KEYNOTES

The conference will take place on our dedicated event platform accessible only by registered participants. Keynote presentations will be streamed live over Zoom and will include time for Q&As; the audience will be able to submit questions via Zoom chat, and these questions will be put to the Keynote by the Chair of the session. These Zoom presentations / Q&A sessions will be recorded, and be available on the video platform for those that missed them or wish to rewatch for over a week after the live event.

Prof. Andrew Benjamin

Andrew Benjamin is the Distinguished Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Technology, Sydney (and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, Melbourne).

His keynote paper for this year's conference is titled Future as Suspension.

In Walter Benjamin’s review of Junger’s edited collection War and Warrior, Benjamin links the possibility of the future to the overcoming of myth and magic. He writes in relation to the essays comprising the book that, Until Germany has broken through (gesprengt hat) the entanglement of such Medusa- like beliefs that confront it in these essays, it cannot hope for a future (eine Zukunst erhoffen).

While the term ‘breaking through’ occurs in this passage, a similar strategy is at work in terms such as ‘divine violence’, ‘destruction’ and ‘caesura’. What is significant about them is that they define the future in terms of the openings created by the suspension of dominant logics. The aim of his paper is to investigate this particular conception of the future.

Prof. Rebecca Braun

Rebecca Braun joined NUI Galway in 2021 to take up the position of Executive Dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences & Celtic Studies. Before then, she was Professor of Modern Languages & Creative Futures at Lancaster University in the UK, where she was also Co-Director of the Institute for Social Futures from 2017-2020. She has held further lectureships and research fellowships at the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester and Oxford in the UK and at the Freie Universität Berlin. She grew up in West Cork and Tipperary.

Rebecca's work explores how literary texts can drive new ways of thinking about the future, both as objects of analysis (traditional literary criticism) and as a co-creative process (practice-focused workshops using creative writing techniques). This futures work builds on a deep understanding of the power of people and stories, which she has traced in numerous books on authorship, world literature, transnationalism, and cultural value. Most recently, these include World Authorship, co-edited with Tobias Boes and Emily Spiers (Oxford: OUP, 2020) and Transnational German Studies, co-edited with Benedict Schofield (Liverpool: LUP, 2020).

Her keynote paper for this year's conference is titled Literary Futures: How Fiction Can Help Policy Makers.

This lecture sets out how literary texts both engage with methods that are central to futures studies – notably forecasting and back-casting – and are themselves a method for linking past, present and future in new, socially-meaningful ways. Because narrative plots routinely upend any straightforward chronological understanding of causality, literature can itself be seen as a tool with practical application for work in social futures. Accordingly, I provide a broad survey of how canonical literary texts and genres have developed blueprints for different ways of living in the world that draw alternately on forecasting and back-casting methods, and then work through the specific example offered by one of the founding novels of the European canon, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605/1615). In so doing, I show how literary texts allow their readers to reposition themselves in relation to multiple possible worlds and sketch out distinct plans of action, for both themselves and others, that are informed by powerfully imagined lived experience. Literature provides valuable insight into the different kinds of agency and resilience that are needed to sustain such future-forming activity and which other, more technocratic models of scenario planning tend to overlook.

Prof. Shaun Gallagher

Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a Professorial Fellow at the School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong. He was a Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Fellow (2012-18), and has held Honorary Professorships at Tromsø University (Norway); Durham (UK) and Copenhagen (DK), and visiting positions at Cambridge, Lyon, Paris, Berlin, Oxford and Rome.

His areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of mind, embodied cognition, social interaction, self/personal identity and hermeneutics. His publications include Action and Interaction (2020); Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (2017); A Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder (2015); Phenomenology (2012; new edition 2021); The Phenomenological Mind (with Dan Zahavi, 3 rd edition 2021); How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005); editor: Oxford Handbook of the Self and Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

His keynote paper for this year's conference is titled The Future of Action.

How should we act to address climate change, racism, sexism …? These are large important problems that call for serious actions on both individual and collective scales. To think about actions on these scales one needs to think about future or distal intentions – that is intention formation that involves deliberation, action planning and decision, much of which can involve communication with others. My aim is not to address these large questions – so I won’t be offering any advice about how we should address climate change, etc. My aim is rather to dig down into the phenomenology of the possibility of taking action, and indeed the possibility of deliberating, planning, decision-making and communicating – all of which are themselves actions. My analysis will address a version of what has been called the ‘scaling up’ problem.

I will argue that in regard to processes on the scale at which Husserl addresses time-consciousness – which I want to call intrinsic temporality, because it applies not just to consciousness, but to action and performance, and perhaps to life processes in general – the rule is not passivity, as a sort of waiting for the future to happen, but enaction. We enact the future on the most basic scale, and if this were not the case, we would not be able to take action, to deliberate, to decide, or to communicate, or solve any of the problems concerning climate, racism, or sexism. The latter processes involve a narrative scale. I’ll argue, however, that rather than ‘scaling up’ to narrative (understanding it as higher-order cognition), one should think of ‘scaling out’, and understanding narrative as a kind of performance. In this regard, although this kind of formal analysis does not give us any answers to these larger questions, it should tell us how it’s possible to act.

Fiona Hallinan

Fiona Hallinan is an Irish artist and artistic researcher undertaking a doctoral project at LUCA School of Arts KU Leuven, researching the performative coming-into-being of Ultimology, a concept that proposes the close examination of endings as a site for transformative encounter. In collaboration with curator Kate Strain, this project was previously in residence at CONNECT, the Science Foundation Ireland Research Centre for Future Networks and Communications.

She hosts On Death, an interdisciplinary reading group, recently co-wrote a BAI funded radio essay for RTE radio and is on residency at Kunstencentrum Vooruit looking at the worker's canteen as an endangered entity. Her work takes the form of writing, drawing, discursive events and rituals. She has exhibited at Grazer Kunstverein, Kerlin Gallery, IMMA, Parsons Paris and Brown University.

Her keynote paper for this year's conference is titled Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is: On darkness and the study of endings

Ultimology refers to the study of endings, or that which is dead or dying. This presentation will propose darkness as one of a set of thematic concerns for the concept. An introduction to the background of the project of Ultimology will outline a set of contexts where the concept has been applied, and will illustrate some ways artistic research practice can be used to explore new models of record making, specifically looking at darkness as an affective tool. Darkness will be presented in this paper as a site of potential and transformative encounter through examples of its application in a number of contexts. The paper will be accompanied by a set of directions for listeners.

Title is a quote from a poem by Wallace Stevens

Prof. Sara Heinämaa

Sara Heinämaa is Academy Professor (2017–2021 Academy of Finland) and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland. She specialises in phenomenology, existentialism, philosophy of mind and history of philosophy, and has published extensively in these fields, especially on normativity, emotions, embodiment, personhood, intersubjectivity and gender. She is an expert of Husserlian phenomenology but has also contributed broadly to our understanding of existential phenomenology and its methods, especially the philosophies of Merleau-Ponty, de Beauvoir and Sartre.

Heinämaa is co-author of Birth, Death, and Femininity (2010) and author of Toward a Phenomenology of Sexual Difference (2003), and has co-edited several volumes, including Why Method Matters: Phenomenology as Critique (forthcoming 2021), Phenomenology and the Transcendental (2014), and Consciousness (2007)

Her keynote paper for this year's conference is titled Phenomenology as Vocation: A Project Instituted by the Will for a Future.

In The Crisis, Husserl argues that transcendental phenomenology must be understood as a scientific vocation with radical philosophical aims. However, The Crisis also gives a curiously ambiguous characterization of the phenomenological vocation which emphasizes its similarities with other life vocations but, at the same time, problematizes this analogy. On the one hand, Husserl argues that we can conduct phenomenological inquiries in the same manner as we manage other projects, scientific and non-scientific. On the other hand, he also argues that phenomenology requires a radical and fundamental abandonment of all worldly interests – theoretical as well as practical, positive scientific as well as critical. If this holds, phenomenology cannot be practiced in the manner of any worldly projects (everyday, scientific or philosophical). So, we find a fundamental tension in Husserl’s characterization of his own philosophy: it seems that phenomenology must be understood as a dual vocation which, on the one hand, allows periodic practicing like worldly vocations but, on the other hand, demands a permanent abandonment of everything that is worldly. My presentation gives a novel account of Husserl’s understanding of the phenomenological vocation, one that helps us understand and alleviate this tension. I will argue that Husserl’s conceptualization of phenomenology as a scientific vocation must be understood in the light of his theory of the habituation and institution of intentional acts, and that special attention must be paid to the habituation of the conative acts of willing. For this purpose, I will offer explications of Husserl’s concepts of habituation and institution and introduce the main parameters of his analysis of the intentionality and temporality of volition.

Dr Alessandro Salice

Alessandro Salice is Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy of University College Cork and a Research Associate at the Center for Subjectivity Research (CFS) in Copenhagen. Previously, Alessandro held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Graz, Basel, Vienna, and at the CFS. He mainly works at the intersection of phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and moral psychology, by paying particular attention to the social capacities of the mind.

Alessandro has edited The Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality. History, Concepts, Problems (2016), together with Hans Bernhard Schmid. He is co-editor of Journal of Social Ontology and his papers have been published in several journals including: Emotion Review, European Journal of Philosophy, Frontiers in Psychology, Frontiers in Psychiatry, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences, Philosophical Psychology, and Synthese.

His keynote paper for this year's conference is titled Realist Phenomenology: A Plaidoyer.

A spectre is haunting the phenomenological community—the spectre of phenomenological realism. All the powers of old phenomenology have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Sartre, post-structuralist radicals and analytic spies.

But what is phenomenological realism? The talk aims at answering this question in three steps.

In the first part, I give a brief historical overview of the Munich and Göttingen circles of phenomenology, while highlighting some methodological considerations on how to approach the study of this complex tradition of philosophy.

In the second part, I focus on phenomenological realism as a metaphysical position consistently embraced by the members of the two circles. I argue that phenomenological realism is characterized by (a specific form of) correlationism and by essentialism and I show how these two principles have informed some specific positions in phenomenological psychology and social phenomenology.

Finally, the last part rejects various attempts to assess realist phenomenology in relation to its convergence or divergence with the Husserlian project. Realist phenomenology, so the claim goes, deserves to be assessed in its own right because it is a unique, fertile, and autonomous form of phenomenology. Doing that—i.e., philosophically engaging with early phenomenologists, while historically uncovering their insights—promises to impact different strands of the current philosophical debate and to substantially enrich the received picture of the phenomenological movement.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse