the “obliging body” through a so-called “anti-phenomenology of the flesh.” Yet, rather than the “flesh” (chair) translating into French Husserl’s subjectively lived body (Leib) and distinguishes it from the body’s objective materiality (Körper, corps), Caputo’s “flesh” indicates the bodily tissues (Fleisch) sitting between these two phenomenological paradigms. This account is then an “anti-phenomenology” insofar as it considers experiences marginalised by phenomenology’s traditional reduction of embodiment to Leiblichkeit (i.e., to “the egological sphere of ownness” in which the world is constituted): experiences in which my body resists reduction to a deployment of the self and is precisely experienced as such (i.e., a “queer” rather than “ownmost” body). Caputo’s Fleisch is therefore primarily experienced in clinical situations, notably as degenerative disease: when the deterioration of my body equally constitutes the breakdown of phenomenalising and world-constituting consciousness (e.g., the body’s inability to continue functioning, including phenomenologically as transcendental “I can” or spatial “zero-point of orientations”). For Caputo, human embodiment is then the experience of decay, as exemplified by the “AIDS-afflicted flesh” to which his works repeatedly refer. Outlining how Caputo’s Against Ethics indeed thematises a dimension of embodiment (Fleisch) overlooked by traditional phenomenology, this paper nevertheless also demonstrates its insufficiency by contrasting it with Emmanuel Falque’s phenomenology of palliative care entitled Éthique du corps épandu: Caputo’s account of decay neglects our regard for the (terminally) ill that distinguishes anaesthetised flesh from butchered meat. Drawing on Hervé Guibert’s AIDS-writing, the paper shows how, in his words, even the AIDS-afflicted body remains “a human being,” not just “a bloody pancake” (i.e., decaying tissue). It proposes a “hermeneutics of care” complementing Caputo’s “phenomenology of decay” and turning it into a complete account of human embodiment: a body experienced as worthy of care and thus inherently obliging.  

Nikolaas Cassidy-Deketelaere is a researcher in continental philosophy at the Catholic University of Paris and the Australian Catholic University. His work considers questions of phenomenological methodology and philosophical anthropology in relation to theology, religious studies, and the medical humanities. Recently, he co-edited The Pulse of Sense: Encounters with Jean-Luc Nancy (Routledge, 2022). 

The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to suggest that phenomenological studies of worldliness are crucial for dream research; second, to indicate that dream research can in return enrich our understanding of world-consciousness. Dreaming is a rare theme in the classics of phenomenology. It is not easy to determine the nature of dreaming in the light of other kinds of experience. As Jean Héring has neatly summarized, phenomenologists are divided by two opinions: dreaming is either perception or representation. However, as this paper aims to show, subsuming dreaming under either category is equally perplexing, for it will then become either a special case of perception, or a special case of representation. A solution is thereby proposed, according to which oneiric phenomenon should be studied in the light of its presumptive worldliness. Dreaming is special so long as it opens a field of experiences encompassing our being-there, to the extent that dream appears as if a reality. A phenomenology of dreaming therefore focuses on the borderline between dream and reality, in order to ascertain how far they can be confused. Such a study is preceded by controversies over the worldliness of dreams. For example, while Edmund Husserl and Theodor Conrad affirm that dreaming implies immersion in a dreamworld, for Jan Patočka and Jean-Paul Sartre dreams essentially involve the privation of worldly structure. Provided that worldliness is a minimal condition of the position of reality, determining whether dreams are worldly (welthaft) or worldless (weltlos) is decisive for determining how far dreams resemble reality. Phenomenological debates on the nature of dreaming will also prove crucial to dream research in general. Despite advanced methods of observation, pioneering dream researchers are still fundamentally divided regarding the experiential characters of dream. And a significant portion of their disagreement lies in the presumptive worldliness of dreams.

I am a doctor candidate in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. My research focuses on the motivations of phenomenological reduction, and extends to altered states of consciousness. In 2020, I have published a book on dreaming, titled Formen der Versunkenheit.

It is well known that Husserl and Heidegger approach the analysis of the fact that we share one common lifeworld in different ways. For Husserl, the constitution of the shared world relies on transcendental intersubjectivity as a community of co-constituting monads, whereas Heidegger claims that the world is always already a shared space of openness, prior to any constitution by a plurality of subjects. In this paper, however, I propose understanding both views of the foundational social dimension of the world under the same umbrella of a “mereological” phenomenological analysis. That is, I suggest reading Husserl’s and Heidegger’s apparently opposed positions in terms of an approach that emphasizes how certain essential part-whole relations condition experience as such. Against this background, I show, on the one hand, how such an approach brings Husserl’s and Heidegger’s conceptions of the basic sense of sociality closer together. But on the other, through a discussion of the way social relations embody certain parthood relations, I also demonstrate a yet deeper sense in which they disagree on what it means to share a public sphere. The first part of my paper establishes the thesis that both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenological analyses rely on a basic “logic” of parts and wholes, which makes its first appearance in the Logical Investigations. Building on this, the second part shows how such a mereological logic comes into play in Husserl’s and Heidegger’s characterizations of sociality in the Cartesian Meditations, Husserliana 13-15, Being and Time, and the 1928 lectures Einleitung in die Philosophie, respectively. Lastly, I demonstrate how despite this common methodological ground, Husserl and Heidegger hold different conceptions of sharing. Whereas Husserl’s transcendental notion of sharing posits an open-ended plurality, for Heidegger sharing is ultimately grounded in a prior undifferentiated sphere of openness to the truth of being. 

Noam Cohen is a PhD candidate at the Mandel School for Advanced Studies in the Humanities and the Department of Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2020/21 he was a guest researcher at the Husserl Archive at the Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. His doctoral dissertation sets out to explore from a phenomenological perspective different models of intersubjectivity and community, with a focus on their relations to the constitution of mathematical objectivity. It takes on the form of a comparative study of this theme in the philosophies of Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, and Hans Georg Gadamer. 

Co-presenter: Marie-Anne Perreault 

Postulating, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a relationship of expression between the body and the place it occupies, we borrow from queer and feminist phenomenologies to think about the spatiality of subjects forced into heterosexuality. Sexual orientation is here defined as a constraint acting as a common ‘ground’, always already present, the sort of ‘background’ that Merleau-Ponty rightly considered constitutive of the subject-world relationship. As many feminist theorists have defended in the wake of Adrienne Rich, the patriarchal norm quickly steers us towards the opposite gender. If such a definition of compulsory heterosexuality is true, the feminine space and the obliteration of the subject in this space will benefit from being studied as always already established in terms of masculine desire. This erasure of feminine desire and embodiment, abundantly discussed by recent feminist phenomenology and generally considered antagonistic to masculine body comportment and spatiality, draws from Iris Young and Judith Butler’s critical works and groundbreaking ideas on gender studies.   In our presentation, after defending that erasure is characteristic to female body comportment in the shared space of compulsory heterosexuality, we will defend that it is because this spatiality and orientation is rooted in a temporal, performative manifestation of gender norms and is sedimented in habits that we can imagine a different future for gendered shared space.   Thus, we argue that heterosexual shared space must also be thought in its temporality to be better understood. In other words, the reinvestment of this orientational constraint supported by the Merleau-Pontian furrow could allow a ‘keeping-open’ of the future gender norms and, through it, the gendered sharing of space.

Myriam is a M.A. philosophy student at Université Laval. She is currently working on the erasure of (and alterations to) marginalized expressions by the phallocratic logic of discourse - a subject she tackles through Irigaray's theory of écriture féminine. Her papers have been published in French in Phares and Le Banquet. Myriam is also interested in critical and feminist phenomenologies. Some of her short stories and poems have been published in French in Zinc, Cavale, Saturne, L'écrit primal and Filles Missiles. 

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. 

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. 

This paper seeks to advance a phenomenological notion of sexuality as a modality of bodily sensibility through the lens of Merleau-Ponty.    Feminist philosophers such as Judith Butler (1989) and Elizabeth Grosz (1994) have critiqued Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of sexuality in the Phenomenology of Perception for presenting sexuality in a universalist (hence masculinist) way, abstracted from the reality of gender difference and non-heterosexual identities. Drawing on Alia Al-Saji’s (2008) and Tom Sparrow’s (2015) work on sensibility, however, this paper argues that Merleau-Ponty’s notion of sexuality should be understood as a modality of sensibility that operates prior to, and as generative of, categorisations into sexual identities. I show how Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of sexuality, rather than making a claim about the universalist character of desire such as it must be for everyone, in fact makes a more basic claim about the strictly bodily, that is, the sensible dimension of our most intimate intercorporeal relations.    Insofar as sensibility designates the pre-reflective and pre-perceptual binding of bodies, then, understanding sexuality as a modality of sensibility, this paper argues, allows us to investigate the ways in which bodies live desire prior to perception and reflection. In this respect, Merleau-Ponty’s description of sexuality as the ‘blind linking of bodies’ (Merleau-Ponty, M., Phenomenology of Perception, p159) is thus not reducible to sexual identity but is rather descriptive of the erotic as the life force that motivates attractions and repulsions – affective ‘pulls’ – between bodies.   Finally, the paper asks how this erotic life force itself, and hence our bodies’ (in)capacity for intimacy, is structured by our socio-politico-historical contexts, including the reality of gender norms? Can a critical phenomenology of sexuality help us to not only understand but also empower the erotic lives of bodies? 

I am a PhD candidate at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy, Kingston University, London. My research project critically traces the phenomenological notion of transcendence such as it operates in Husserl, Levinas, and Merleau-Ponty. It argues that transcendence works, most basically, at the level of bodily sensibility rather than consciousness or perception. Ultimately, I employ this notion of sensibility to investigate how the particular ways in which our bodies move are structured by our individual history as well as the socio-cultural-historical contexts which invisibly prescribe normative ways of moving and acting based on gender, race, class. 

Co-presenter: Jessie Stanier

People’s lived experiences of illness and health form a crucial field of exploration for the medical humanities. A number of methods and theories have proven particularly attuned to this concern, including qualitative interviewing and the philosophical framework of phenomenology. While there have been many attempts to marry up these two approaches (see, e.g., de Boer et al. 2015, de Haan et al. 2013, Legrand & Ravn 2009), the epistemological, methodological, and ethical implications of their union remain underexplored. Phenomenological philosophers who integrate qualitative interviewing in their studies generally note the methodological importance of embodiment in the encounter with research participants (see Høffding & Martiny 2016). What embodiment exactly contributes, however, is not spelled out in any detail. We take feminist epistemology as the starting point of our investigation into embodied interviewing. In her well-known essay on situated knowledges, Donna Haraway (1988) challenges the doctrine of disembodied scientific objectivity and contrasts it with response able, partial, and localized ways of knowing. Attending to embodied experience, as we understand it, is one way of situating knowledge production in a web of worldly intersubjective relations. The aim of this investigation, then, is both methodological and ethical: to develop resources for self-reflection that further enhance the integrity and rigour of the phenomenological interview. We pursue this aim by asking the following question: how does an embodied encounter with the other ground the phenomenological interview, in the sense of inaugurating a situated way of knowing? We approach the above question by means of a dialogical phenomenological analysis. Our analysis is based on an ongoing exchange of reflections regarding our respective experiences as interviewers. Through this practice of joint sense-making, we are able to describe the interview encounter in terms of basic phenomenological concepts. Echoing the interview situation, the dialogical format blends the content and the form of our analysis. It also promotes self-reflectivity by forcing us to progressively re-interpret our experiences and to regard them from different positions. In our contribution, we focus on the methodological and ethical implications of understanding the interview as an inter-corporeal encounter. This aspect is captured most succinctly by the notion of the other who does not leave me. We are left by the other with a feeling of abiding commitment to them as a research participant, which situates the practices of interviewing and data analysis between the academic possibility of co-creating new meaning and the ethical call of the other. Tracing ‘the other who does not leave me’ through various refractions of lived experience—the interview itself, the transcription, the phases of analysis—we explore how in each instance bodily proximity and ethical response-ability are enacted.  

I am a PhD candidate at the Tilburg School of Humanities and Digital Science working on the NWO-funded research project "Age and Existence: An Empirical-Philosophical Investigation of Late Life". Before training as a philosopher (BA from KU Leuven, MA from Radboud University Nijmegen) I completed a law degree at the University of Vienna. The aim of my research project is to conceptualize ageing in a way that does justice to the lived experience of older people. To this end, I am drawing on the philosophies of Simone de Beauvoir and Maurice Merleau-Ponty while also conducting ethnographic fieldwork at different sites in Tilburg. 

This paper offers reflections about the possibilities and limits of online intercorporeality and empathy. During the Covid-19 pandemic I participated in two online community choirs: the Toronto Sacred Harp Singing Group and the Transnational Vocal Exploration Choir lead by Chris Tonelli of the University of Groningen. To my surprise, both choirs functioned successfully using standard-issue video conferencing software despite their need for substantive embodied reciprocity among vocalists, and between vocalists and the conductor(s). Using the phenomenological interview to supplement my own phenomenological descriptions, I collected data on the lived experiences of participants regarding intercorporeality and empathy during online choral gatherings. This paper will present my findings that suggest intercorporeality and empathy are, with caveats, genuinely enabled in musical interactions using simple online video interfaces.  With this finding I aim to enrich and re-direct trends in the human sciences that tend to regard online intersubjectivity as purely symbolic or representational. If these trends were to be correct, contra my assertions, then only extended or high-level empathy would be possible in such spaces: low-level or primary empathy - which relies on intercorporeality - would be incompatible. Marshalling evidence to the contrary, that intercorporeality can be enabled online (at lease while musicking interactively) will, I hope, spark new philosophical reflections on the nature of online collaboration and shared digital agency, as well as contribute to thinking about the social affordances engendered by community musick-making in particular.  

Dr. Rachel Elliott works on social ontology at the level of intercorporeality and affect, particularly regarding improvised collective agency in art and politics. She has published on topics such as the transformation of the habit body in music, and the exclusionary tendencies of synchronization, in journals such as: the Journal for International Institute for Critical Studies in Improvisation, and Punta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology. She is currently working on a manuscript titled Intercorporeality Online. Dr. Elliott received her PhD in 2019 from the University of Guelph, and is currently Assistant Professor in Philosophy at Brandon University in Manitoba, Canada.  

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.  

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. 

Co-presenter: Martin Huth

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.   

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. 

In the contemporary debate on social cognition, several defenders of the Direct Perception Account (DPA) maintain that we can have direct perceptual access to the mental states of others by perceiving their bodily expressions, since the latter can be considered as components or features of the former (Krueger 2018; Overgaard 2012; Krueger and Overgaard 2012; Hampshire 1976; Green 2007, 2010; Newen et al. 2015). Krueger and Overgaard (2012), for instance, maintain that certain mental phenomena can be regarded as having a hybrid structure, constituted both by internal aspects (e.g. the lived experience of the subject) and external ones (the bodily gestures and expressions). In this theoretical line, I will specifically consider affective experiences and their relation to their bodily expressions. Compatibly with Krueger and Overgaard, I will argue that bodily expressions can be seen as constitutive proper parts of the expressed affective experiences. However, differently from them, I will propose that we can aptly consider bodily expressions specifically as non-independent parts – moments, in Husserlian terms (Husserl 1901) – of the expressed affective experience considered as a whole. In this framework, I will also advance the idea that expressed affective experiences are linked to their bodily expressions specifically by means of motivational connections, as opposed to mere causal ones (Husserl 1952, Stein 1917). Motivational connections are conceived as intelligible and meaningful relations (Stein 1917, 1922): therefore, the idea is that the very nature and meaning of the expressed affective experience account for the displayed expressive behavior. I will show that conceiving bodily expressions as motivated, rather than caused, allows one to account for the fact that bodily expressions can be highly individualized and that, even if often pre-reflectively performed, they do not just passively happen to us but can be more or less endorsed by us, in an individual, personal way.  

Francesca Forlè is Post-doctoral Fellow and Guest Lecturer at the Faculty of Philosophy, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University, Milan. Previously, she was CAS SEE Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Rijeka and Guest Lecturer at the Faculty of Psychology, Vita-Salute San Raffaele University. She holds a PhD in Cognitive Neurosciences and Philosophy of Mind. She is mainly interested in phenomenology and philosophy of mind, specifically in embodied cognition and philosophy of personhood. Francesca published several papers on edited volumes and peer-reviewed international journals, such as Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences and Topoi. She is Managing Editor of the journal Phenomenology and Mind. 

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of “anthropological spatiality” – various spatial levels related to the manner that we project the world, and that are not connected through geometrical space where each part is interchangeable, but rather through a more primordial, existential space where we are anchored as natural subjects. The experience of the dreamer, the schizophrenic or the person under influence from mescaline give examples of anthropological spatialities. Another such spatiality is said to be opened by “aesthetic perception” (1945, 333) – such as that of painting or of dance – and I will accordingly term it aesthetic spatiality. The spatiality of dance is “without goals or directions … the subject and its world are no longer opposed” (1945, 333), in a similar way that a painting is not “at the same place” as the canvas or the cracks on the wall of the cave. Now, the spatiality of a hallucinating or schizophrenic person seems available only to the subject doing the projection, while an aesthetic spatiality must be intersubjectively available: art only makes sense a cultural and shareable phenomenon. How, then, does the dancer, for example, constitute a form of spatiality that is valid for others? To resolve this problem, I will first appeal to Merleau-Ponty’s idea that the body is “the first cultural object” (1945, 401) and thus already in itself intersubjectively given with cultural meanings. Our body has, moreover, an “emblematic value”, so that our bodily positions, emotions and desires have a symbolic relation to one another (1945, 329). Finally, the characterisation of the spatiality of dance will be amended, and described, not as being “without goals or directions”, but with often unpredictable direction and as its own goal: one of the tasks of dance is to understand the very dynamics of bodily movement itself.   

Anna Petronella Foultier is a Senior Lecturer in philosophy at Umeå University. Her present research is focused on the dancer’s experience and aesthetic know-how. She has published in journals such as Hypatia, JSBP, Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, Chiasmi international and Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and coedited the anthology Material of Movement and Thought: Reflections on the Dancer’s Practice and Corporeality, with Cecilia Roos (2013). Foultier also works as a translator of philosophy and fiction, and has translated Beauvoir, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Kundera, Merleau-Ponty, Nora and many others into Swedish. 

We both perceive and evaluate aesthetically spaces with our body, in particular by (experiencing ourselves) occupying and moving in them. Unlike simply being in a space, the experience of occupying is the experience of actively filling the space with our bodily presence and mobility. Where exactly we place our body in a space, how we place it (posture, orientation), and with which motion (activity) alters our perception of that space and our aesthetic evaluation. And vice versa: our unique perception of a space also affects how we feel our body. Saying that a space is oppressive or expansive, or warm or cold, or cozy or desolate, seems to express this. Perceiving a space shows strong similarities with the experience of touch: we touch a space with our body and our body is touched by that space. This is quite different from saying that the haptic features of our physical environment (natural or built) are relevant in our perception of spaces (J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, 1996). All sensible features can be said to be, not just add-ons, but integral part of that perception (cf., e.g., G. Böhme., Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces, 2017): the light and colors (vision), the temperature and the textures of materials (touch), the sounds that are altered by, and fill, that space (hearing), the smells that also fill it (smell/taste). Our aesthetic evaluations of spaces not only take this—i.e. our perception of a space--into account but bring into them (a) the uniquely personal meaning we perceive in the sensible features (coziness, warmth, expansiveness) and (b) the evaluation of two types of possibilities we see in the space: (b.1) possibilities to do what is significant for us and, among these, (b.2) possibilities that can be qualitatively enhanced (i.e. in their felt quality) by that space (“it feels better to read in the balcony”). We, thus, evaluate spaces aesthetically, not only by touching them with our body—or being touched by them--but also projecting on them (touching them with?) our ideal of life. Our ideal of life explains our perception of significance and meaningfulness in the (embodied) activities and ways of filling the space (occupying). Reading by the fire while it rains and reading under the sun in the park are experiences of reading altered in different ways by the very experience of occupying that particular space, in a particular way, and at this moment of our life. Our (changing) ideal of life makes our aesthetic choices deeply personal and dependent on the very present moment of our life. And, thus, an aesthetically preferable space reveals itself as the appropriate fit of activity, moment-in-our-life and (perceived) space. It is a space where, not only our body but our life fits well--or fits better. 

Abel B. Franco holds a M.A. in History (1998) from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY); a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Salamanca (1999) and a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science (2006) from the University of Pittsburgh (EE.UU). He has taught in different CUNY campuses, at the University of Pittsburgh and, since 2006, at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) where he is currently a Professor in the Philosophy Department. He has written, given talks and published, mainly on the History of Natural Philosophy (especially Middle Ages and 17th century), on the History of Philosophy (especially the 17th century and, in particular, Descartes), on the History and Philosophy of Mind (especially emotions), and on Aesthetics (especially the relation between emotions and art, in the Baroque and in contemporary debates on philosophy of architecture and philosophy of fiction). His most recent articles are “Our Everyday Aesthetic Evaluations of Architecture” (_British Journal of Aesthetics_, 2019) and "The Aesthetic Value of Film" (_Journal of Aesthetic Education_, forthcoming). 

The individual suffering from depression is prone and susceptible to normative, precise, rigid ways of being, and expectations in social and societal spheres induce exceptional strong feelings of obligation towards oneself, others, and society – as though they are constantly in debt and owe something of value. Ways of how one ought to be and act quickly becomes performative tasks for the person with depression, and failing to perform or falling short of their self-established duties in social interactions, even when alone, evoke feelings of existential shame. Taking the shape of something irrevocable, and becomes part of the individual’s essence, a character trait, or even a state of being, a shame for existing. Shame, then, is an integral part of depression and the lived experience. Therefore, based upon phenomenological qualitative interviews of people with depression, I argue in this talk, firstly, that the shame of not living up to self-imposed, rigid, specific normative ways of being drastically affect the lifeworld of the person with depression with a hypersensitivity, where otherwise local affordances has become global, threatening the ‘I’ in relation to itself – representing ways in which to either prove or disprove an identity, which potentially leads to what Thomas Fuchs (2013) calls the corporealization of the lived body, as a means to protect the ‘I’. Secondly, shame shows how people with depression, unlike commonly considered, live rich inner social lives. And although shame is a, seemingly, overly negative emotion, it also points towards meaningful personal relations with others, and just how valuable these are to people with depression, and how extremely hyperaware they are of the social dimension, even if they withdraw themselves. 

Oskar Otto Frohn graduated as an undergraduate in philosophy from University of Copenhagen, and recently obtained a M.A from KU Leuven. He has worked with and researched depression for almost four years as a scientific assistant in philosophy and has focused primarily on phenomenology of psychopathology and first-person lived experience in his master’s programme. 

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. 

Maria Galkina is a PhD student in Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris working on phenomenology of environmental shame and negative dialectic of human power. Her research interests cover Phenomenology of emotions and affects, Ethics and Metaphysics. Maria holds a B.A. in Creative writing from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute of Moscow and an M.A. in Contemporary Philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, which has focused on the dialectic of negativity and creativity of shame through analysis of works of Levinas, Agamben and Dostoevsky.

This is an existential-phenomenological account of shyness that shows shyness to be properly understood as an anticipation of shame. Specifically, a retreat from the risk posed to the possibility of a relation that we desire to stand in with the Other. The risk is the Other’s disapproval of our standing in relation to them in the way that we desire, thereby eliminating its possibility by their denying consensus, and the shame we wish to avoid is our standing before the Other as being-the-one-who-was-rejected. Altogether, and temporally, shyness is a response to something present with concern about a future where we will have been rejected by the Other. I first discuss the risk, turning to Sartre’s(2003, 2018[1943]) account of shame, where shame is the fundamental characteristic of the mode of being-with-the-Other. Sartre does not give an account of the anticipation of shame and so I provide this here. I then discuss our being compelled to choose how to respond to the risk, for its being an unavoidable imposition on our project of establishing the desired relation with the Other: to retreat from the risk, in shyness, or confront it, in boldness. Our response is also our choosing a value of the desired relation in the face of the risk: to retreat is to sanctify the desired relation while it is trivialised by our confronting the risk. Additionally, our acts are affective upon the ground of the desired relation, our current relation with the Other: to retreat is to attempt to preserve the ground while it is endangered by our confronting the risk. I lastly discuss shyness and boldness as classifications of particular acts and those acts themselves: meekness, making oneself absent and ‘proceeding inconspicuously’(shyness); irony, ‘masquerading in the guise of shyness’ and honesty(boldness). 

Darren Gillies is an independent researcher and alumni of the University of Glasgow and the University of Dundee. His research is grounded in existentialism and phenomenology, drawing on the work of Husserl, Heidegger and Sartre. His research themes are authenticity, bad faith, the Other, ontology, shame, shyness and secrecy. 

Content note: diet culture, eating disorders, fatphobia. Diets ostensibly function as reactions against and prophylaxis from “excess” body weight. However, diets rarely affect long term weight-loss. “Weight-cycling” (sometimes called “yo-yo dieting”) describes the phenomenon of losing weight and gaining it (and often more) back in repetitive cycles as a result of dieting behavior(s). The paradigmatic experience of what I call being a “weight-cycler” is therefore that of oscillation between being fat and being relatively thin(ner) in a fatphobic society. A phenomenological analysis of this experience of weight-cycling is missing from the interdisciplinary literature of Fat Studies. Using tools developed within the canon of critical phenomenology, which has historical roots in Merleau-Pontian, Sartrean, and Beauvoirian existential phenomenology, I fill this gap. Weight-cyclers commonly experience disordered relationships with their own bodies and the things that sustain it: food and exercise. I examine weight-cyclers’ troubled relationships with food, exercise, and their bodies, alongside their oscillation between different body-sizes, to argue that the phenomenology of the weight-cycler creates the conditions for an “apprehensive perception” towards the futurity of their own embodied selves. This feeds into further weight-cycling. I contend that part of the weight-cycler’s difficulty is that they focus on the body they “might have” instead of the body as lived.

I am a white cis-woman PhD student in Philosophy at CUNY. Broadly speaking, I work in moral and social philosophy. More narrowly, my projects typically involve questions at the intersections of feminist philosophy, existential phenomenology, bioethics, social epistemology, philosophy of language, and fat studies. 

A concern with menstrual shame has occupied policymakers, educators, and charity workers abroad for decades (ActionAid 2021, Amnesty International 2019). Increasingly, the ‘fight against period shame’ has been discussed within the UK, amid news of the Scottish government scrapping the ‘tampon tax’ and the award of an MBE to Amika George for her activism in offering free period products in schools (BBC 2021).    What is it that troubles many about menstrual shame? What exactly are activists fighting against?  I argue that these questions are best answered by attending closely to the phenomenology of menstrual shaming - this phenomenology not only reveals menstrual shaming to be insidious, but to constitute an injustice.  I argue, drawing on Iris Marion Young and Julia Kristeva, that menstrual shaming takes place mainly at the level of habits and unconscious behaviour in everyday social spaces. It reaches all corners of life - from personal to interpersonal and institutional.  The phenomenology itself plays a crucial part in discovering just what the injustice consists in: I argue that habit-formation influenced by shame and institutional failures, as I highlighted, leads to women’s self-respect being undermined before they even begin to engage in projects. It undermines their self-respect at early yet important stages of women’s lives, while remaining often invisible and highly normalised.    This account of injustice arising from the phenomenology of menstrual shaming, I conclude, gives us important insights into which other forms of bodily shaming constitute injustice and why they do so. This allows me to answer one of the most powerful objections to my argument, namely that we all conduct certain bodily needs in private and would be ashamed if discovered, yet do not think of this as an injustice. The specific phenomenology of menstrual shame, I contend, allows us to differentiate different forms of bodily shaming.  

Ronja Griep is a PhD Student in Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. Her research focusses on menstrual shaming, starting from its phenomenology to its status as an injustice and ending with thoughts on possible empowerment. She is especially interested in FemTech’s promise to ‘empower’ women from menstrual shame, e.g. by offering them to track their periods. Her research is funded by the Gates Cambridge Scholarship Programme and the Arts and Humanities Research Council.  

As I walk down the corridor, I barely slow my pace, extend my arm, and am then thrown by the wholly unanticipated experience of my body crashing into the unbudging door. I typified the door as a ‘push-door’ and approached it with the presupposition that my expectation of it opening upon being pushed would be fulfilled.  I argue that this all-too-familiar experience illuminates a tendency toward concordance which underlies the most pernicious and unintentional discriminatory practices. Concordance, understood as the cohering of experience with one’s expectations, provides us with a sense of normality which is fundamental for epistemic, normative, and doxic familiarity. In this talk, I bring Husserl’s phenomenological understanding of concordance-normality into dialogue with social scientific and philosophical work on discrimination. Historically, phenomenology has concerned itself with the lived experience of the discriminatee. However, it is also well-equipped for thematising the ways in which we discriminate at the pre-reflective levels of perceptual experience and bodily being. Discriminatory practices manifest in the unintended turning of heads, prolonged looks, or prejudicial ways of seeing and hearing. Drawing on examples of stereotyping, cognitive biases, and spatial exclusion, I show how discrimination is often a naïve, normalising attempt to stabilise concordance at the expense of new, revised, and dialogically established ways of seeing. To these ends, I begin with Husserl’s understanding of normality and its constitutional significance for our typifying experience of the world. I then illuminate the attitudinal character of discrimination and argue that there is a normalising tendency toward concordance underlying discriminatory practices. Lastly, I want to problematise this tendency toward concordance by arguing for the normative, epistemic, and experiential richness of discordance. Despite their disorientating and unfamiliar character, discordant experiences allow us to revise, critically reflect on, and expand our horizons of expectation. 

Tristan Hedges is a PhD fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. He is working under Dan Zahavi as part of the Who Are We research project, for which he is exmaning the phenomenological notion of we-identity. Within this context his research is interested in the Us/Them dichotomy, and how we-identities can be antagonistic and exclusionary, but also provide senses of belonging and political solidarity.  

Bulimia has been medically and socially constructed as an illness afflicting affluent, young, white women, which is to be cured through weight gain and the resumption of a ‘normal’ relationship with food. This myopic depiction of bulimia represents a predilection to ‘make sense’ of illness experiences in medically- and/or culturally-intelligible terms, and constitutes epistemic violence towards sufferers through its erasure of diverse forms of suffering and its disavowal of the subjective complexities of recovery. The pervasiveness of the eating disorder memoir, which dominates written representations of bulimia and positions linear recovery (expressed in narrative terms) as an experiential norm, further marginalises ongoing experiences of suffering; as Angela Woods argues, ‘[n]arrative does not have a monopoly on expressivity’ (Woods, 2013: 124).   In this paper I will use a phenomenological approach informed by affect theories, specifically Sara Ahmed’s work on orientations and attachments, to engage with embodied experiences of bulimia. I will read Bulimics on Bulimia (2009), a collection of fragmented, first-person, present-tense accounts of bulimia edited by Maria Stavrou, to propose that living with bulimia can engender individualised, affectively-charged attachments between selves, objects, and spaces through which each is destabilised and redrawn. Aiming to ‘provide a sample of insight into what life is like living with bulimia’ (Stavrou, 2009: 7), Bulimics on Bulimia seeks to address the privileged articulacy of narrativized accounts of bulimia through its representation of moments of intensity situated within social worlds from a polyphony of voices. Using an engaged phenomenological methodology which provides new ways of listening to written accounts of living with bulimia, I will seek to rearticulate bulimia as an object around which surges illogical, ambivalent feelings and emotions. 

Tom Hey is an AHRC-funded PhD student at Lancaster University, researching representations of eating disorders in contemporary literature through the intersecting frameworks of the medical humanities, postcolonial theories, and affect theories. 

In this paper, I argue that by approaching torture phenomenologically, we discover that the violence and pain wrought in torture suspends the spatial, temporal, and hermeneutical horizons of the tortured subject, leading to a collapse of her belonging to a social body. Moreover, specific torture techniques target the social body of the tortured subject in order to individuate and isolate the tortured subject. Drawing upon Elaine Scarry, I argue that in collapsing the horizons and social body of the tortured subject, the torturer attempts to impose a new social body unto the tortured subject, i.e., the social body of the state sponsoring the violence. The teleology of torture, however, is not this imposition of another social body but the destruction of the resistance of the tortured subject. After torture, resistance and sociality can be re-established with others through a process that is similar to Susan Brison’s understanding of renarrativization for victims of trauma. Restoration or healing is not always possible, but I detail some of the conditions that are helpful towards a reintegration of a tortured subject into a social body and expanded horizons once more. 

Jeremy Heuslein is finishing his doctoral research project, “The Flesh in Pain: A Phenomenology of Torture” at the University of Leuven. He has previously written on torturous violence and the phenomenology of other-inflicted pain. 

This paper gives a phenomenological analysis of the impact of grief upon bodily experience. In the first half of the paper I will provide an analysis of responses to Question 7 of the ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience’ questionnaire, ‘Has your body felt any different during grief?’ which was conducted with colleagues from the University of York. Using Braun and Clarke’s qualitative method of thematic analysis, I will organise the descriptions of bodily experience into patterns of themes, including feelings of heaviness, emptiness, constriction, numbness and depersonalisation. In the second half of the paper I will critically evaluate these themes in light of the broader literature on the lived body and lived space, as given in the work of Merleau-Ponty, Sartre, Marcel, Minkowski, Bollnow and Schmitz. In so doing, I will explore the ways in which modifications to bodily experience in grief can be seen to impact spatial experience and, by implication, the way in which the mourner finds themselves in the world as a whole. 

I am a postdoctoral research associate in philosophy at the University of York working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience.’ I completed my PhD at the University of New South Wales. My research is situated in the intersection between existential phenomenology and the philosophy of psychiatry and psychology, with a particular focus on phenomenological interpretations of affect and the way in which emotions modify temporal experience. 

Co-presenter: Rhona J. Flynn

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. 

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. 

Anxiety disorders are the most common psychiatric disorders and are associated with a high burden of illness. Given the increasing reports of anxiety symptoms in the face of climate change, pandemics, and socio-political relations, anxiety disorders are due additional analysis that might aid our descriptions and explanations. I propose that a phenomenological approach to anxiety disorders can do just that. Specifically, we ought to examine the ways in which the self plays a role in anxiety disorders. While previous accounts have highlighted the importance of the self in the occurrence and maintenance of anxiety disorders, their dealing of the notion lacks the phenomenological richness to capture the multidimensionality of selfhood. Borrowing the notion of self-disorder from phenomenological pathology, I argue that anxiety disorders similarly exhibit an alteration to our most fundamental experience of a self-immersed-in-the-world via disordered/disrupted organization of self-specifying processes. To substantiate my claims, I refer to empirical work on anxiety from clinical psychology and cognitive science regarding disruptions in experience of selfhood, on the one hand, and corresponding alterations of worldly experience, on the other. Next, I consider and respond to reasons theorists might have excluded anxiety disorders from the class of self-disorders. I then propose that interoception, which plays a fundamental role in forming our basic sense of self, is a good place to start when looking for the disruption of self-specifying processes in anxiety disorder. After considering empirical evidence to support this hypothesis, I will suggest a possible, causal explanations for this disruption in interoception by drawing from emotion theory and recent work in neuroscience. 

Alexandra Jewell is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Under the supervision of both Christopher Mole and Evan Thompson, Alexandra researches the intersection of philosophy of mind, phenomenology, cognitive science, and philosophy of psychiatry. She is interested in bringing the phenomenological approach into our understanding of psychiatric disorders in hopes to improve our descriptions and explanations within psychiatry. Having a background in Tibetan Buddhism, Alexandra also incorporates this worldview in her investigations of the subjective experience in cases of psychiatric disorder. 

According to Mariana Ortega (2016) humans occupy multiple worlds; following Martin Heidegger’s conception of Dasein as beings-in-the-world, she suggests that all of us are beings-in-worlds or beings-between-worlds. However, she suggests that this is especially the case for marginalized groups, who must travel between worlds in which they struggle to perform social norms pre-reflectively, engendering feelings of alienation.   This is analogous to the experience of the agoraphobe when they venture into public space. Despite being embedded in the surrounding culture, they too find themselves in a space where they cannot act pre-reflectively; instead, they are anxious, vigilant, and consumed by the fear of transgressing a social norm. This fear can result in the person abandoning their worlds and becoming housebound, as they seek out the comfort and safety of home against the panic-ensuing world   However, the relationship between the agoraphobe and the home is more complex when further considered. We must leave home to find home (Jacobson, 2011). Thus, it appears that while the agoraphobe is housebound (Davidson, 2000), she is also homeless, her home is always less than home. I suggest that this is because the house for the agoraphobe is more of a foxhole than a home; a place to recede to for temporary cover situated deep in the midst of a danger-zone. This is further suggested by the agoraphobe’s use of “shields” outside the home; objects which serve as a protection from the glare of the Other’s gaze (Davidson, 2000; Davidson, 2003). Surrounded by a battleground, the agoraphobe becomes a being-on-the-outskirts, with the uncanniness of the external world penetrating the walls of her fortress. Paralyzed by fear, she becomes snagged in the “imaginary” of a home (Ortega, 2016). 

Denise Kelly is a doctoral student under the supervision of Dr. Danielle Petherbridge in Philosophy at University College Dublin, where she is researching the phenomenology of mental illness. Her Ph.D. research looks specifically at agoraphobia and social phobia, examining these disorders in relation to the themes of intersubjectivity, embodiment, and affectivity. Her interdisciplinary research draws not only from traditional and contemporary phenomenological work and methods, but also from sociological understandings of illness and clinical data.   

This paper discusses the relevance of the embodiment dimension in psychological care through the case study of anorexia nervosa. Modern psy-scientific discourse is structurally based on the classical mind-body dualism which leads to the marginalization of the lived body in current psychological discourses. Nowadays a wide variety of disciplines emphasize that ignoring the lived body hinders understanding of the human being and its relationship to its environment (such as feminist approaches in sciences). The embodiment paradigm, that was once flourished in the phenomenological movement, now spreading among other fields to show the importance of the body. In the case of psychological practice, it emphasizes that feelings and behavior are not attributable only to the mind but also to the interaction of the body with its environment. The present paper aims to point out the usefulness of the paradigm through the case study of anorexia nervosa. The medical interpretation of anorexia sees body image disturbance as an individual issue and subordinates the body to mental processes. Feminist critique, in contrast to the individualizing perspective, focuses on the social causes behind the development of the disturbance. It concentrates on the social representations of the ideal femininity, cultural practices, questions of personal and social control, and the symbolic meaning of the body. Yet, critical theories, like social constructivism, reproduce the inaccuracy of psy-sciences. For them, the body is a material object, which only gains meaning through the symbolic acts of signification. Within both paradigms, the female body has a passive, subordinate role. The embodiment approach interprets the social and personal causes of anorexia through the subject's lived experiences. Thus, it does not impose extrinsic interpretations on the body of women who struggle with anorexia but helps to affirm their agency. The study first introduces the mainstream medical perception of anorexia in dialogue with its feminist critique. Afterward, it draws on the phenomenological movement, including the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, to interpret the embodiment perspective of the disturbance. Besides, the paper mentions possible therapeutic procedures that could successfully apply the embodiment paradigm in the treatment of anorexia.

Kata Dóra Kiss is a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Pécs, Hungary. Her doctoral research focuses on the importance of intersubjective relations in the field of psychological therapy. Before her Ph.D., she completed her master’s in Philosophy and Critical Gender Studies at Central European University, Budapest. These different fields help her to apply a multidisciplinary perspective in her research.

Co-presenter: Filipa Melo Lopes 

From Mary Wollstonecraft to Sandra Bartky, feminist philosophers have historically denounced women’s attention to clothes as a form of complicity with patriarchal hierarchy. Through self-objectifying and laborious forms of dress, women constitute themselves as passive objects, rather than active subjects. The key to liberation, then, has been said to lie in ‘opting out’ of care for one’s appearance. However, this strategy problematically dismisses the pleasure and the sense of creative self-fashioning that women experience in selecting, wearing, and making clothes. Feminist philosophers therefore face an impasse: either we acknowledge the oppressive function of clothes, but risk ignoring women’s lived experience; or we recognise the genuine pleasure and expressive freedom derived from clothes but undermine our ability to critique them. What then, if anything, can we say about what it is to ‘dress well’, in an ethical sense, in a patriarchal society? To answer this question, we adopt a phenomenological perspective, focussing on the relational, dynamic and embodied nature of meaning. We argue that the meaning of clothes is never entirely fixed and that they sit within a relational whole of significations (a ‘world’). Therefore, complicity with gender hierarchy is not a matter of what one wears, but primarily of how one wears it: of one’s relation to clothing and to the world. We develop a phenomenological account of Effortless Dressing that seeks to do justice to feminist critiques, whilst also recognising the pleasure and possibilities that can be found in practices of dressing. We argue ‘effortlessness’ involves: 1) a recognition that clothes have meaning, but that this meaning is not entirely fixed, 2) a critical awareness of the social scripts around dressing, and 3) a relation to clothes that values them for how they enable us to do things in the world, rather than as ends in themselves. 

Charlotte Knowles is an Assistant Professor in Ethics, Social and Political Philosophy at the University of Groningen. Her primary research areas lie in feminist philosophy and phenomenology, particularly Heidegger and Beauvoir. These interests come together in her work on complicity where she explores issues of freedom, responsibility, agency and oppression from a phenomenological perspective, in order to examine why women sometimes reinforce or uphold their own subordination. 

Recent phenomenological approaches to grief have, understandably, focused primarily on the relationship between the griever and the deceased, describing grief as an experience of different kinds of losses and as a transformation of various structures of subjectivity. In addition to the griever-deceased relationship, phenomenologists have even more recently begun to attend to the cultural and social aspects of grief (e.g. Køster and Kofod 2021). However, phenomenologists have yet to provide a thorough examination of the social dynamics and the sense of social isolation and alienation that can appear in grief. In order to address these issues, this paper will clarify the interplay of temporality and sociality in grief. Building on Thomas Fuchs’ account of ‘contemporality’, I argue that grief involves a desynchronization between the griever and their social world, which diminishes the griever’s sense of belonging with and ability to relate to non-grieving others. Further, I argue that a griever’s implicit or explicit awareness of their desynchronization from the social world accounts for the sense of alienation and estrangement often experienced when engaging in daily routines, projects, and social interactions. That is, the transformations in temporality in grief also involves an awareness that the griever temporally inhabits the world differently than others, causing the griever to experience once-familiar activities and social engagements as alien and strange. To make this argument, this paper will draw on literary-autobiographical accounts, namely Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Notes on Grief, Denise Riley’s Time Lived, Without Its Flow, and C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, with a focus on their descriptions of social interaction, performing daily routines, and self-understanding. Attending to these intertwined temporal and social aspects will provide a clearer understanding of how grievers renegotiate their relationship to their social world in the wake of their loss. 

Gage Krause is pursuing a PhD in Philosophy at Fordham University. His research focuses primarily on Phenomenology and Social & Political philosophy, working at the intersection of Critical Phenomenology, Phenomenological Psychopathology, and Philosophy of Disability. 

This paper argues that current accounts of primitive shame are incomplete and poorly  grounded in the relational context within which primitive shame develops. These accounts use adult concepts to explore the pre-linguistic, sensory world of the infant. The use of these concepts is at best indicative or metaphorical. What is required is a proto-phenomenological approach (Hatab) to the infant’s sensory experience. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty and Hatab I argue that it is our initial experience of bodily sensory connectedness which provides the pre-conditions for the initial development of primitive shame and the later development of pure shame. Nussbaum characterises the infants experience of primitive shame as a “fear of abandonment by the source of good” as in the infants relationship with the caregiver. Rochat theorises primitive shame in the same direction and claims that empathy is an emotional derivative of shame. Both Nussbaum’s and Rochat’s analyses stop far short of a comprehensive understanding of the relational context within which primitive shame emerges.   The Foetus begins initially in the tactile, protective environment of the womb. At birth the baby sensorially experiences separation: the cutting of the cord, the drawing of a first breath. It also experiences the intimacy of touch and the other non-visual senses: the comfort and warmth of its mothers breast, the sounds of her voice, the smell and taste of her body .  Touch, smell, sound and taste all bring connectedness and familiarity before vision highlights separateness.  It is this initial sensorial experience of connectedness which grounds primitive shame. This ‘proto empathy’ which is initially sensorially experienced in connectedness, touch and nurturing grounds and fosters the desire for social  proximity and belonging later exhibited by pure shame.  (283 words) 1. Guenther critiques Sartre’s account of pure shame for not providing an account of the sharing, supportive and nurturing environment which makes shame possible. p.27 2. Zahavi and Rochat  do not use the concept of ‘proto empathy’ but write about a basic other acquaintance which is “a central precondition for experiential sharing and emergence of a we.” Zahavi, Dan and Rochat, Phillipe: Empathy ≠ sharing: Perspectives from phenomenology and developmental psychology. p.551. 3. Dolezal, Luna ; Shame, Vulnerability and Belonging: Reconsidering Sartre’s Account of Shame, p. 436   

I am currently studying for a practice-based PhD in Philosophy and English at NUIG.  My project is: The completion of a philosophy thesis on the origins of subjectivity and the self, titled: How does ‘I’ Begin?  The completion of a novel on the theme of unlearning habit and beginning again. The novel is titled: No way to say Goodbye and is written in the first person.  I hold a BA (Hons) in philosophy from NUIM and an MA in Philosophy from University of London. I returned to university in 2017 after a gap of 33 years. 

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues that binocular vision is accomplished neither through the impersonal accumulation of separate images nor through the transcendental inspection of the mind; rather, it is accomplished through the gearing together of the two eyes in a single gesture responding to the tensions that steal across the phenomenal field. The gesture that creatively takes up these tensions is solicited but not predetermined by them. The binocular image haunts the field protentionally; it is a certain absence remaining virtual and imminent, and only there for the person able to sense its call. It is no more contained in these tensions than a poem is prefigured in a language, and only the accomplishment of binocular vision will prove that there was something there to be seen in this way. And yet, how the tensions of the field solicit a creative gearing-into has not been fully appreciated, with much of our focus on the accomplished perception rather than the paradoxical structure of tension that solicits it. Moreover, completing this picture is particularly urgent insofar as this example shapes Merleau-Ponty’s account of the perception of others and collective action. Now, although Gilbert Simondon rarely acknowledged his philosophical debt to Merleau-Ponty, I argue that Simondon’s account of the metastable tensions that solicit oriented but unpredictable individuation completes and furthers Merleau-Ponty’s fascinating use of the figure-ground structure and the event of binocular vision. By mobilizing Elizabeth Grosz’s reading of Simondon’s powerful philosophy of individuation and my own account of the paradoxical solicitation of the virtual, this paper offers foundational insights into our perception of others, collective action, and our being-with-others as a creative resolution of the tension of seeing double, together. 

Donald Landes is Associate Professor of Continental Philosophy in the Philosophy Faculty at Laval University, Quebec. He has published two books on Maurice Merleau-Ponty and the recent English translation of Merleau-Ponty's key text, Phenomenology of Perception. Landes has published many chapters and articles works on Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and contemporary French thought, and is particularly working in critical phenomenology.  

Adorno always maintained that "new music"—his term for mostly atonal, avant-garde music—was not just yet another musical school within the history of music which would gradually settle down and develop its own idioms, but that it was unique in the history of music and that it introduces a certain rift—"an abrupt, qualitative leap"—due to which it would never settle down. He developed this understanding of avant-garde music in writings that, at the same time, combine a philosophy of music, a sociology of music, and an engaged music criticism addressing contemporary works, whereby this criticism was never value neutral. In this paper, I demonstrate that phenomenology—despite Adorno's explicit but misplaced distaste for it—is well disposed to ground this understanding; in doing so, I use notions developed in general phenomenology and in "classic" texts of phenomenological aesthetics, such as notion of Typik in Husserl, notions of schemata and historical a priori in Dufrenne, or conception of a schematic work in Ingarden. Interpreting Adorno phenomenologically allows us to confirm the profound rift between atonal avant-garde music and the rest of music that Adorno identified, and to disclose it more precisely, describing phenomenologically how such music places unnatural demands on us, while it simultaneously stimulates us. In return, phenomenology of music itself benefits from phenomenological absorption of Adorno's philosophy of music, too. Such absorption helps phenomenology to engage critically with contemporary musical works and thereby test the thesis of the profound rift on the current atonal avant-garde works; this approach also helps to develop criteria to evaluate the avant-garde works. Finally, this rift can be interpreted as a defining feature of avant-garde music, and therefore contribute to discussions about definition of avant-garde music, which are still unsettled in musicological literature. 

Michal Lipták is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of Slovak Academy of Sciences. He defended and published his dissertation on aesthetics of Husserl and Ingarden, and his current research involves Husserlian phenomenology, phenomenology of art (and music in particular), structuralism and post-structuralism, political philosophy including critical phenomenology, Hegelianism, Marxism and post-Marxism, philosophy of new media, and philosophy of law. He regularly reviews contemporary classical music for Slovak cultural magazines. In addition to philosophy, he also studied law and works as an attorney. 

Becoming-a-physician through medical education is a process often mediated by shame (Bynum); that shame is not always as explicit or discriminatory as in July 2020, when the Journal of Vascular Surgery published an article classifying surgery trainee social media posts as either ‘professional’ or ‘unprofessional.’ Considered unprofessional: controversial social or political comments, and “inappropriate” attire including bikinis and swimwear. The article was interpreted as explicit shaming of gendered bodies within the profession and met backlash in the form of a Twitter campaign in which healthcare workers posted their bikini pictures with the hashtag #MedBikini. Here, I analyse Twitter discourse and popular coverage of #MedBikini as a surface reworking of the affective economy in medical training and suggest potential phenomenological implications of this shift (Ahmed).    The Vascular Surgery article made the nature of medical professional discipline visible, as it utilized surveillance and classification to manifest power and encourage normalization—and attempted to circulate shame among trainees. However, participants in #MedBikini re-signified bikinis (and their gendered and racialized bodies) as not-shameful, but valuable and resistant to dominant norms. Simultaneously, the #MedBikini movement highlights how racialized attire (hijab) and racialized bodies continue to be attached to negative feelings in the profession, complicating the potential meaning of the response as a social movement. Phenomenologically, the signification of bodies has potential impact on the experience of being- or becoming-a-physician. The revaluing of bodies within medical training reassigns group notions of shame and pride, reflecting Sedgwick’s notion of shame as a mobile and identity-producing emotion. The reshaping of the affective economy at the discursive level highlights the potential role of ‘affective activism’ in forming the power dynamics of medical training and the profession. That potential can be fulfilled when discourse translates into political and institutional responses which manifest change in the embodied experience of medical training. 

Penelope Lusk is a doctoral student in Education, Culture, and Society at the University of Pennsylvania, USA. She was a 2020-2021 Fulbright student fellow at the University of Exeter, UK. Her research interests are focused on healthcare and professional education, affect theory, critical theory and philosophy. 

Heart failure is a widespread and increasingly common disease. Its symptoms can be dramatic and debilitating. Serious heart failure is also incurable and represents a clear example of the kinds of serious illness and disability discussed by phenomenologists of health and illness. The gold standard treatment for end-stage heart failure is heart transplant. Increasingly, however, patients are offered artificial hearts – either Ventricular Assist Devices (VADs) or Total Artificial Hearts (TAHs) – as either a bridge-to-transplant or as a final or “destination therapy”. Artificial hearts supplement or replace the organic heart and perform the heart’s blood-pumping function, or what might be described as in Albert Borgmann’s “device paradigm” as the commodity of circulation. However, while they can provide this life-saving function, artificial hearts also generate both obvious and subtle phenomenological changes in their bearers. Incorporating a mechanical heart with both interior and exterior features is challenging. Artificial hearts produce and draw attention to new representations of otherwise felt or interocepted visceral states, and might interrupt pre-device motor intentionalities. Devices detach circulation from ordinary cardiac rhythms, while machine routines mark out new temporalities. In this paper, I introduce artificial hearts and why phenomenology is useful for considering them, then focus in on the three scales – short-, medium-, and long-term – of temporal change they may generate. 

Pat McConville is a doctoral candidate in philosophical bioethics at the Monash Bioethics Centre, Monash University, Australia. He principally draws on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to explore the phenomenology of medical devices, particularly artificial hearts. He has also published on phenomenology and congenital illness, phenomenology and reverse triage, and phenomenology and the aesthetics of the early arcade game Asteroids. 

This paper will examine the ethical basis of nursing using the prism of Heidegger’s idea of dasein. It will look at how, in the nursing ‘moment’ between a nurse and their patient, a nurse is called upon to be ethically responsive to the patient in a manner that engages in a dialogue with all those nurses who have provided care theretofore, are currently doing so and who will do so in the future. In direct patient care a nurse is responding to the ‘other’ in front of her, with their specific personhood and needs, but also to the generalised other person who may fall into one or more disease categories. This toggling between a specific and generalised patient ‘other’ presents dilemmas for nurses of how to shape care that attends to the needs of that individual patient while observing care guidelines and professional ethical precepts that are required by hospitals and professional nursing bodies. Data will be presented from interviews with nurses and from field notes observing nursing practice to substantiate the above and to show how nursing practice is not simply the observance of set and invariant modes of activity. Rather, nurses have to navigate the needs of: their professional training, their empathy with an often empained patient other, the changing expectations of those receiving care, the embodiedness of the other and their own embodiedness as well as supporting the patient to wellness, a less empained existence or through palliation to death. An understanding of nursing will be presented in which hermeneusis is suggested as a central part of nursing practice, wherein nurses- acting ethically- continually interpret the needs of their patients in providing the most appropriate care, against the backdrop of a constantly shifting personally and professionally accumulated knowledge of their role in providing care. 

Dr Joe MacDonagh is a Chartered Psychologist and a member of the research ethics boards of two acute hospitals in Dublin, Ireland. He is also a member of the Life and Medical Sciences committee of the Royal Irish Academy. He has a particular interest in bioethics, and has been involved in the organisation of seminars and webinars on this area. Finally, he is a former Honorary Secretary of the History and Philosophy of Psychology Section of the British Psychological Society. 

Edmund Husserl and other classical authors of phenomenology (such as Heidegger, Scheler, Plessner, and others) considered the problem of animal being a particularly important topic. As far as I know, however, none of these authors (including Husserl) devoted special attention to the problem of animal emotions. In this conference presentation, I would like to sketch out a phenomenological theory of animal emotional life from a Husserlian perspective. Just as the phenomenological study of emotion has contributed to understanding the essence of consciousness, it is my contention that the study of animal consciousness can similarly offer crucial insights. Both of these subjects help us to examine certain crucial features of consciousness in a sharper light. Animal consciousness represents a more elementary level of consciousness. Emotions, in turn, play a fundamental role in organizing conscious life; they underlie our goals, they also disclose the world in a fundamental way. In these respects, I believe that a better understanding of animal emotions could serve research on consciousness in general.   In this presentation, I take Husserl’s theory of emotions, as presented in his unpublished work, “Studien zur Struktur des Bewusstseins”, as a point of departure, and I apply this conception to the case of animals. In Husserl’s work, there are three principle levels of affectivity and emotion: feeling-sensations, “moods” or “dispositions”, and acts of feeling and emotion. I show that this schema is applicable to various kinds of animal consciousness, since wherever animal consciousness is concerned there are, at the very least, minimal (feeling-sensations) present. On this point, I also engage with contemporary scientific and neuroscientific research – especially the works of Jaak Panksepp. This makes it possible to explore how, while mammals have a quite rich and sophisticated emotional life, even insects might plausibly have certain elementary feelings (Perry, Baciadonna, & Chittka 2016). 

Bence Peter Marosan is from Budapest, Hungary. He has BA and MA in Philosophy, Theory of Arts and Media from Eötvös Loránd University. His PhD is in Philosophy, Phenomenology, also from Eötvös Loránd University (Hungary). Current affiliation: Budapest Business School, Pázmány Péter Catholic University. publications: 1) “Levels of the Absolute in Husserl”. In Continental Philosophy Review. 2021. 2) “Husserl on Minimal Mind and the Origins of Consciousness in the Natural World”. In Husserl Studies. 2021.  His research interests are: Phenomenology (Husserl in particular), Hermeneutics, Philosophy of Mind, Political Philosophy, Eco-ethics, Eco-politics  

Videogames are an experiential medium par excellence. Recently, phenomenological approaches in Game Studies have put forward how gaming is experienced as the embodied and multidirectional interaction between player and game, instead of focusing on either of the two (Crick, 2011; Čulig et al., 2019; Keogh, 2018; Vahlo, 2017). So far these perspectives remain theoretical, although they can have a profound influence on engagement with videogames about marginalized experiences. In this paper, I specifically consider the potential of videogames to communicate the lived and embodied experiences of neurodivergent people. Central to the experience of neurodiversity, regardless of official diagnoses, is divergence in embodied phenomena such as perception, sociability, emotionality, learning, and attention (Stenning & Rosqvist, 2021). By taking up the affordances of videogames as an experiential, immersive, and embodied medium, it becomes possible to better explain what these experiences are like.  Specifically, I will reflect on ethical questions that arise if we try to communicate neurodivergent experiences through videogames. I argue that, even though not principally harmful, videogames with the explicit goal to create empathy or care for neurodivergence can also be restrictive. These games encourage in advance that neurotypical persons take on the role of the ‘carer’, and neurodivergent persons the ‘cared-for’. This means that these games are not an open platform to explore the meaning of neurodivergence on an equal footing. I put forward attunement as an intersubjective and non-hierarchic mode of affective engagement with neurodiversity through gaming (Di Paolo & De Jaegher, 2021; Lipari, 2014). I argue that in principle, the potential for attunement is not restricted to specific types or genres of videogames. However, games that break with the cycle of fast-paced play and reward already possess stronger affordances to enable a reflective attitude. 

Lisanne Meinen is a doctoral researcher working on an interdisciplinary PhD project that maps how we can better understand neurodivergent experiences through videogames. In the project, she combines a cultural studies approach with qualitative inquiry to integrate life experiences of neurodivergent game designers and players in her research. Her theoretical interests include feminist philosophy, critical disability studies, queer theory, and all the ways they speak to each other. 

Co-presenter: Charlotte Knowles

From Mary Wollstonecraft to Sandra Bartky, feminist philosophers have historically denounced women’s attention to clothes as a form of complicity with patriarchal hierarchy. Through self-objectifying and laborious forms of dress, women constitute themselves as passive objects, rather than active subjects. The key to liberation, then, has been said to lie in ‘opting out’ of care for one’s appearance. However, this strategy problematically dismisses the pleasure and the sense of creative self-fashioning that women experience in selecting, wearing, and making clothes. Feminist philosophers face therefore an impasse: either we acknowledge the oppressive function of clothes, but risk ignoring women’s lived experience; or we recognise the genuine pleasure and expressive freedom derived from clothes but undermine our ability to critique them. What then, if anything, can we say about what it is to ‘dress well’, in an ethical sense, in a patriarchal society? To answer this question, we adopt a phenomenological perspective, focussing on the relational, dynamic and embodied nature of meaning. We argue that the meaning of clothes is never entirely fixed and that they sit within a relational whole of significations (a ‘world’). Therefore, complicity with gender hierarchy is not a matter of what one wears, but primarily of how one wears it: of one’s relation to clothing and to the world. We develop a phenomenological account of Effortless Dressing that seeks to do justice to feminist critiques, whilst also recognising the pleasure and possibilities that can be found in practices of dressing. We argue ‘effortlessness’ involves: 1) a recognition that clothes have meaning, but that this meaning is not entirely fixed, 2) a critical awareness of the social scripts around dressing, and 3) a relation to clothes that values them for how they enable us to do things in the world, rather than as ends in themselves. 

Filipa Melo Lopes is a Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh, where she researches feminist politics, sexual ethics, social philosophy, and the philosophy of Simone de Beauvoir. Her recent publications include Beauvoirian analyses of incel violence and the #Metoo movement. 

There are two sub-theses to the Embodied Mind’s (1991) core five theses which I contend Engaged Phenomenology needs to reconcile: phenomenology and autopoiesis. In particular, how is what is revealed in experience (phenomenology) connected to the neuro-immuno-cognitive-networks that make us living (autopoiesis)? In Evan Thompson’s 2007 book Mind in Life, he provides a history of autopoiesis and a genealogy of phenomenology which attempts to provide such an answer. In later work, Giovanni Colomobetti, in the book The Feeling Body (2013), views autopoiesis as too restricted a concept for the purposes of characterizing the features of a field she has invented (for the purposes of better understanding the intersubjective reality of emotions): Dynamic Affective Science. In this essay, I present the core features of autopoiesis, give examples of failed attempts to artificially generate such living structures, and situate the sub-concepts on the conditions of life and meaning of “adaptation” (according to autopoiesis) against evolutionary theory. In particular, I suggest that the autopoietic formulation of “adaptation” properly understood is what Colombetti describes in her genealogy of phenomenology (Chapter 2) as “primordial affectivity”. Thus an engaged phenomenology premised on shared life-worlds, in particular in their affective complexity, can rely on autopoietic criteria to ensure their phenomenology is of the living. 

Matthew Menchaca is a 4th year Ph.d student in philosophy at City University of New York (CUNY). A pipeline mentor and himself of minority descent (Mexican and Native American), he most recently presented at Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science (DUCOG) 2021 Linguistic and Cognitive Foundations of Meaning, applying Devitt and Kripke’s causal theory of reference to the acquisition of “standard” arithmetic. Currently at the prospectus stage, he is looking forward to writing a dissertation at the intersection of phenomenology and cognitive science. 

Engaged phenomenology does not only have the potential to transform socio-political realities and power relations between human beings, but also those between man and nature. Currently, anthropocentrism, namely the view that nature has only an instrumental value which is relative to the ends of human beings, governs these realities and relations. Phenomenology can contribute to transform them by including the lived body in the self-understanding of human beings. Understanding the lived body as the “nature that we are ourselves” (Böhme, 2019) would involve a different conception of nature as well: Man and nature wouldn’t be dichotomic anymore, rather human beings would be part of nature. Embracing such an ecophenomenological (cf. Brown and Toadvine, 2003) conception would have important normative implications. I will present them in three steps. Firstly, I argue that the instrumental value of nature for the fulfillment of human basic needs and health can be particularly well justified based on an ecophenomenological approach for it is precisely man’s corporeality by virtue of which he has these needs and through which health (or illness) manifest themselves. Secondly, sentience is inseparable from corporeality. Therefore, insofar as it is a concern of the ecophenomenological approach to take corporeality and its implications seriously, sentient beings deserve direct moral consideration. Thirdly, natural entities build an integral part of the good life of human beings, hence they deserve indirect moral consideration because of their eudaimonic value (Chan et al., 2016). As corporeal beings, humans can enjoy nature aisthetically, that is via their senses: The beautiful, the sublime, but also nature as home, as offering leisure and recreation, spirituality and transformation (Krebs et al., 2021). Taking corporeality into account, that is embracing an ecophenomenological account, thus leads to a deep anthropocentric position (Ott, 2016) and facilitates the transformation of current power relations and thereby shaped human-nature-relations. (301 words exclusive of literature).

Kira Meyer is a doctoral candidate in the field of environmental ethics at Kiel University. In her dissertation project she investigates the connection between the lived body and a relational understanding of freedom and argues on this basis for the compatibility of (strong) sustainability and freedom. Her research focuses on (eco-)phenomenology, new phenomenology, environmental ethics, and the concept of political freedom. 

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.   

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).

I am going to collide two approaches to technology in disability and chronic kidney disease: extension and incorporation. For the 4EA view, the metabolically considered living systems can include resources and processes beyond their bodies. The individual enacts autonomous self-monitoring, control of internal regulation, and exchanges. This ‘hybrid intercorporeality’ exists with graded norms of vitality – health, sickness, stress, and fatigue. It is an incorporation that affords the individual to enact her sense-making through the integration of technologies, artifacts, and prostheses into her body schema. This view emphasizes the body-as-subject, in contrast to the extended cognition thesis characterized by the tendency to objectify the body. The central problem of this approach is its view of incorporation as fruitful and enabling. I want to concentrate on the case of dialysis in chronic kidney disease as painful and discomforting integration of technology. This shows the intertwinement of the lived body and biomedical body-as-object. Dialysis is prescribed for persons with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) – kidney failure. The patient needs to rid her blood from toxins. This leads to the need for a regular course of long-term dialysis accomplished with an artificial kidney–dialysis machine. Based on the phenomenological interviews with the patients going through dialysis, I will analyze their view of technology as a life-supporting machine and a trap. The patients feel disgust and abjection towards the body due to the aggressive and painful presence of equipment – tubes and needles, fluid filling the body, changes in body shape and weight, nausea and fatigue, immobility, and limited social activities. Based on the materials of the phenomenological interviews with the patients going through dialysis, I want to show how the incorporation of technology and bodily integrity is enacted through pain and discomfort.

I am a Senior Lecturer in Bioethics at Pirogov Russian National Research Medical University. Also, I am a visiting scholar at the Faculty of Philosophy at Vita-Salute San Raffaele University (remotely). I hold a Ph.D. in Philosophy from Higher School of Economics (2019). The dissertation committee included Catherine Malabou and Adam Berg. My recent studies revolve around embodiment, disability studies, bioethics, and media theory. Currently, I am finishing phenomenological research on relations between doctors, patients, and technologies in palliative care. Also, I am conducting the phenomenological interviews with patients going through hemodialysis under the condition of chronic kidney failure.

This presentation describes an inclusive methodology I will be using in the future to account for the lived experiences of disabled people and the mundane skills they have formed from adapting to everyday social and environmental barriers. In both public thought and philosophy, those interested in understanding the concept of skilled action tend to focus on examples of elite skill, e.g., 'expert athletes'. (Gallagher et al 2019, Dreyfus 2014, Christensen 2019, Fridland 2014). If we ask what skilled action in disability looks like, we are pointed to examples of Paralympic athletes and wheelchair basketball (Edwards and McNamee 2015). However, I address an uncovered aspect in how we understand skilled action, by arguing that there is skill in everyday mundane tasks disabled people carry out in the face of barriers, such as navigating a wheelchair on a cobbled pavement. Although this research stems from reflecting upon my lived experiences of disability and skill, I do not solely include my own first-hand experiences. I will create workshops with 25 disabled individuals who are members of the charity Difference Northeast. They will be asked to scrutinise philosophical ideas about skill and consider the extent to which they fit with their lived experience of skilled action. Lived experiences that conflict with the philosophical conception of skilled action will be gathered and moulded into an inclusive account of skilled action that embodies these everyday mundane experiences. One of the aims of this presentation is to explain the motivation behind the practical workshops, as it arises from my characterization of mundane skill. This inclusive methodology is distinctive in that it aims to change public perceptions of disability and skill, whilst providing conceptual resources that can be used by those with lived experiences of disability to understand and articulate the ways that they are skilled. 

Abigail Moses is a PhD student at Durham University, UK. Abigail’s research is at the intersection of Phenomenology of Illness and Philosophy of Action, focusing on lived experiences of disability and everyday skills gained from navigating social barriers. She conducts research for the charity Difference Northeast, which aims to change perceptions of disability. Her interest in these areas of philosophy is driven by a longstanding attentiveness to the lived experiences of those around her. This includes personal reflection upon her own disability and chronic illness, in the hope that she will be an authentic voice of intersectional representation in philosophy. 

Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a psychopathological condition characterized by persistent deficits in social interaction, social communication and restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour and interests (APA 2013). To build an integrative, ecological-enactive account of autism, I propose we should endorse the skilled intentionality framework (SIF; Rietveld, Denys, & van Westen 2018). SIF connects a number of disciplines - ecological psychology (landscape of affordances), phenomenology (selective openness to and relevance of affordances, optimal grip), emotion psychology (states of action-readiness), and embodied neurodynamics (self-organizing affordance-related states of action-readiness). In SIF, embodied cognition is understood as skilled engagement with affordances (possibilities for action) in sociomaterial environment of the ecological niche by which an individual tends toward the optimal grip. An important part of SIF is an ecological-enactive interpretation of the free energy principle and predictive processing (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014). Predictive processing accounts point out that in ASD too much precision is assigned to prediction errors (Van de Cruys et al. 2014; Constant et al. 2020; Miller et al. 2022).  Autistics suffer from suboptimal generative models that do not reach high levels of abstraction and generality (they have “overfitted” models). I will show that in SIF`s terms, autistic patterns of action-readiness pick out very specific solicitations in the environment and achieve optimal grip only in well-known situations and specifically constructed niches. They make interventions in the environment with reliable cue-effect relations. Autistic individuals lack the openness (pathological embodiment) needed to be responsive to the relevant affordances, pilling up habits and skills that are rigidly applied without adjustment to the changing environment. I argue that autistic persons favour social environments that increase predictability through ritual behaviour and routines (XXX et al. 2022) and design monotonous landscapes of affordances. 

I am a junior postdoctoral researcher on The Sciences of the Origin Project (University of Oxford project ‘New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe’ and John Templeton Foundation) at the Institute for Philosophy (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade). My research is located at the intersection of Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Psychiatry. I focus on studying pathologies of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in autism spectrum disorder and building an integrative approach to autistic disturbances that combines phenomenological, enactivist, ecological and neuroscientific (predictive processing /free energy principle) perspectives. 

The concept of suffering is part of a new way of thinking about pain that tries to take patients’ individual perspective seriously instead of reducing their experiences to a biological mechanism (Ballantyne & Sullivan, 2015). I will briefly summarise the preliminary result of a systematic review of operationalisations of suffering (authors anonymised, in prep.), point out a fundamental disagreement within the literature, and then show what phenomenology can contribute to resolve it.   Suffering is usually defined as emotional distress related to a loss of identity and resulting from insufficient coping resources (Cassell, 1982; Chapman & Gavrin, 1999). However, some argue that suffering is a strictly individual experience only understandable from within a life narrative (Frank, 2001; Kleinman, 1988). Defining it is said to be futile and even harmful for the patients because it thrusts a foreign perspective on their illness upon them (Charmaz, 1983; Frank, 2001). To sum up, while most authors believe the concept of suffering to widen the scope of medicine, others warn against the danger of patronizing patients. I propose that phenomenology can solve this problem by analysing suffering in terms of (gradual) presence. In suffering, my lifeworld becomes less present to me, i.e. less forceful, less vivid – with one exception: That, which I suffer from, becomes more present to me. This is a particular form of presence that I call ‘pre-intentional’ (Bernet, 2014).  This analysis contributes to the reconceptualization of pain by offering a working hypothesis about the core of the suffering experience. By focussing on the structure of suffering rather than its content, it avoids patronising the sufferer and acknowledges that suffering is as heterogenous as the lifeworlds of the suffering subjects. I conclude by comparing my analysis to an insightful phenomenological account of suffering as an alienating mood by Frederick Svenaeus (2014).        

PhD student at the Section for Phenomenology, University Hospital Heidelberg - starting in July 2022: Clinical psychologist at the Clinic for General Psychiatry, University of Heidelberg - 2020-2022 MSc Psychology at Heidelberg (thesis about the operationalisation of suffering in pain research, systematic review) - 2015-2020 BSc Psychology at Heidelberg - 2015-2019 MA Philosophy at Heidelberg (thesis about the phenomenology of pain and depression) - 2012-2015 BA Philosophy at Heidelberg and Oxford - born 10 December 1991 in Freiburg, Germany .

Husserlian phenomenology attempts to develop a theory of mind that suspends the major metaphysical questions about human experience. As a result, Husserl focuses on the world as given. Typically, the nature and essence of morality is metaethical question; in other words, determining the essence of morality, or the good, is a metaphysical question. The result is a strange position where the phenomenological method is somewhat unavailable to ask how the essence does of the good relate to experience. Essentially, Husserlian phenomenologists would be required to adopt an antirealist position. Metaethical antirealist could use the phenomenological method because they hold that the essential nature of moral facts are not objective, true, or universal facts or properties but are rather ones that are non-objective, conventional, and particularist judgements or states of affairs. Yet Husserl and other phenomeologist that follow such as Stein and Merleau-Ponty, are careful not to endorse such a position. Husserl clarifies his opposition to antirealism in his ethical lectures,  claiming that there is a ’unconditional objectivity of validity in ethics’ (Husserl, Husserliana XXXVII, 147). However, he wants to preserve the notion that affective states indicate moral facts, but cannot be the basis of them, a neo-sentimentalist position. The goal of this paper is to investigate this problem and propose a solution where objective moral facts are investigable in a Husserlian phenomenology. To do so, I will draw on Stein’s understanding of the primordial given. The primordial given, according to Stein is what is naturally given in the world as a part of the essence of the world. I will argue that morality is part of the primordially given resulting a naturalist moral reaslist position. 

I am a current graduate student at the University of Cincinnati of Hispanic descent. My research focuses on morality and moral experience using interdisciplinary methods. My current project is using philosophical and psychological methods to develop a new method to study moral behavior. In addition, I am interested in understanding the nature of moral perception and moral action as it relates agent’s social experience and behavioral history. 

Online forms of social encounter are typically evaluated based on how well they might (or might not) act as a replacement for our face-to-face encounters (e.g., Dreyfus 2009; Turkle 2015, 2017; Chalmers 2022). I highlight three reasons why we should reject the false dichotomy presented by discussions of “offline vs. online” and move beyond considering the role of online forms of sociality within the framework of ‘replacement’. First, we should be wary of buying into the replacement dichotomy considering how each side of the debate is typically framed. On the side of the techno-optimists is a promise of technology yet to be developed, as such any argument for the success of ‘full digital replacement’ remains wishful and hypothetical. On the techno-pessimist side, critiques of digital communication tend to present an overly reified view of fully embodied offline sociality, seemingly forgetting that not all face-to-face encounters are smooth, positive, valuable, successful, or even respectful. Second, when comparing offline and online sociality, there is tendency to suppose that the participants are ‘neutral’ universal subjects and that face-to-face embodied social encounters are superior to mediated embodied social encounters. What this ignores is that there are many cases where an individual may experience supposedly ‘diminished’ or ‘altered’ embodiment as preferable, e.g., when online platforms provide a safe or less sensorially overwhelming social space. There is, then, a normative assumption baked into discussions of offline vs. online sociality. Third, by assessing online sociality in terms of its suitability as a substitute for physically co-present encounters, we both lose sight of, as well as impede, creative ways for us to encounter others online. Rejecting the notion of replacement allows us to conceive of online sociality beyond substitution; pushing us to demand and design digital tools that do not merely simulate offline forms of interaction but support novel ways of encountering each other. 

Lucy Osler is a postdoctoral researcher at the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. She is interested in phenomenological approaches to intersubjectivity, online sociality, embodiment, perception, emotions, and psychopathology. She is currently writing on social inclusion and exclusion in the online world, online grief, feelings of belonging and community online, as well as the role social technologies play in mental health, well-being, and therapy. 

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). 

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. 

Co-presenter: Myriam Coté 

Postulating, with Maurice Merleau-Ponty, a relationship of expression between the body and the place it occupies, we borrow from queer and feminist phenomenologies to think about the spatiality of subjects forced into heterosexuality. Sexual orientation is here defined as a constraint acting as a common ‘ground’, always already present, the sort of ‘background’ that Merleau-Ponty rightly considered constitutive of the subject-world relationship.  As many feminist theorists have defended in the wake of Adrienne Rich, the patriarchal norm quickly steers us towards the opposite gender. If such a definition of compulsory heterosexuality is true, the feminine space and the obliteration of the subject in this space will benefit from being studied as always already established in terms of masculine desire. This erasure of feminine desire and embodiment, abundantly discussed by recent feminist phenomenology and generally considered antagonistic to masculine body comportment and spatiality, draws from Iris Young and Judith Butler’s critical works and groundbreaking ideas on gender studies.   In our presentation, after defending that erasure is characteristic to female body comportment in the shared space of compulsory heterosexuality, we will defend that it is because this spatiality and orientation is rooted in a temporal, performative manifestation of gender norms and is sedimented in habits that we can imagine a different future for gendered shared space.   Thus, we argue that heterosexual shared space must also be thought in its temporality to be better understood. In other words, the reinvestment of this orientational constraint supported by the Merleau-Pontian furrow could allow a ‘keeping-open’ of the future gender norms and, through it, the gendered sharing of space. 

Marie-Anne Perreault is a M.A. philosophy student at the Université de Montréal. She works on the feminist reappropriation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought of embodiment and on feminist perspectives on the body. She is mainly interested in critical phenomenology, feminist philosophy and social epistemology. Her papers have been published in French in Ithaque, Phares and Cahiers du CIRP. Apart from her studies, she is co-organizer of the Symposium de philosophie féministe in Quebec and member of the Société de philosophie du Québec. She wishes to pursue her work in feminist phenomenology during her Ph.D. 

Co-presenter: Natalia Burakowska

The notions of what constitutes self and personhood are philosophically disputed, with different accounts focusing on narrative construction, others on a pure identity pole, or different phenomenological accounts pointing to a minimal or experiential notion of self in contrast to personhood, which includes habitual, social and culture aspects. In this paper, we problematise these various accounts based on the consequences for persons with neurological illnesses, such as dementia. The paper, however, has a more important aim. We draw on research arising out of engaged phenomenological workshops conducted with carers and persons with dementia to investigate the implications of assumptions about what constitutes the self and personhood in health care settings. In recent years, the ‘person-centred’ approach to dementia, first developed by Tom Kitwood (1997), has gained prominence within healthcare settings. However, we identify ways in which the person-centred approach to dementia is limited and potentially problematic. In many settings, it relies on a narrative construction of personhood, whether prior to memory loss or reconstructed from family members (McGreevy, 2015). We suggest persons with dementia should be considered to maintain personhood even after the onset of memory loss or seeming loss of narrative and linguistic capacities. We reflect on the ways in which our engaged phenomenological workshops have informed new understandings of: i) persons with dementia as dynamic and developing persons capable of expressing themselves in embodied ways; ii) the ramifications of defining what constitutes persons in the context of dementia in terms of narrative selves iii) how such reassessments might inform the practice of carers. This research will demonstrate that a shift away from understanding persons merely as narrative constructions and equipping carers with an embodied understanding of personhood can shift some of the power and dignity back to the patient.     

Danielle Petherbridge is Ass. Professor in Philosophy at University College Dublin. Her primary research interests include phenomenology and social philosophy, medical humanities and ethics. She writes in the area of phenomenology and illness, critical phenomenology, and social philosophy. She is currently working on a research project on phenomenological approaches to dementia, and is PI of an Irish Research Council New Foundations funded project BodyDementia. She is a team member of the EU Funded Horizon 2020 grant Policy, Expertise and Trust (PERITIA) and co-founder of Health, Ethics and Narrative Ireland.    

From self-harming behavior to the military industry (and its impact on global climate change), violence is a pervasive phenomenon in human existence. It is a relevant topic in numerous scientific disciplines (from psychiatry to political theory) and, depending on the definition, encompasses very different practices and social constellations, as well as their respective causes and consequences: from verbal aggression, threat, theft, fighting, assault, and murder to civil war and/or international armed conflict. Violence is thus a complex phenomenon related to a very wide range of social dimensions thematized by different sciences. What is the roll of phenomenology in this vast field of research? How should we approach this phenomenon from a phenomenological point of view? This work analyzes the phenomenon of interpersonal violent conflict from the viewpoint of transcendental phenomenology, focusing mainly on cognitive and normative aspects of different types of violent practices, understood as habitual forms of intersubjective interaction that can develop into cultural behavior patterns. The first part of my presentation offers a preliminary remark on the concept of violence. The second part presents a methodological adaptation of the “general scheme (allgemeines Schema)” of Husserl’s phenomenology to the phenomenon of violence as a form of intersubjective interaction. I go from the egological scheme “I have the lived experience of an appearing object (ego - cogito - cogitatum)” to the intersubjective scheme “we experience our own intersubjective interaction from diverse perspectives”. From here, the phenomenon of executed, suffered and/or witnessed violence will be analyzed from a static and genetic as well as generative perspective. In the third and last part, I make a self-reflexive commentary on phenomenological methodology. 

Sergio Pérez-Gatica holds a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Cologne (2020), where he conducted research on the methodological renewal of First Philosophy in Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. From October 2021, he is a full-time postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Phenomenology and Continental Philosophy – Husserl Archives in KU Leuven, where he works in the collective project “‘Functionaries of Humanity’: Phenomenology, the UNESCO, and the Problem of Universalism in Science and Culture”. Currently, his main research line focuses on the application of phenomenological methods for the analysis of social conflict in the field of violence research. 

Co-presenter: Phil Tovey  

Just as the Anthropocene marked a geological epoch that, for the first time, would be attributed to actions according of a single species, Homo Sapiens is on the precipice of another epochal transition through Human Augmentation (HA) whereby, through technological alteration, a single species is decoupling its own evolutionary trajectory from that of its natural environment. Through HA we should anticipate major disturbances concerning the classification of what it is to be human- taxonomically, socially and importantly, phenomenologically – owing to the intrinsic relational basis of our evolutionary-biological models with nature and their effects on perceptions of selfhood. By extension, this affects what it is to be a non-human and therefore has important ethical implications beyond an anthropocentric purview, to a more-than-human world whose only opportunity for augmentation arises in tight ecological symbiosis with its natural ecosystem. HA therefore represent a sociotechnical pivot point whereby the construct human is existentially disrupted through assimilation with either the purely machinic (i.e., Cyborgs) or the animalistic (i.e., Chimeras) both leading to what we coin as ‘ecophenomenological self-disruption’. We highlight HA’s self-disruptive potentiality through re-examining Wood’s (2001) rich dimensions of ecophenomenology - the plexity of time and the boundaries of thinghood – to reveal how these technological augmentations in our physiological structures (including our sensory modalities) threaten to either entrench ontological anthropocentrism or offer a promising opportunity to transition away from it towards ecocentrism. 

Dr Matt Pritchard is Visitor to the Faculty of Theology and Religion at Oxford University. He has BA and MPhil degrees in Archaeology and Anthropology from Cambridge University and a DPhil in Embodied Cognition and Religious Naturalism from Oxford. He was Co-Chair of the Civil Service Environment Network for 2021/22 and is on the Government Office for Science’s Expert Advisory Group for Resilience. 

Jean-Paul Sartre gives the example of being caught by someone looking through a keyhole as a profound shame experience. He took the essence of the experience of shame as one being a mere object for the other. The other’s look (‘The Look’) is the main way in which I encounter the other’s subjectivity. Personal relationships, for Sartre, are hence an inherently unstable dynamic, in which one is either the subject or the object. Douglas Harding was a British philosopher from outside the academy, who also analysed the lived experience of interpersonal relationships. Like Sartre, he thought of consciousness as a type of ‘nothingness’ and the making of oneself into a mere object as a kind of false consciousness. However, unlike Sartre he thought that my objectification from the gaze of the other is a habit that can be short-circuited. Harding observed that from the first-person perspective I don’t see my face. Rather in my visual experience, I am looking out of a gap. Visually speaking, I am space for the world, not a thing in it.  As infants and young children, one gradually learns to identify with how other’s see them – ‘The Face Game’. This social game is at the heart of one’s personal identity and also of difficulties in personal relationships. In particular, it is one of the main sources of the experience of shame (being ‘shame-faced’) and morbid self-consciousness. While Sartre doesn’t tell us how to remedy these debilitating forms of self-consciousness, Harding developed a number of practical awareness exercises that can be used in everyday circumstances. I will guide the audience through some of Harding’s first-person experiments. I will discuss how conscious ‘facelessness’ can be applied to problems such as shame, stage fright and morbid self-consciousness.  

Brentyn Ramm is a Humboldt postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Psychology and Psychotherapy at Witten/Herdecke University in Germany. His research focuses on using first-person experimental methods to investigate conscious experience – particularly on the self, awareness, and contemplative experiences in Asian philosophy. He completed his PhD in the School of Philosophy at the Australian National University in 2016. His honours in philosophy was at the University of Queensland. Before this he completed a PhD in cognitive psychology at the University of Queensland in 2006. His honours in psychology and BA (majoring in philosophy and psychology) was at the University of Adelaide. 

Though the relevance of conflict is universally acknowledged in political theory, it rarely is investigated as a political phenomenon in its own right. Instead, philosophical approaches to conflict are end-state theories, i.e., oriented towards the desirable states of affairs after a conflict is mastered. Moreover, these theories do not fully appreciate the particularities of real conflict participants’ experiences and the way these factor in in formulating effective solutions to conflict. Attempting to provide a first step into remedying these shortcomings, this paper discusses the significance of the spatiality of conflict events. Drawing on qualitative interviews I conducted with political actors – politicians, officials, and activists – and on Martin Heidegger’s account of space in Being and Time, I will argue that conflict space, existentially understood as a space of action, is co-constituted by the respective conflict participants, as well as the location where the conflict unfolds. Understood this way, location and conflict parties’ (self-)understandings enable and constrain ways of seeing and acting. This includes to ‘see’ the solution(s) to a conflict. Yet, a purely transcendental phenomenology will remain oblivious to the quasi-transcendental, social structures that shape a person’s conflict experience. Actual conflicts do not take place behind a ‘veil of ignorance;’ their situation is not ‘ideal.’ Instead, conflict spaces, as any other political spaces, are spaces of power. Hence, to illuminate these facets of the phenomenon, phenomenology has to become critical. Combining insights from interviews with Black Lives Matter activists and Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s notion of misfit, I will argue that power shapes conflict space in three ways: who chooses the conflict location/who may enter it; who builds a conflict location/for whom is it built; and the agent-relative difference in scopes of possible actions and experiences afforded by the location. Taking conflict seriously, then, involves coming to grips with the where of conflict. 

Niclas is a doctoral student at the University of Essex. His dissertation analyses philosophical approaches to political conflict. A particular emphasis rests on the phenomenology of conflict, appreciating the complexity and diversity of the phenomenon in modern polities. To this end, he conducts interviews with political actors. His interests include phenomenology (especially applied and critical), political and social philosophy. His research is funded by the German Academic Scholarship Foundation and the Consortium for the Arts and Humanities South-East England. He is also a research assistant at the interdisciplinary project ‘What does Artificial Intelligence Mean for the Future of Democratic Society?’ 

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. 

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.  

Recently there has been a spate of interest in Max Scheler’s social phenomenology (Schloßberger, 2016; Szanto & Moran, 2016; Cusinato, 2018). In this paper I aim to show that his philosophical contribution on sociality has its focal point on the concepts of eccentricity (Exzentrizität), both on the individual level and on the collective-social one. The socio-philosophical discussion about these two different levels, according to Scheler, often generates a dangerous dualism between individuation process and emotional relationality (Scheler, 1923). My main hypothesis is that Scheler escapes from this dualism through the theorization of the idea of Exzentrizität (Scheler, 1928): an anthropo-phenomenological reading of eccentricity reveals a creative interpenetration (Ausgleich) between the ideas of freedom, uniqueness and individuality (eccentricity in the individual sense) and the ideas of alterity, open-mindedness and World-openness (Weltoffenheit) (eccentricity in the relational sense) (Scheler, 1923; Scheler, 1928). My idea is that, for Scheler, the essential condition of any attitude towards personal changes (Umkehr) have its center in the idea of personal co-execution (Mitvollzug) for the maturation and the growth of personal singularity (Personbildung) (Scheler, 1925; Scheler, 1927; Scheler, 1928). And this means the formation and the expression, in the eccentric perspective mentioned above, of one's own ethical singularity (An-sich-Gutes für mich) and of one's own vocations. The idea of eccentricity declined in terms of vocation is therefore strictly interdependent on the idea of Otherness-exemplar (Vorbild) and personal witnessing (Scheler, 1921). The latter, as a paradigm of existential improvement, feeding on diversity and inspiration (Cusinato, 2018). On this point, many studies have suggested that Scheler’s reflection on exemplariness is solely grounded on the moral level, and therefore on the emulation of the virtues of others (Russo, 2019). This carries the risk of homologation, rigidity, and fixity. In addition, the risk is to produce a qualitative levelling of individual, value, and cultural differences. A close examination of the ideas of vocation and witnessing reveals instead that they are founded on the exaltation of talents, plasticity, peculiarities, and specificities of the person (Bellini, 2021; Ruggiero, 2018; Ruggiero, 2020). The presence of Otherness-exemplars (in personal, social, cultural, and religious terms) can provide individual with a guide or mentor for his or her peculiar process of axiological growth and personal happiness. While existing studies have clearly demonstrated the centrality of the idea of eccentricity for Scheler’s phenomenology and personalism, they have not addressed the connection between sociality, solidarity, eccentricity and exemplarist theory of Bildung and Vorbildsmodelle all the way. 

Alessio Ruggiero is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Verona. He obtained his master’s degree at the University of Salerno, where he has conducted for many years research on the thought of the German phenomenologist Max Scheler as a student and honorary fellow. He is currently working on the analysis of the ethical, pedagogical, and metaphysical-religious elements of personal exemplarity. He is an editor for national and international scientific journals ("New Journal of Philosophy of Religion"; “Philosophical News. Official Publication of the European Society for Moral Philosophy"; "Thaumàzein. Rivista di filosofia"). He collaborates with the Italian Association of Philosophy of Religion (AIFR), and with the European Society for Philosophy of Religion (ESPR) and with the European Academy of Religion (EuARe).

In this talk, I will explore the implications that our interpretive capacities have for experiences of mental disorder. The traditional view, as I call it, describes mental disorder as a dysfunction of the individual, whether that be in the brain, or in body-world interactions (de Haan 2020). By looking at the interaction between our folk-psychological tools for social understanding and the self, we see that mental disorders have an importantly intrapersonal (as well as interpersonal) dimension which should be brought forth front and centre. My thesis develops from an understanding of what it means for human beings to be ‘self-interpreting animals’ (Taylor 1985), drawn from the mind-shaping literature (Andrews 2015a, 2015b; McGreer 2007, 2015; Mameli 2001; Zawidzki 2008, 2016). Under this view, “What determines one’s being human is the image one adopts.” (Heschel 1965, p.8). Our folk-psychological concepts are inherently normative under the mind-shaping view and when applied to the self, we shape our behaviour in norm-conforming ways so we can be understandable to others. I argue that, while the ‘self-understanding as self-shaping’ thesis from Zawidzki (2016) and Andrews (2015b) is compelling as it explains the consistency and inconsistency of the self, the mechanisms at play create significant problems for individuals with mental disorders. Namely, it entails that these individuals may be overburdened to be understandable to others and themselves, feeling compelled to make sense of the inconsistent and incoherent self-experiences. This is troubling when individuals lack folk-psychological tools to make sense of experiences such as in cases of hermeneutical injustice (Ritunnano, 2022). This suggest to me new tactics in alleviating the suffering of individuals with distressing pathological experiences. 

I’m a 3rd year, SGSAH-funded philosophy PhD student interested in the intersection of mind and medicine. My research began with a deep dissatisfaction to our current approach and concepts of mental disorder and so I develop my project with the intention of developing a concept of mental disorder that both better captures the experiences of individuals and does better work for us politically and socially by reducing stigma and allowing people more agency in how they treated and understood. As such, I explore and am interested in all aspects of phenomenology of illness, from embodiment to agency, language and emotions. 

Street protests create spaces of appearance (Arendt) that galvanize public support for hitherto hidden forms of precarity and oppression. Put in these terms, street protests raise questions about their duration, as they rely on the physical proximity of people; they also raise issues of who can and cannot participate in this space of appearance and in what way, as public space is subject to various forms of policing(Butler). In this paper, I investigate these  limits of embodied resistance by looking at a different form of street protest, namely the feminist collectives that put up posters in the streets of Brussels denouncing gender-and sex-based violence. Some of these target street harassment by imploring passers-by to “laisse[r] les filles tranquilles”, while others focus on feminicide, publishing the name of victims of domestic violence. In different ways, these interventions relate isolated and privatized experiences of violence to patriarchal structures. First, deploying Arendt’s political phenomenology, I argue that these artefacts are intended as a (semi-)permanent mark on the public space; and they invoke the victims of various forms of gender-and sex-based violence, reclaiming the streets as a site of commemoration and of free movement. Secondly, I show how they also presuppose passers-by that stop, read and respond to them. I suggest this interpellation should be understood as a moment of critique, in the sense in which critical phenomenologists (Guenther, Al-Saji, Salamon) have defined it as the suspension of everyday comportment and the exposure of historically contingent structures of oppression. Thirdly, I argue (contra Arendt) that protest does not always require the physical proximity of a group of people engaging in purposeful action-in-concert, but can also develop as a series (Sartre, Young), in this case, as the interpellation of passers-by as possible agents of social change, engaging in acts of indignant remembrance and of leaving women and other targeted groups alone. 

Liesbeth Schoonheim is a postdoctoral researcher at Humboldt University, Berlin, working on the intersection of political theory, feminism, and social theory. Previously, she held a postdoctoral research fellowship at KU Leuven (Belgium) and an appointment as a lecturer at University of Amsterdam (Netherlands).   

In the field of the phenomenology of depression, depressed individuals have reported feeling disconnected, isolated, incarcerated, detached and alienated from other people and the world. I argue that such descriptions of one’s experience of depression can be examined through understanding the depressed individual as a ‘non-participant spectator’ in the world.  I begin by examining the structure of interpersonal relationships and suggest that an interpersonal relationship is characterized by the following constitutive aspects: i) Reciprocity, ii) Interaffectivity, and iii) A sense of the other as a person. An interpersonal relationship involves turn-taking and, as such, is a reciprocal interaction in which agents respond to the other’s actions and behaviour. Additionally, such interactions are interaffective in nature as participants have the ability to ‘affect and be affected’. An interpersonal relationship also involves a sense of the other as a person - that is, as an individual who offers the possibility of engaging in contingent interactions, with whom one can interact in a reciprocal and interaffective manner. By focusing on the above three constitutive aspects of an interpersonal relationship, I describe how each of these is disturbed in depression, subsequently affecting the individual’s being-in-the-world. Due to these disturbances, depressed individuals describe themselves as inhabiting ‘another world’, being alienated, isolated, and incarcerated in the world, and also as experiencing a diminished sense of being-with other people.  Testimonies from depressed individuals demonstrate that the depressed individual feels that they adopt a third-person detached perspective toward the world and feels that they cannot actively participate in it. As the depressed individual cannot establish interpersonal relationships which are reciprocal, interaffective and which involve a sense of the other as a person, the world for them takes the form of a world being a world-for-others toward which they merely spectate.  

I obtained a BA in Philosophy and Psychology and an MA in Philosophy from Durham University (UK). I am a 3rd-Year PhD Researcher in Philosophy at the University of York (UK), working on the philosophy of mental health, specifically on phenomenological experiences of depression, under the supervision of Prof Matthew Ratcliffe and Prof Keith Allen. My research focuses on first-person experiences of depression, especially on individuals' experience of the world as alienating, isolating, and incarcerating. I argue that such descriptions of one's experience of depression can be understood using the notion of being a 'non-participant spectator' in the world. 

This presentation examines the role of shame in relation to giving birth. Three dimensions of shame will be explored: 11.) Nudity. Although giving birth does not necessarily mean being entirely naked, it certainly means an exposure of one’s genitals. 22.) Intimate touch. Before and during birth, vulva and vagina are being touched by healthcare professionals who will normally be strangers to the woman giving birth. 33.) Display of emotions. Giving birth means to experience overwhelming emotions while surrounded normally by one’s closest partner as well as healthcare professionals as strangers. My presentation will describe each of these dimensions with respect to the shame involved. Phenomenological thinkers Jean-Paul Sartre (being looked at), Jean-Luc Nancy (touch) and Maurice Merleau-Ponty (flesh, body language, intercorporeality) will be drawn upon for these description to provide us with relevant concepts. Practical solutions will then be suggested with special emphasis on verbal language and body language. Nudity can often be mitigated by verbal speech. Intimacy of touch can be balanced by relevant modes of touching in other areas (esp. massage). The best response to displays of emotion would be normalising these expressions, and not feeling the need to thematise them. Examples will be discussed for each of these. Overall, establishing intercorporeal relations between the involved party helps alleviate shame as well as anxiety, preparing the parents for the wonder to come. The most fundamental intercorporeal relation is simply being there. Although being there for the woman in labour can involve verbal language, the dimensions of body language and silence are crucially important (as I have developed in an online module commissioned by the Royal College of Midwives). 

Dr Tanja Staehler is Professor of European Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Her research interests include Plato, Hegel, Phenomenology (Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Derrida), Aesthetics, Philosophy of Pregnancy and Childbirth. She has written books on 'Hegel, Husserl, and the Phenomenology of Historical Worlds' (2016); 'Plato and Levinas: The Ambiguous Out-Side of Ethics' (2010); and (with Michael Lewis) 'Phenomenology: An Introduction' (2010). 

Co-presenter: Hans-Georg Eilenberger

People’s lived experiences of illness and health form a crucial field of exploration for the medical humanities. A number of methods and theories have proven particularly attuned to this concern, including qualitative interviewing and the philosophical framework of phenomenology. While there have been many attempts to marry up these two approaches (see, e.g., de Boer et al. 2015, de Haan et al. 2013, Legrand & Ravn 2009), the epistemological, methodological, and ethical implications of their union remain underexplored. Phenomenological philosophers who integrate qualitative interviewing in their studies generally note the methodological importance of embodiment in the encounter with research participants (see Høffding & Martiny 2016). What embodiment exactly contributes, however, is not spelled out in any detail. We take feminist epistemology as the starting point of our investigation into embodied interviewing. In her well-known essay on situated knowledges, Donna Haraway (1988) challenges the doctrine of disembodied scientific objectivity and contrasts it with response able, partial, and localized ways of knowing. Attending to embodied experience, as we understand it, is one way of situating knowledge production in a web of worldly intersubjective relations. The aim of this investigation, then, is both methodological and ethical: to develop resources for self-reflection that further enhance the integrity and rigour of the phenomenological interview. We pursue this aim by asking the following question: how does an embodied encounter with the other ground the phenomenological interview, in the sense of inaugurating a situated way of knowing? We approach the above question by means of a dialogical phenomenological analysis. Our analysis is based on an ongoing exchange of reflections regarding our respective experiences as interviewers. Through this practice of joint sense-making, we are able to describe the interview encounter in terms of basic phenomenological concepts. Echoing the interview situation, the dialogical format blends the content and the form of our analysis. It also promotes self-reflectivity by forcing us to progressively re-interpret our experiences and to regard them from different positions. In our contribution, we focus on the methodological and ethical implications of understanding the interview as an inter-corporeal encounter. This aspect is captured most succinctly by the notion of the other who does not leave me. We are left by the other with a feeling of abiding commitment to them as a research participant, which situates the practices of interviewing and data analysis between the academic possibility of co-creating new meaning and the ethical call of the other. Tracing ‘the other who does not leave me’ through various refractions of lived experience—the interview itself, the transcription, the phases of analysis—we explore how in each instance bodily proximity and ethical response-ability are enacted.  

Jessie Stanier is a PhD student at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. She takes an engaged approach to her PhD research on phenomenology, ageing, and older age. The project draws together Jessie’s theoretical interest in critical Husserlian phenomenology with her ethical and methodological interests in working together with participants on research. Jessie is Chair of the International Symposium for the BSP and she set the conference themes on ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ in 2020 and 2022. She completed her MA in Philosophy at KU Leuven, Belgium, in 2018. 

It is often argued that mutual understanding is crucial in clinical encounters. In particular, narrative medicine proponents strongly believe that through mutual understanding and doctors’ narrative skills it is possible to increase both empathy in the doctor-patient relationship and affiliation within the community of healthcare professionals (Charon, 2017; DasGupta & Charon, 2004). However, although empathy appears to be one of the main aims of narrative medicine, it has not been extensively analyzed by its supporters. For this reason, I argue that narrative medicine should discuss on the one hand what the role of empathy is in narrative medicine’s proposal and, on the other hand, what kind of empathy should be involved in the clinical encounter. In this regard, I show that if the type of empathy involved in narrative medicine is understood as synonymous with the doctors’ ability to simulate the patients’ perspectives as proposed by Simulation Theory (Goldman, 2006), narrative medicine and the clinical encounter can be negatively impacted (Gallagher, 2007). In addition, when empathy is reduced to a simulation-plus-projection mechanism, it can not only radicalize the other’s alterity triggering possible harm towards others (Bubandt & Willerslev, 2015) but also disregard whether and how deeply people want or need to share their perspectives and ignore the situatedness of the empathic understanding exacerbating existing inequalities (Hollan, 2008, 2017). Finally, I suggest that narrative medicine should explore alternative accounts of empathy. Specifically, the phenomenological approach (Scheler, 1913; Stein, 1917) offers one that is multifaceted and layered in which empathy has a specific but partial role in understanding others (Throop & Zahavi, 2020). Accordingly, I will try to show that phenomenological empathy seems able to provide healthcare professionals guidance to improve their narrative skills and achieve the ultimate goal of affiliation, without having to face the objections raised against a simulationist concept of empathy (Vendrell Ferran, 2015; Zahavi, 2014).   

Eugenia Stefanello is a PhD Student in Philosophy at the Department of Philosophy, Sociology, Education and Applied Psychology (FISPPA), University of Padova, Italy. Her research focuses on Phenomenology, Moral Philosophy, Bioethics, and Philosophy of Mind with a particular interest in empathy and its influence on the deliberative process. 

In this paper, I illustrate how reflexivity, humility, and embodiment are integral to moral phenomenological research. While reflexivity and embodiment are widely acknowledged in qualitative inquiry and the phenomenological research process, these concepts are not critically examined within moral phenomenology. With the help of two ‘reflexive moments’ from the exploratory qualitative study which examines the moral experience of humiliation within Non-European migrants' healthcare experiences in Zurich, Switzerland, I will describe how reflexivity and embodiment are intertwined with humility. By doing this, I argue that researchers and participants share the intersubjective space where they engage with the emerging layered complex experiences. Furthermore, I illustrate that embodied humility provides space for mutual recognition of researchers and participants ‘moral self and Other’. Finally, I discuss how these complex intertwining layers, through the reflexive process, result in understanding moral experiences and moral judgments. Through this paper, I conclude and advocate for weaving in embodied humility and reflexivity while conducting moral phenomenological research, as it demystifies the moral and epistemological stances of the researcher and research process. 

I am a Postdoctoral Fellow, and work on the philosophical and conceptual constructions of (dis)respect, humiliation and respect for persons within bioethics literature. My research interests lie at the intersection of moral emotions, ethics and behaviour. I employ qualitative methodology to explore moral subjectivities of individuals and engage with moral epistemological inquiries in my methodological research. 

“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.  

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.). 

Co-presenter: Matt Pritchard  

Just as the Anthropocene marked a geological epoch that, for the first time, would be attributed to actions according of a single species, Homo Sapiens is on the precipice of another epochal transition through Human Augmentation (HA) whereby, through technological alteration, a single species is decoupling its own evolutionary trajectory from that of its natural environment. Through HA we should anticipate major disturbances concerning the classification of what it is to be human- taxonomically, socially and importantly, phenomenologically – owing to the intrinsic relational basis of our evolutionary-biological models with nature and their effects on perceptions of selfhood. By extension, this affects what it is to be a non-human and therefore has important ethical implications beyond an anthropocentric purview, to a more-than-human world whose only opportunity for augmentation arises in tight ecological symbiosis with its natural ecosystem. HA therefore represent a sociotechnical pivot point whereby the construct human is existentially disrupted through assimilation with either the purely machinic (i.e., Cyborgs) or the animalistic (i.e., Chimeras) both leading to what we coin as ‘ecophenomenological self-disruption’. We highlight HA’s self-disruptive potentiality through re-examining Wood’s (2001) rich dimensions of ecophenomenology - the plexity of time and the boundaries of thinghood – to reveal how these technological augmentations in our physiological structures (including our sensory modalities) threaten to either entrench ontological anthropocentrism or offer a promising opportunity to transition away from it towards ecocentrism. 

Philip Tovey is the Head of Futures in the public sector organisation. He holds a MSc by Res in Policing from Canterbury Christ Church University and his research focuses on the cognitive phenomenology of time and futurity. Phil is a strategic partner of the University of Bristol’s ESRC Centre for Sociodigital Futures, whereby he focused on interdisciplinary research to address environmental issues of strategic importance to the UK.   

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. 

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 presentation discusses more than twenty years of transdisciplinary research with geographers, linguists, philosophers and collaborators from other disciplines.  This research into landscape language (ethnophysiography) utilised applied and critical phenomenological methods to investigate practical, embodied, affective and engaged modes of dwelling which have continued for tens of thousands of years.  This included the authors (second) PhD investigation and dissertation: Understanding Modes of Dwelling: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Phenomenology of Landscape (Murdoch University, Western Australia).  A transdisciplinary approach, using engaged phenomenology as the over-arching meta-paradigm, was operationalised via a detailed case study and data analysis methodology, including phenomenography and other hermeneutic methods.  Such collaborative research with indigenous peoples requires comprehensive ethical considerations, negotiations and protocols, involving appropriate engagement with both female and male participants.  The research produced an explanatory model of factors relevant to differences in relationships with landscape, as place, (Ethnophysiography Descriptive Model) and identified language ontologies represented in landscape terms and toponyms (placenames).  Case studies with Australian Indigenous language communities investigated their embodied relationships with landscape, as ‘taskscape’. Some language group members continue traditional practices; ceremonies at sacred sites, hunting, gathering and caring for ‘country’.  The research recognised the central importance of their social/cultural/spiritual holistic system called (T)Jukurrpa in the central and western desert areas and other names in different languages (e.g. Bidarra Law in Yindjibarndi).  This integrates social organisation, ethics and spirituality, intimately linking each specific language group to their ‘country’.  It is inadequately termed ‘The Dreaming’ in English.  This collaborative investigation facilitated interpretation of relationships with landscape in terms of commensurability with Heideggerian concepts of ‘care’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘topology’, while addressing ‘Eurocentrism’.  Two case studies produced a Pictorial Dictionary of Landscape Terms for Yindjibarndi and for Manyjilyjarra Aboriginal languages.  These dictionaries assist in language preservation, community cohesion and practical caring for ‘country’ by indigenous ranger teams. 

Andrew Turk has degrees in Surveying, Applied Science (Cartography), Arts (Psychology/Philosophy), PhD [1992 - Melbourne University] and second PhD [2020 - Murdoch University].  In the 1970s and 1980s he worked for the Australian Government producing topographic maps, involving surveying fieldwork in remote areas (including Antarctica) and development of digital-mapping and GIS.   In 1983 he commenced research/teaching at Melbourne University.  From 1993 Andrew taught human factors aspects of Information Systems at Murdoch University and researched Native Title, community development and cultural information with Aboriginal communities. Since 2000 he has conducted transdisciplinary research into cultural/linguistic aspects of landscape (ethnophysiography) using phenomenology methods. 

The aim of my paper is to show that insights from the field of embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition can be used to articulate a more inclusive socio-technical imaginary of human well-being. I borrow the notion of a socio-technical imaginary from Jasanoff and Kim (2015), who define socio-technical imaginaries as “collectively held, institutionally stabilized, and publicly performed visions of desirable futures, animated by shared understandings of forms of social life and social order attainable through, and supportive of, advances in science and technology.” I begin by arguing that a quasi-Cartesian conception of the mind and the body currently shape our sociotechnical imagination, informing widely held ideas of: 1) what minds and bodies are 2) what well-functioning minds and bodies look like & 3) what it means to design technologies that purport to support, augment, cure, and rehabilitate minds and bodies that deviate from the widely shared view of properly functioning bodies and minds. I will discuss how developments in Crip Technoscience allow us to interrogate and critique this quasi-Cartesian socio-technical imaginary. I will then propose that these Crip Technoscientific insights can be bolstered with insights from the field of embodied, embedded, extended and enactive cognition, also known as 4E Cognition. After I discuss how 4E offers an alternative take on ideas 1-3, listed above, I offer a tentative sketch of a more inclusive sociotechnical imaginary centered around Crip Technoscientific and 4E insights.

Janna van Grunsven is an assistant professor in philosophy of technology at TU Delft and a research fellow in the NWO-Gravitation research programme “The Ethics of Socially Disruptive Technologies”. Van Grunsven’s work combines insights from philosophy of technology and the field of 4E cognition and examines how different theoretical accounts of the mind and different technological developments can have decisive ethical implications for how disabled people are brought in view in a moral sense. Her work has appeared in journals such as Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Topoi, the Journal of Consciousness Studies, and Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology.

Theories of affective intentionality are concerned with the evaluative dimension of emotions. From this perspective, emotions can be seen as the ability to disclose meaningfulness. However, such theories too often neglect the social structuring of affectively disclosed content (for example, in Goldie 2001; Helm 2000; Roberts 2003). Theories within the paradigm of situated affectivity (cf. Stephan, Walter & Wilutzky 2014; Slaby 2014; Colombetti & Roberts 2015) which do consider socio-cultural factors often fail to acknowledge the meaning-making dimension of emotions because of their focus on emotion regulation. In this talk I combine theories of affective intentionality (cf. Slaby 2008; Slaby et al. 2011) with the paradigm of situated affectivity from a critical phenomenological (Ahmed 2010; Al-Saji 2014) and practice-theoretical perspective. On that basis I introduce the concept of “habitual affective intentionality”, which allows to address and, if necessary, to criticise the socio-cultural structuring of affectively disclosed content. I consider affective intentionality to be a bodily, phenomenally experienced way of disclosing complex meaningful Gestalts in and against the background of social practice. In this talk, I will especially spell out the ability to disclose meaningfulness by means of an emotion as the ability to “play along” (cf. Bourdieu and Merleau-Ponty) with practice-relevant “games” and thus to maintain their validity. This raises the normative question of whether the practices and forms of living supported or disturbed by means of affective intetionality are justifiable or not. This orientation leads from the theoretical description of affective intentionality as an embodied and practical capacity to the normative and social theoretical perspective on the critical interrogation of consolidated emotional practices. It thus opens up the philosophy of emotions, which has so far mainly revolved around theoretical questions of affective intentionality, to questions of contemporary social philosophy and social critique. 

I work as a postdoctoral researcher at the institute of cognitive science at Osnabrück University, Germany. I defended my PhD thesis in November 2017, which has been about the epistemic relevance of emotions in socio-culturally situated complex understanding processes. I have done research on emotions from a decidedly normative/political stance from the beginning of my studies and am now also working on a theory of education that is concerned with how to properly understand social matters in order to change them (climate change, structural racism, ethical issues concerning AI and technology, etc.). 

In a 2011 paper Merold Westphal argues that Gadamer and Ricoeur’s respective hermeneutical projects expose us to a dialectic between distanciation and belonging. Ricoeur shows us our distanciation by pointing out that when an author publishes a book, their text is open to interpretation by anyone who can read. Therefore, the text is distanced from its author. However, Gadamer says that both the reader and the author “belong” to the world of the text through “absorbtion”. Nonetheless, Westphal goes on to argue that we should not think of Ricoeur and Gadamer as “opposite poles” of hermeneutic thought, but that we should think of them as exposing us to an uncomfortable dialectic that the hermeneutical tradition exposes. In this paper, I will argue that there are at least two ways in which one's social media profile shows us this dialectical relationship in action. In the first case, the profile belongs to them since they are in control of what gets posted. But, on the opposite end of the dialectic there is a distanciation that occurs from the poster when they make a post. That is, in the same way the author of a novel puts something out in the world to be interpreted, so too does the poster when making a post. The second way this dialectic gets put on display is that a person belongs to their profile in the sense that it is a sort-of virtual representation of the self. The subject and their profile are inseparable, both belonging to each other. Yet, the profile is also distanciated because there is a distance between the subject and their profile. Put bluntly, the social media profile becomes a distanciated self.

Jeff Wasch graduated with an MA in philosophy from West Chester University of Pennsylvania. His interest are in phenomenology, epistemology and philosophy of mind, existentialism, and hermeneutics.

Lisa Guenther offers a definition of critical phenomenology that proceeds by establishing three pivots from canonical phenomenology, especially a shift from inquiring about transcendental structures to “quasi-transcendental structures.” What shifts will be required in its methods to address this shift in its object? Guenther suggests that critical phenomenology’s method involves “emotional work.” In what way does critical phenomenology involve a uniquely affective toil? I argue that phenomenology’s critical turn calls for an affective turn in both its methods and its objects of inquiry. Alongside Guenther, I draw on Alia Al-Saji’s work on Fanon’s phenomenological method as one that pivots from the specular to the affective.   After explaining Guenther’s definition, I articulate a methodological problem critical phenomenology faces given its shift in object of inquiry. But I forecast that this is a false problem generated by what Al-Saji has called the “methodological trap of specularization.” Al-Saji argues that Fanon defuses this trap with a turn to a phenomenology of affect.   I build an argument for a related conclusion that bears on critical phenomenology broadly. I proceed through an analysis of the sociological notion of emotional work as containing three key ingredients: affect circulation, affective force, and affective agency. I use these concepts first to revisit Guenther’s definition of critical phenomenology, then to understand a paradigm case of critical phenomenological method (Fanon’s account of colonial racism) in contrast to a paradigm case of traditional pheomenological method (Sartre’s account of being-for-others). I conclude that affect has a privileged place both in critical phenomenology’s objects of inquiry and its methods: both the sites where we go to work, and the tools we bring to bear. Guenther is right: critical phenomenology involves emotional work.   And Al-Saji is right that “a phenomenology of racialization is a phenomenology of affect”—in fact, this is true for critical phenomenology generally. In this move, critical phenomenology loses the immanence of phenomenological evidence in the first person, but it gains the immanence of critical phenomenological evidence from within the second-person, transindividual circulation of affective forces, as well as gaining evolution from a phenomenology of mere description to one that “mak[es] us feel social structures,” putting us in touch with their affective force as it circulates through us (whether we are wounded by their injurious influence or employed as its weapons), and there giving us a work zone for the transformative dimension of critical phenomenology’s project. 

Shiloh Whitney is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. Her research lies at the intersection of Feminist Philosophy, Critical Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Affect and Emotions. Her current book project develops an ameliorative concept of emotional labor, building the theoretical framework of affective economies and affective injustice that expanding intersectional feminist usage of the term requires. Her critical phenomenology project engages with French thinkers such as Merleau-Ponty and Fanon as well as with contemporary scholarship in critical phenomenology both to develop a critical phenomenology of affect and uniquely affective forms of injustice, and to build a theory of the role of affect in critical phenomenological method. 

The aim of this paper is to better understand the feeling of alienation in the aftermath of trauma. It is a feeling often described as not being at home in the world, the absence of a feeling of belonging not tied to specific individuals or groups. Husserl offers a concept that can aid us in capturing something important to this pervasive background feeling: the ‘homeworld’. The homeworld is constituted in contrast to an alienworld. It is experienced as ours rather than theirs. It is thus an inherently intersubjective concept that rests on the shared experience of possibilities and anticipations within one’s homeworldly horizon. Applying the homeworld concept to experiences of psychological trauma highlights the limitations of the notion. What we perceive as our world is messy, heterogenous, and in constant flux. The clear dichotomy between the home and alienworld that Husserl suggests does not capture the complexity of human experience; an alienworld may become familiar, and the homeworld may cease to feel like our own. I draw on work by Gerda Walther to develop a homeworld concept that allows for movement between and overlap of various homeworlds. I thereby develop a conceptual framework to describe the feeling of alienation in the aftermath of trauma in a more nuanced way. Trauma alters the individual’s sense of possibilities and anticipations. There are constraints on how far an experience can deviate from its normal anticipation-fulfilment structures and still be accommodated within our intersubjectively constituted homeworld. When an experience is too disruptive, the experience cannot be integrated within the homeworldly horizon: the individual no longer feels part of their homeworld and is expelled into a No-man’s-land. I suggest that this captures the sense of alienation common to post-traumatic experience. 

I recently submitted my PhD on the phenomenology of post-traumatic experience with a focus on intersubjectivity at the University of York. My supervisors are Matthew Ratcliffe (philosophy) and Christina van der Feltz-Cornelis (psychiatry). I hold an MA in Philosophy from the University of Copenhagen. 

In ordinary language, “common sense” is understood as certain “sense” that is taken for granted (selbstverständlich). However, is the “sense” of common sense an unquestioned feeling towards the world or is it rather certain common understanding of it? Through a phenomenological investigation of schizophrenia, I argue that the common sense does not only encompass both but also a third dimension, namely, the affective trust and familiarity (Vertrautheit) with the world constituted intersubjectively. In their study of schizophrenia, Blankenburg and Thomas Fuchs understand the common sense (Selbstverständlichkeit) lost in the schizophrenic patients principally as a kind of feeling or affectivity. Blankenburg terms it the Feingefühl and identifies it with the Heideggerian concept of Bewandtnis- and Verweisungszusammenhang, as distinguished from the objective apperception of things that remains unscathed. Fuchs, similarly, argues that it is the disorder and modification of the mood (Stimmung) into the Wahnstimmung that underlies the modification of lived-experiences of the patients characterized by their constant questioning (Infragestellung) of one’s existence and paranoiac delusions. Revisiting Heidegger’s account of Bewandtniszusammenhang as constituted by both understanding and attunement (Befindlichkeit), I contend with two concrete arguments that the basic sense of the world as Bewandtniszusammenhang is preserved by the patients. What is lacking in the patients is instead the “capacity” to devote oneself to (sich hingeben) the retained sense of world. Here I introduce Husserl’s distinction between the simple value-perception (schlichte Wertnehmung) of something as valuable/invaluable and the subject’s affective position-taking (Gemütsstellungnahme) towards those apperceived qualities. The dedication (Hingabe) requires the subject’s affective trust and familiarity with the world and others, which is established throughout one’s lived-experiences in the intersubjectively constituted life-world.  Once this essential sense of trust, or Urvertrauen, is destroyed (through e.g., traumatic experiences), the subject would no longer be able to truly embrace any kind of common sense as unquestioned.

Graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, I am now a PhD candidate of Prof. Thiemo Breyer and a DAAD-scholarship holder at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School from the University of Cologne. My research project is dedicated to the problematic of the unconscious, understood as the sedimentations in the Husserlian sense, and its relation to the normal as well as so-called pathological life of consciousness such as schizophrenia and borderline-personality disorder. Last year, I held a presentation titled “Der Urboden des Bewusstseins – die Stimmung und die Frage nach dem Unbewussten” in the colloquium organized by Prof. Thomas Fuchs in Jena.

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. 

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. 

Co-authors: Kathryn Body (presenting the paper); Jamila Rodrigues 

The Covid-19 pandemic has had far-reaching and life-changing consequences for many people, including the loss of loved ones, livelihoods, and life milestones. The risks associated with a potentially life-threatening virus such as Covid-19 have been widely discussed from an epidemiological or otherwise scientific perspective. Whilst this is vitally important for understanding how the virus transmits and behaves once inside the body, it cannot tell us how the pandemic has changed people’s lived experience of the world and of their bodies. In this paper, we use theoretical frameworks from social anthropology (Douglas 1966, 1970, 1992) and phenomenological philosophy (Carel, 2016, 2018) to analyse qualitative data drawn out of a large-scale anonymous survey focusing on adult populations in the UK, Japan, and Mexico. This study asks: How has the Covid-19 pandemic changed people’s experience of their bodies and the world? We unpack this further by asking the following sub-questions: What effect has the lockdown and other countermeasures against the virus had on the way people perceive their bodies and other people’s bodies? What cultural and symbolic meanings are attached to the body and if so, how did they change? To what extent do the risks associated with the Covid-19 virus threaten people’s sense of bodily security and safety? To address these issues, we present a conceptualisation of a pandemic body captured into five main themes, these are: Fear and Danger, Bodily Doubt and Hypervigilance, Risk and Trust, Adapting and Enduring, Changes in Perspective. These themes emerged from qualitative survey data and show how different aspects of the pandemic experience have been embodied through people’s narratives. Through a detailed analysis of these issues, we conclude that the pandemic has forced people to rethink their relationship with their bodies, other bodies, and the world around them. 

Havi Carel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol. She recently completed a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award, the Life of Breath. She was awarded the Health Humanities’ Inspiration Award 2018 for this work. Her third monograph, Phenomenology of Illness, was published by Oxford University Press in 2016. She was selected as a ‘Best of Bristol’ lecturer in 2016. Havi is the author of Illness (2008, 2013, 2018), shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize, and of Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (2006). She is the co-editor of Health, Illness and Disease (2012), New Takes in Film-Philosophy (2010), and of What Philosophy Is (2004). 

Co-authors: Kathryn Body (presenting the paper); Havi Carel 

The Covid-19 pandemic has had far-reaching and life-changing consequences for many people, including the loss of loved ones, livelihoods, and life milestones. The risks associated with a potentially life-threatening virus such as Covid-19 have been widely discussed from an epidemiological or otherwise scientific perspective. Whilst this is vitally important for understanding how the virus transmits and behaves once inside the body, it cannot tell us how the pandemic has changed people’s lived experience of the world and of their bodies. In this paper, we use theoretical frameworks from social anthropology (Douglas 1966, 1970, 1992) and phenomenological philosophy (Carel, 2016, 2018) to analyse qualitative data drawn out of a large-scale anonymous survey focusing on adult populations in the UK, Japan, and Mexico. This study asks: How has the Covid-19 pandemic changed people’s experience of their bodies and the world? We unpack this further by asking the following sub-questions: What effect has the lockdown and other countermeasures against the virus had on the way people perceive their bodies and other people’s bodies? What cultural and symbolic meanings are attached to the body and if so, how did they change? To what extent do the risks associated with the Covid-19 virus threaten people’s sense of bodily security and safety? To address these issues, we present a conceptualisation of a pandemic body captured into five main themes, these are: Fear and Danger, Bodily Doubt and Hypervigilance, Risk and Trust, Adapting and Enduring, Changes in Perspective. These themes emerged from qualitative survey data and show how different aspects of the pandemic experience have been embodied through people’s narratives. Through a detailed analysis of these issues, we conclude that the pandemic has forced people to rethink their relationship with their bodies, other bodies, and the world around them. 

Jamila Rodrigues is a postdoctoral researcher in the Embodied Cognitive Science Unit at OIST where she contributes as a qualitative researcher to the project COVID-19 pandemic experience. Rodrigues has extensive experience working doing ethnographic fieldwork in South Africa, and East Asia on topics related to embodiment, gender, religious studies, and wellbeing. Rodrigues was recently awarded with a JSPS (2022) standard fellowship for a study on gender, Japan and embodied ikigai (propose of living) during the pandemic crisis. 

Co-author / paper presesented by: Yekta Bakırlıoğlu 

The act of designing involves the creation and implementation of products, services and systems for users, through increasingly critical approaches such as design for social innovation, participatory design, transition design, which emerged over the past couple of decades to challenge mainstream design practice.  Nonetheless, defining a hierarchically conspicuous design problem that frames the design outcomes remains a crucial aspect of designing, which is inherently eliminative and reductive and results in exclusionary products and services. The outcomes of such processes inevitably pose various forms of domination, inequality and injustice, concomitant with gender-blind, gender-biased practices. A robust, inclusive and intersectional gender lens needs to be incorporated into designing to address such exclusionary practices, and the totality of the design experience (i.e., the act of designing, design outcomes and how they are experienced) should be interpreted accordingly. Most importantly, phenomenological perspectives that are highly benefitted in gender theories can prove beneficial in this endeavour, enabling a multi-faceted perspective to address the design process and outcomes while presenting potentials to enable designers to grasp different aspects of subjectivity rather than just seeing users as ‘social objects’. Especially, the queer phenomenology of Sara Ahmed, with the concepts of orientation, disorientation and reorientation, helps us understand the subjectivity beyond the restrictive definition of user, within temporality and spatiality and how subjects turn toward certain objects and away from others – which helps define the overall design experience. ‘Queer’ here enables not only defining the disorientation of subjects – experienced as discomfort, alienation and being lost – but also their reorientation – towards subversive yet constructive and exploratory. Thereby, the act of designing readily orientated within pre-defined, closed systems can be disorientated and reorientated while unveiling critical, socio-political, and open-ended potentials. In this path, being disoriented would be cherished to explore these multi-faceted potentials of the act of designing and thus prevent the eliminative and restrictive defining of design problems.  

Erman Örsan Yetiş is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Criminology, the University of Manchester, UK, as a TUBITAK-2219 Fellow. He received his PhD from the Department of Gender Studies, Ankara University, Turkey, his MA from the Department of Gender Studies, Central European University, Hungary, and his BA from the Department of Sociology, Bogazici University, Turkey. During his PhD, he was a visiting researcher at the Department of Gender Studies, Lund University, Sweden, as a Swedish Institute Fellow. He is also a gender expert and a gender equality trainer. His research interests include gender-based violence, psychosocial approach, critical masculinity studies and gender-sensitive design.