Identity and change, present and future: four ever present concepts of the human substance. If we go back over the centuries, we should consider the Metamorphoses poem as a real treasure chest donated by the great Roman poet Ovid: the idea of transformation from one shape into another one is the central theme in his poem and we believe that this key concept still works as a kind of educational effort to think of identities in terms of present and future human imagination. Nowadays we must be ready to deal with new kinds of metamorphoses: anthropomorphic robots and humanoids, prosthetics and mutations are the real challenge for human beings to rethink their identity. While Ovid uses metaphors to describe human identities, robotics engineers use human shapes to make machines have greater impact. However this is still the philosophical question: what will then be our choice for the human measure in the future? We will try to answer to this complex question using Ovid as a basis of interpretation. At first sight, all the metamorphoses depicted in his poem are a distortion of reality, a denial of the natural order of things, because they symbolize an ontological shift, a fundamental change in what we consider the natural boundaries of being human. But if we read the text carefully, we learn that those transformations actually restore an ethical order of things. Metamorphoses respond to reality by helping to cope with unacceptable and uncomfortable situations and resolving contradictions in the world; they bring salvation or doom, therefore, through this, performing an act of justice. An ethical and social order is precisely what should be maintained from the present to the near future: this is an even stronger requirement in the new circumstances of long-term social interaction with robotic applications. 

Fabrizia Abbate is currently an Associate Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Molise (Italy), in the Department of Medicine and Health Sciences; she is also member of the Scientific Committee of the Interdisciplinary Research Center on Governance and Public Policies in the same University. She has been a member of the Italian Society of Moral Philosophy from 2017 and a member of the Italian Society of Aesthetics since 2013. She was previously a contracted Lecturer in Aesthetics at Roma Tre University in Rome, Researcher in Ethics and Education at Ca’Foscari University of Venice, and Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago (US) with a research project supported by Martha C. Nussbaum. Her work focuses specifically on European hermeneutics (Paul Ricoeur), with a particular attention to the questions of subjectivity, imagination and social capabilities. She is currently working on these topics linked to robotic issues and medical artificial intelligence.

What is the "world" to us? Is it more correct to speak of "world" or "worlds"? What is the relationship between what exists (the real) and what can be born (virtuality)? How can we improve and transform reality through artistic practice and knowledge? My intervention wants to try to answer these questions, from a philosophical and phenomenological perspective, through the analysis of the philosophy of M. Dufrenne. The premise from which to start is that of a deep co-appearance between the subject and the object: both share a way of being that leads them to be structured for each other (the a priori). In this, a particular primacy belongs to the aesthetic experience which, opening us to a different kind of affectivity each time different, opens us also to the different faces of reality: more than "world", it is therefore more correct to speak of "worlds", 3 both in relation to the different aesthetic objects and in relation to the different individualities that live them. We thus go beyond the idealistic perspective of Husserl, which risks giving too much importance to the constituent subject. Another central aspect of the theme is that of the difference between "world", "nature" and "Nature" (with the capital n): if the first two indicate respectively the formal characteristics of reality and the characteristics of the natural world, the Nature, on the other hand, indicates a primordial and unconditional generating power, the set of all latent possibilities which can be realised over time. I therefore intend to show how the concept of "virtuality" present in Dufrenne's philosophy encourages us to transform reality, to actualise its latent possibilities, its multiple ways of being, while respecting at the same time the origin from which we come.

Germana Alberti is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at the University of Rome “Tor Vergata” in co-supervision with the University of Liège, where she is working on a thesis concerning the aesthetics of Mikel Dufrenne. She is part of the following research groups: “Traverses” and “Intersections” (Belgium), “Sensibilia Colloquium on Perception and Experience” (Italy), and she is also member of the Italian Society of Aesthetics (SIE), the French Society of Aesthetics (SFE) and the Society for French Studies (SFS). She was scholarship holder of the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Filosofici and teacher of philosophy in Italian high schools. Her main research interests include: French phenomenology; phenomenological aesthetics; theories of sensibility and corporeality. She has recently carried out a research stay in France (UMR “Thalim” of Cnrs).

Before becoming a subject in philosophical and political studies, transgenerationality is a genetic or generative approach that reflects upon the ‘process of becoming’ of phenomena and their constitutive systems, and conceives this as a process that occurs over the generations. This term refers to transgenerational inheritance of epigenetic markers from one organism to the next or the psychological term, which asserts that behaviours of trauma can be transferred in between generations. Questioning generative phenomenology in the contemporary scenario means embracing the legacy of the concept of ‘generation’ in the history of philosophy and also exploring its potential for different fields of knowledge, such as politics, ethics, education. The first meaningful occurrence of the concept is in Aristotle’s Περ γενσεως κα φϑορς (On Generation and Corruption), wherein γνεσις means that things come into being from not being through causes, or that everything is generated purely through alteration. In 1924, Heidegger claimed that in research into history we find unclarified phenomena, such as that of generations, of the connection between generations. As he wrote, the historicity of Dasein grounded in the possibility according to which any specific present understands how to be futural (GA 64). In the Heideggerian philosophy of time and in the Arendtian phenomenology, we find a connection between the project of education and the revolutionary power of the future (Hodge, 2015; Loidolt, 2018, Parekh, 2008). In recent years transgenerational approaches contributed to philosophy by providing ethical frameworks based on the analysis of the contemporary world as well as on the prediction about the future of the Earth and the fate of globalised humanity (Andina, 2020; Nixon, 2020). The aim of this paper is to present transgenerationality as the obligations to future generations, but also the call of present-day humanity has an historical challenge to education.

Alessandro Anzà (1992) earned a BA and MA in Philosophy with distinction from the University of Palermo. He is an Alumnus of the Italian Institute for Philosophical Studies in Naples, with a scholarship in Political Philosophy (2019), and an Alumnus of the Harvard Kennedy School, Executive Education in Social Sciences (2020). His field of specialisation is phenomenology, 4 hermeneutics, political theory, and interdisciplinary studies on education and social inequality. He is publishing his thesis on time and education in Heidegger’s work. Waiting for a PhD, his research is about fundamentals concepts, such as humanity, education, and freedom, in Heidegger and Arendt’s philosophical legacy.

In book III of his work on the soul, shifting from what is common to all animals, i.e., perception, to what is specifically peculiar of the human being, i.e., thinking, Aristotle describes imagination as a sort of movement. Phantasia, claims the philosopher, is what we experience when we figure before us an object that, however, is not physically there and that has been generated because of previous perceptions. This kind of movement, as the philosopher clarifies it, is compared to light — phaos — because in a certain way phantasia allows the human being to see. It is possible to attest that this feature, not exactly a type of episteme and yet a sort of knowledge, guides human beings in those situations where human agency does not have or does not require an always certain gnoseological account. Imagination, starting from sensibility and organising phenomena accordingly, can be understood as a feature rooted in the past, active in the present, and projective with respect to the future. Imagination works as an anticipation of what can happen: it operates on the phenomena coming from previous sensations so to pre-figure or foresee probable scenarios. Moreover, given all its characteristics here listed, phantasia shows to be strictly connected to orexis as well: imagination, together with desire, is the reason why human beings can move autonomously. Through an analysis of the Aristotelian imagination, it is possible to understand how for the being that we are the future is always already a concern for us.

Elena Bartolini is a postdoc fellow at the University of Milan-Bicocca, where she works as Assistant for the teachings of Moral Philosophy and Philosophical Practices. During her PhD she was visiting student at the DePaul University (Chicago). In the last few years, she has presented her research in a range of national and international conferences (Cambridge University, University of Rome “La Sapienza”, Catholic University of Milan, American Philosophy Association, Ancient Philosophy Society, Heidegger Circle, Heidegger Gesellschaft). She published various articles both in English and Italian. In 2015 her first monograph was released, Per un’antropologia sistemica. Studi sul De Anima di Aristotele.

One trope of ageing is the tendency amongst those getting on in years to observe that some, many, perhaps most, things are getting worse: call this the curmudgeonly attitude. It’s often met with derision, not least because it concerns changes that don’t directly or radically inhibit the curmudgeon’s well-being and autonomy. But I think we should take the curmudgeonly attitude more seriously. Doing so provides some insight into the longer-lived self and its relation to the future. Showing this requires disentangling curmudgeonliness from other alleged afflictions of the long-lived person, such as boredom. Boredom has dominated discussions about longevity thanks to Bernard Williams’ influential “The Makropulos Case”. I reveal the presence, in that paper, of a 5 neglected, additional problem for the long-lived person to that of boredom, namely alienation in the face of change. Williams gestures towards this problem but does not pursue it. I flesh the problem out on his behalf, connecting it to the curmudgeonly attitude and uncovering various ways in which it is distinct from boredom. I contend that—as with boredom—a sense of alienation born of the curmudgeonly attitude can become terminal for the subject, rendering her unable to envision the future as a site of worthwhile, valuable, or meaningful activity. However, if terminal boredom is an insular, inward-facing, and essentially self-directed problem, terminal alienation born of unwanted change is a world-facing crisis for those whom it afflicts; how one relates to the future more generally, beyond one’s own personal future, becomes a salient issue for the long-lived curmudgeon. One concern that emerges from this is the fraught question of whether our caring about future generations depends on our imagining them as being “like us”—relatively unchanged from how we presently are.

Kathy Behrendt is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Wilfrid Laurier University, Canada. She received her D.Phil. from the University of Oxford, where she also taught for several years. Behrendt has published in the areas of neo-Kantian and Parfitian reductionist theories of personal identity, narrative views of the self, death, emotion, illness, literature, and meaning in life. She is co-founder of the International Association for the Philosophy of Death and Dying, and is currently working on two projects: cross-over issues in the poetry and philosophy of death; and longevity, alienation, and the limits of our concern for future generations.

I approach the theme of the future as a present concern from an ethico-political perspective, through an existential reading of Arendt’s account of judgment. From this perspective, “witnessing the future” is the human ability to envisage a possibility not yet fulfilled which, albeit rooted in the past, does not follow necessarily from it. There is an interplay between reproductive and productive imagination which opens up the space of freedom necessary for reflecting on future possibilities and choosing among them. I begin by showing why Arendt’s conception of political judgment is relevant for relating to the future beyond the passive expectation of the not-yet to happen. To assume the future as a present concern is to assume the responsibility for the future – not only for our personal future, but also for that of others and of the common world we share with them. Ontologically speaking, it is a responsibility that we always already have; ontically speaking, however, we can assume it or not. I argue that judging or what Arendt calls “representative thinking” is a way in which we can assume this responsibility: by looking at a particular situation or a possible course of action from the viewpoints of all involved in it or potentially affected by it, we can discriminate between right and wrong and thus choose how to act, taking as a reference point the potential agreement of others. Nevertheless, the ability of judging to guide future action is undermined by a widespread thesis that Arendt’s work would contain two different, even contradictory, models of judgment: one practical and future-oriented (involving the agent), one contemplative and past-oriented (involving “the spectator”). By connecting Arendt’s conception of judging to Heidegger’s interpretation of temporality, I argue that this separation is artificial, because the past and the future cannot be separated. 

Dr Ileana Bortun received her PhD in Philosophy from the University of Bucharest (in 2014), with the thesis “Shaping an Existential Ethics by Identifying the Connections between Metaphysics and Totalitarianism”, arguing for the possibility of developing an ethics starting from Heidegger’s 6 existential analytic, by taking the kinship between metaphysics (in Heidegger’s interpretation) and totalitarianism (in Arendt’s interpretation) as a negative reference point. In a post-doctoral project (2018-2020), she developed further this existential ethics through a phenomenological approach to political judgment (in Arendt’s conception). She is currently involved in the project “I was there. Laying the Foundations for a Comprehensive Phenomenology of Testimony”. 

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

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

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

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

In what way does a Russian anarchist’s address to the youth in the fin de siècle 19th century differ from the one currently being made by a contemporary French philosopher to the youth of his era? How would Kropotkin’s address be understood in our time? Are his concerns of the same direction and determination as those espoused by the contemporary French philosopher Bernard Stiegler? Could Kropotkin speak of universal concerns and interests not bound by race, nation, sex, class, and not strictly governed by digital relations? My argument is that while their mutual interests do indeed lie with youth and the state of their respective worlds, the respective milieu and setting are nevertheless vastly different. I ask, in this extreme and toxic milieu, would Kropotkin’s rhetoric fall on deaf ears because of an indifference to the plight of mankind? Is it conceivable that the humanist prospects of youth so vaunted by Kropotkin would buttress against the inhuman and nihilistic tendencies of the miscreant, “blank” generation as detailed by Stiegler? While it is seemingly impossible to balance the hope of youth in Kropotkin with the fear of youth in Stiegler, and, despite differences in episteme, tradition and political orientation, both thinkers I think are concerned with the trials and tribulations of youth and both hold out the prospect of the not-yet of youth, of the coming into being of maturity, and of Aufklärung. It is this aspect I wish to scrutinise further. I shall compare these thinkers through a consideration of the philosophical importance of corruption. 

Paper part of pre-constituted panel with Ruth Irwin:

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

Joff P.N. Bradley is Professor of English and Philosophy in the Faculty of Foreign Languages at Teikyo University in Tokyo, Japan and visiting professor at Jamia Millia Islamia University in New Delhi, India, where he is undertaking research on critical post-media studies and Deleuze and Guattari in India, Korea and Japan. Joff is also visiting research fellow at Kyung Hee University is Seoul, South Korea.

If it is true, as Tribunella argues in Melancholia and Maturation, that US culture includes a belief that children must undergo certain forms of trauma in order to become “proper” adults, then at least one sense in which the future is a present concern is in the form of cultural machinations directed at the formation of future adults. The characteristics presented as desirable for “proper” adulthood align with the values of the dominant culture and consumer capitalism; for example, seriousness and productivity, as well as heteronormativity. Clearly, this conservative approach maintains the status quo, rather than inventing different future possibilities. The question can then be posed, is this picture of proper adulthood, and the future that it presumes, one that is actually desirable on moral and/or political/social grounds? Given, for example, how much the US has seen in the last year of renewed or revitalised racial and ethnic violence from whites, it seems arguable that our “program” for developing “proper” adults is either failing, or succeeding, but producing adults that should not be considered proper under current conditions of increasing diversity and our (at least rhetorical) commitment to equality. I will argue in this presentation that the belief that trauma is necessary for producing “proper” adulthood is deeply misguided in that it is re-producing an ongoing kind of “hazing” as initiation into adulthood, based on a “for your own good” mentality. I will introduce the possibility that if we were to change our picture of the necessity for trauma for developing proper adults, we might get a kind of adult that is more inclined toward open-mindedness, empathy and inclusivity, which would allow us to move toward a future of greater peace and equity. 

Melissa Burchard is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina Asheville. She works in theoretical and applied ethics, and social and political philosophy. Her current research interests are primarily in the philosophy of trauma, especially in representations of trauma in children’s literature and popular culture. Recent publications include Philosophical Reflections on Mothering in Trauma and a special edition of Public Philosophy Journal, “Philosophical Engagements with Trauma”, co-edited with Courtney Miller and Hannah Bacon.

This paper reconceptualises the phenomenon of depoliticisation as the materially closing off of alternative future possibilities on the basis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Marxist-existentialist theory of human praxis. Traditionally, political theorists have defined depoliticisation as a symbolic mutation at the level of ‘the political’. In this account, a state of depoliticisation occurs when a contingent situation appears as immutable or the expression of a more foundational (theological, cultural, technocratic) logic. The future in any society is radically open, but this ontological fact is symbolically covered up. The task of political theory therefore is to show that a particular situation is politically instituted and that a society should acknowledge its own constitutive openness towards an undefined future. This paper criticises this exclusive emphasis on the symbolic conditions of futurity in the theorisation of depoliticisation. By turning to Sartre’s Critique of Dialectical Reason, it argues that next to a symbolic closure, the future can also be practically or materially closed. Practico-inert ensembles can impose a specific directionality on the future by formulating exigencies or imperatives that human praxes must fulfil. By reconstructing Sartre’s conceptual framework, this paper reformulates the phenomenon of depoliticisation as a future which cannot be transcended. In a word, a depoliticised society is one where the future becomes a fate which one cannot escape. This reformulation carries significant consequences for the critical analysis of contemporary 9 societies. It implies that depoliticisation can occur even in situations where there is a high level of political contestation (protests, riots, social polarisation) but where groups lack the practical capacity to redirect the imperatives that are imposed on society. Finally, it shows that confronting depoliticisation not only entails revealing the contingency of a specific situation, but also dismantling the exigencies that dominate our praxis. 

Lorenzo Buti is a doctoral candidate at RIPPLE (Research Institute in Political Philosophy Leuven), KU Leuven. His research interests lie in continental political philosophy (Lefort, Balibar, Rancière) and the tradition of critical theory (Marx, the Frankfurt School and, somehow, Sartre). Lorenzo works on a research project that aims to rethink the character of democratic action along insurgent lines, in the face of material conditions that structure the stakes of the political stage.

In the twentieth century, few philosophers have relaunched the question of time as much as Heidegger. Throughout Heidegger’s thought, time is tackled in relation to both future and Care. Indeed, Heidegger underlines the importance of future among the other dimensions of time, since it stands for the ecstatic mobility of human existence. Moreover, Heidegger marks the future as «Sorge», which means «care» as well as «concern». This contribution thus centres around the relation between future and Sorge, addressing it by focusing on two main issues. The first one is the fact that future turns back to the past. In paragraph § 65 of Being and Time Heidegger indeed claims that «having being arises from the future», insofar as the human being can reach its past only through its being outside itself that characterises the existential openness to the future. This turning back results fundamental in defining that which will happen, because when the «having been» is opened by the future, the past turns out to be a legacy of inherited possibilities. I will thus discuss how the future coming from those possibilities contributes in building an idea of «tradition» (Überlieferung) that is both open to changes and ethically binding. If the first issue addresses the Sorge from its meaning of «care», the second one underlines the sense of anxiety. According to Heidegger, what concerns about the future is not its uncertain character, nor its being a potential threat to a favourable present. Rather, future concerns us because it may happen nothing from it, e.g. when we lose our relation with tradition. This occlusion of future possibilities gets an apocalyptical tone in Heidegger’s writings during the ‘40s. Within this context, I will try to analyse the meaning of Kehre and Ereignis, as well as Heidegger’s entrustment to the «last God». 

Marco Cavazza obtained his Bachelor Degree in Philosophy at the University of Bologna in 2014, discussing a thesis on Heidegger and Plato. After that, he began his Masters in Philosophical Sciences at the University of Venice, and in 2015 I was awarded an Erasmus+ scholarship for the University of Freiburg, in order to delve deeper into Heidegger’s thought. He graduated with honours in 2016 on Heidegger’s Beiträge zur Philosophie, and then taught in secondary schools until 2020, when he commenced a PhD in Philosophy at the University of Venice. He is currently working on Heidegger’s Zeit-Raum in relation to Husserl and Kant.

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

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

Although most directors working in the genre of science fiction have been content to explore the darker themes associated with the late modern condition—e.g., nihilism, decay, alienation, ecological collapse, the looming apocalypse, and so on—several recent films have endeavored to renew the promise of political resistance and emancipation. One such film is Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival (2016), in which a gifted linguist, Louise Banks, is recruited by the US military to decipher the logographic language of a visiting alien race. As she immerses herself in the language of the mysterious Heptapods, Louise discovers that she now apprehends time itself as non-linear. Suddenly “remembering” a future that, strictly speaking, has not yet occurred, Louise defuses escalating tensions that are trending toward a war in which the human combatants would be unlikely to survive, much less prevail. While the tightly paced drama of Arrival makes for entertaining (if predictable) theater, Villeneuve has larger ambitions for his viewers. The more philosophically interesting development in the film is that Louise relies on her acquired “memory” of the future to decide to conceive and bear a child whose grim, unalterable fate is already known to her. Having learned the language of the Heptapods, and having acquired their non-linear experience of time, Louise finds herself in possession of an alien spirituality, as evidenced by her liberation from the fear of death. Villeneuve thus provides his viewers with a sensitive and sympathetic depiction of the Stoic teaching of amor fati (or love of fate), which Nietzsche identifies in Ecce Homo as his “formula for 11 greatness in a human being.” The past and present may belong to the thugs and warmongers who place their trust in the algorithms of utilitarian cost-benefit analysis, but the future Villeneuve sketches belongs to those who, like Louse, have learned to love fate without subtraction, revision, or regret. 

Daniel Conway is Professor of Philosophy and Humanities, Affiliate Professor of Film Studies and Religious Studies, and Courtesy Professor of Law at Texas A&M University (USA), where he also serves as a core faculty member in the Philosophy for Children program and the Space Governance Research Group. Conway lectures and publishes widely on topics in post-Kantian European philosophy, political theory, aesthetics (especially film and literature), and genocide studies. His most recent publications include essays on Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus, Arendt, law & humanities, philosophy for children, and treatments of genocide in the cinematic genre of science fiction.

This paper questions whether the poetic is still relevant in the face of our digitised future by examining whether we can fit digital poetry into Heidegger’s understanding of art as the strife. For Heidegger, the question of poetic greatness is an ontological one. A great work is truth because it wins the opening of a ‘world’. In the Origin we are told that truth is wrested from the ‘earth’ of a work. In terms of digital poetry, two interrelated problems arise; firstly, Heidegger’s account only applies to great poetry, the world opening that characterises great poetry is not a feature of a less than great poetry because such a work fails to overcome the concealing tendency of its material. To subject digital poetry to a Heideggerian understanding, we must ask whether it is, in principle, possible for a digital poem to overcome the concealing tendency of its technological earth. Second, given Heidegger’s bleak account of technology, it would seem a forgone conclusion to deny this possibility. Despite these difficulties, this paper argues that Heidegger’s account gives us a powerful way to understand digital poetry, by arguing that the task of digital poetry is precisely to overcome the concealing nature of technology. Such an overcoming would qualify as a Heideggerian confrontation with technology. Thus, the question becomes, how are we to understand digital poetry ontologically; a task hampered by the complexity involved in defining and classifying digital poems. One way to proceed is to build on Hui’s (2016) account of digital objects and their ontology in terms of “orders of magnitude,” These range from the appearance of objects on the screen down to the level of circuit boards. This paper uses Hui’s approach to interrogate the difficulties facing digital poets and how these may or may not be overcome. 

Rachel Coventry holds an M.Litt. a Ph.D. in Philosophy, both from the National University of Ireland, Galway. Her doctorate examines contemporary poetry in terms of Heidegger’s ontological accounts of poetry and technology, in particular, the influence of the digital on poetry. She is also a poet whose work has is featured in many journals and anthologies Her debut collection “Afternoon Drinking in the Jolly Butchers” was published in 2018 by Salmon Poetry. 

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

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

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

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

One of the basic functions fictional literature can have in culture is to act as an experimental system (Rheinberger 1992): fictional texts can generally be understood as experimental arrangements (created out of specific linguistic forms, conventions, and genres) that embody a horizon of meaning. Rather than stating what was and what is, fictions always entail a vector towards futurity because they experiment with what could be. This turns them into polytemporal artefacts. They do so, however, not only on the level of content – as in utopian and dystopian genres – but also on the level of form in the sense of their particular arrangement which offers itself to re-arrangement in the act of reading. From a reader-response perspective (Iser 1978), futurity is not inherent in the text, but an effect of reading and aesthetics. While literary studies with a polytemporal perspective are proliferating in recent years, the study of futurity in this context has sometimes been a part, but seldomly the dedicated focus of previous work. I wish to investigate further the “transhistorical toolkit” with which aesthetics forms operate, focusing on how literary text do not only bring past forms into the present, but, by evoking, imitating, translating and innovating them, indicate or produce futurity. Based on these observations, the paper wishes to explore the following questions: At which times did recipients perceive which texts as having the quality of futurity in the meaning outlined above, and why? Which formal elements and aesthetic strategies of the text afford this quality? And, which methods does one have to employ to find the answers to those questions? How can the experience of futurity afforded by fictions become a basis for cultural intervention in a present in which thinking about the future evokes more fear than hope? 

Nicole Falkenhayner is currently senior lecturer of British literature and cultural studies at the University of Freiburg, Germany. She is the author of Media, Surveillance and Affect (Routledge 2019) and Making the British Muslim: Representations of the Rushdie Affair and Figures of the War-on-Terror Decade (Palgrave Macmillan 2014), as well as the co-editor of Heroism as a Global Phenomenon in Contemporary Culture (Routledge 2019) and Rethinking Order: Idioms of Stability and Destabilization(transcript 2015). She has published on the posthuman, the heroic in popular culture, Victorian culture, the work of Daniel Defoe, and media events in contemporary Britain.

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

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

Time is the context within which all our experiences take place but what happens when our ordinary sense of time is radically disrupted? A commonly reported aspect of the psychedelic experience is that of time dilation and time contraction. During such experiences a brief moment can feel like it takes centuries to pass whilst paradoxically, and seemingly simultaneously, many hours can pass in what seems like an instant. The aim of this presentation is to examine the phenomenological aspects of this phenomenon and consider the wider implications for one obtaining such an experience. To understand time-consciousness in psychedelic experiences, I will proceed in three steps. Firstly, as psychedelic experiences are so peculiar, I will give an empirically informed characterisation of what they are like. Secondly, I will explicate time dilation in terms of Husserl’s theory of time-consciousness. My claim is that, in these anomalous experiences, there is a reduced sense of both retention and protention, but a strong emphasis on primal impression. In a third and last step, I will turn to the implications and outcomes of these experiences. Here one can use Plato’s distinction between Being – atemporal abstract transcendental forms – and Becoming – the physical world as normally perceived through our senses – as an analogy to comprehend the perspective that one obtains in such experiences. Temporally oriented phenomena, most notably our sense of self, which require a normal sense of time as a prerequisite are taken offline throughout the duration of these experiences with the consequence that the subject is afforded an experience where Becoming seemingly drops away to reveal pure Being. The therapeutic value of these experiences to treat anxiety, depression and addictions has been the driving force behind the present renaissance in psychedelic research. 

Danny Forde is a current PhD student based in University College Cork, Ireland. His dissertation ‘Phenomenology of the psychedelic experience’ aims to explicate the psychedelic experience utilising a Husserlian theory of intentionality. Danny has been tutoring and lecturing in UCC since 2018 on topics such as phenomenology, philosophy of mind and metaphysics. He has presented at conferences in UCC, UCD, at the INSIGHT conference in Berlin and at the Irish Philosophical Society’s annual conference.

The looming possibility of widespread displacement owing to the effects of climate change has rightly received a good deal of recent attention from philosophers. They have drawn on a wide array of principles in crafting arguments for how climate change driven displacement should be met. Their conclusions range from the tame (recognising a legal category of climate refugees) to the bold (ceding sovereign territory). But even the tamest views represent significant burdens. I argue that we have ample reason to anticipate that the obligations will go unmet: first, different degrees of failure are possible in addressing such a massive phenomenon, and avoiding any degree of failure would require an impossibly perfect response. Second, failure may be inevitable if some harms imposed will be literally irreparable, which some arguably will be. Building on Lisa Tessman’s (2016) work on moral failure, I call this condition ‘anticipatory moral failure.’ My analysis extends Tessman’s notion of moral failure in two ways: the failure is collective rather than individual, and anticipated rather than completed. Having elaborated what the condition of anticipatory moral failure consists in, I then entertain what it means for us now to know that we will fail in the future. I articulate three action-guiding responses to anticipatory moral failure: last-ditch efforts at avoidance, preparations for repair, and reform to avoid future failures. The dynamic between these responses is that when one is not possible, as may often be the case, the remaining options take on increased importance. Yet it may be, as Tessman worries in the individual case, that focusing on action guidance is a form of evasion, a way of turning even gruesome moral failures into something redeemable. I close by exploring the significance of an alternative response, that of witnessing failure honestly. 

Kyle Fruh is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Duke Kunshan University. He received his BA in Philosophy and Spanish from Amherst College, his MA in Philosophy from the University of Colorado, Boulder, and his PhD in Philosophy from Georgetown University. Dr. Fruh’s research interests traverse a number of areas in ethics, including the ethical implications of climate change, the nature of promissory obligation, and moral heroism.

The future is often cast in terms of images of progress or ruin, but can we imagine a future that escapes such dichotomies? What does such a radically reimagined future look like? Crucially, how can we as subjects institute a shared world building on such an imagination? I develop an answer in two parts by arguing for an ontology of the future as precarious calling for cultivated modes of response that are distinctly democratic. I analyse connections between discourses that amplify the possibilities for thinking a precarious future. First, artistic practices among Bhil indigenous communities in India that reveal relations to a world of complexity. Second, a tradition of western philosophy moving through Nietzsche and Deleuze that highlights elements of uncertainty and play 16 in the world. Third, discourses that upend the “ontological priority of the human” in terms of an account of dispersed agency. Building on complementarities between these perspectives, I argue for an ontology of the future as inescapably precarious; uncertain, susceptible to uncanny twists and turns. A future that is Zarathustra’s dance floor; composed of multiple actants in relations of collusion and conflict that escape human ordering or control; a future that we must embrace precisely as precarious. In the second part, I argue that such a relation calls for cultivating a democratic sensibility. Following post-foundational perspectives, I identify democracy as an openness to heterogenous possibilities of instituting society; democracy as a recognition of ontological pluralism. This is not simply in terms of an openness to difference, but, I argue, also receptivity to subterranean modes of activity and agential forces. Activating political possibilities on the basis of an ontologically precarious future, therefore, calls for a democratic cultivation; modes of political enactment that express a sensitivity to the multiple sites of agency in a complex world.

Tanay Gandhi is a graduate in political theory, having recently completed a Master’s degree (MA) in Ideology and Discourse Analysis from the University of Essex in 2020. He is currently an independent researcher based out of Mumbai, India. His core research interests include radical democratic theory, philosophical aesthetics, and theories of populism, in particular the works of Laclau, Connolly, Deleuze, Adorno, Menke and Rancière. Previously, Tanay was a human rights lawyer in India, working on issues of forest land tenure rights, self-governance and traditional knowledge systems and cultural practices.

The paper aims to develop the question of future in the post-human era: referring to the posthumanistic conception of technosphere that exceeds the classical instrumental and anthropological interpretation of technique, I will try to show how the idea of utopia, characterising the modern era from its beginning, has definitively entered into crisis. The utopian orientation towards the future, expressed by Ernst Bloch as latency and tendency to the approaching New in the individual and collective history, is completely replaced with the operative idea of progress in the technical ecosystems. In these complex systems the way of proceeding forward can be understood through the evolution-theories typical for bio-ecological systems. As Hartmut Rosa proposed, the experience of future in these systems is primary characterised by an increasing acceleration; it becomes more and more clearly the totalitarian power of our post-modern and post-human societies; but the relentless rhythm of our social, individual and cultural life has nether a moral nor a political destination. The acceleration towards the future doesn’t make sense: it follows simply the immanent low of the technical will of power. The future as hope for the approaching of a new world, able to emancipate and overcome the social alienation deriving from the chronic lack of time, is disappeared; with this form of future is also disappeared the Christian-messianic experience of temporality underlying the modern idea of progress. The post-human revelation of time remembers rather the mythical figure of Chronos tearing to pieces his own children, while it is absolutely self-referential and doesn’t allow any real historical change and decision. I will finally put some questions about the possibility to reawaken the sense of future in the post-humanistic era through the experience of crisis and uncertainty that hides itself in the essence of technique. 

Sandro Gorgone is Associate Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Messina. As a scholar of XX century German and French philosophy, he has studied in particular the 17 thought of Martin Heidegger and Ernst Jünger, focusing on topics such as temporality, technology, the crisis of humanism, and nihilism. He teaches regularly also in Germany and Austria. His most significant publications include the two monographs Nel deserto dell’umano. Potenza e “Machenschaft” nel pensiero di M. Heidegger (2011), and Strahlungen und Annäherungen: Die stereoskopische Phänomenologie Ernst Jüngers (2016).

More than ten years ago Joachim Fischer proposed his theory of Philosophical Anthropology as a paradigm rather than a philosophical sub-discipline. This new approach enabled not only Scheler scholars to rethink Scheler’s Philosophical Anthropology but also opened up the way to evaluate its potential use as a framework in order to analyse certain developments in the 21st century. The goal of the following paper is to analyse and evaluate the potential and the limits of using Scheler’s phenomenologically inspired Philosophical Anthropology as a framework for the assessment of contemporary technological developments with regard to the human sphere. I will start by (1) briefly establishing Fischer’s idea of Philosophical Anthropology as a paradigm, and (2) outlining and explaining the key features of Scheler’s Philosophical Anthropology as a simultaneously philosophical and interdisciplinary approach. Here we will focus on the two primordial phenomena: Leben (life) and Geist (spirit), but also on some of the consequences with regard to what it means to be human, including the idea of the human being as becoming, or the role of reality as resistance vis-à-vis selfconsciousness. Finally (3), we will use the two examples of artificial consciousness and transhumanism as case studies in order to evaluate both the potential as well as the limits of Scheler’s approach with regard to important current and future developments in the area of human beings and technology. 

Paper part of pre-constituted panel with Daire Boyle and Dave O'Brien:

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

Susan Gottlöber completed her studies at the TU Dresden with a Ph.D. on Nicholas of Cusa and interreligious toleration (published in 2013). She has been a lecturer in philosophy at Maynooth University since 2009. She has served as the President of the Irish Philosophical Society from 2015–2018 (currently Vice-president) and is the first female member to be elected to the Scientific Committee of the Max Scheler Society in 2013. Her main research interests are: Philosophical Anthropology with focus on Max Scheler in his time and the potential application of his thought for current philosophical developments; toleration, and value theory.

Though “socialism” is frequently invoked as a bogeyman or a dogwhistle in many political circles, the popularity of initiatives like universal healthcare and economic reparations in mainstream discourse demonstrates the relevance of socialist aspirations in today’s world. At the same time, neither of the aforementioned endeavours have yet come to pass, and class inequality continues to grow unabated. As such, hoping for a future egalitarian society in which the lives of the many are no longer dictated by the interests of the few seems like a naïve ambition. Putting one’s faith in a kind of utopian socialist vision, that is, believing in the possibility of liberated egalitarian society, seems to be a fanciful daydream, fundamentally disconnected from present social reality. Nonetheless, envisioning the society we wish to live in seems to be a necessary piece of any socialist project, insofar as the ends, however lofty—like the transformation of society and the actualisation of collective liberation—justify and motivate the means. If the aim of socialism is to bring about a better tomorrow, a better tomorrow must be imaginable, and on some level, possible. To the extent that it provides the inspiration or “breath” for sustained political action, utopianism thus seems to be a valuable feature in socialist strategy. In “Days of Future Past: On the Legacy of Utopian Socialism”, I will explore the merits and drawbacks of utopianism for the pursuit of another world. First, I will recount Marx and Engels’ materialist criticisms of early forms of utopian socialism. Next, I will analyse Walter Benjamin’s case for reviving a modified form of Marxist utopianism in the 20th century, and ultimately conclude that “utopian” socialism and “scientific” socialism are not only compatible, but that the enlivening spirit of utopianism is a necessary component of revolutionary struggle. 

Paper part of pre-constituted panel with Justin Pearce. 

‘The Past Within the Future: Reorienting History with Walter Benjamin’ – Modern future-oriented political projects often express teleological tendencies: lifestyle activists organize their communities around visions of an Edenic kingdom of heaven on earth, deterministic Marxists view history as inevitably marching in the direction of classless society, and liberal reformists optimistically believe in the necessity of modern society’s movement towards progress. These views take for granted the irresistible self-movement of history without recognizing the actions which actually move history. This panel will critique these perspectives using the Messianic utopianism of Walter Benjamin, who rejects the idea that history moves in a predictable course. Instead, Benjamin recognizes that progress is not guaranteed. He understands that the fight for any future society free from oppression must be grounded in solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the past. In contrast with worldviews which orient themselves around our responsibility to future generations, Benjamin offers a vision of politics based on a duty to the victims of history and a vision of utopia based around redemption of these people. These presentations will explore the possibility of committing ourselves to utopian ideas without falling back on abstract teleological assumptions about the future. 

Cara S. Greene is a 4th year PhD student in the Philosophy Department at the University of New Mexico. In 2015, Cara received an MA in Critical Theory and the Arts from the School of Visual Arts in New York City, with a focus on Aesthetics and Social Theory. In 2012, Cara received a BA from Colorado College with a major in Philosophy and a minor in Psychoanalysis. Her philosophical areas of specialization include 19th and 20th Century Continental Philosophy, Critical Theory, Psychoanalysis and Phenomenology. She is currently working on a dissertation on Hegel and modern sacrifice.

The global crisis of Covid-19 pandemic has considerably accelerated the use of teleconsultation (consultation between the patient and the doctor via video platforms). While it has some obvious benefits and drawbacks for both the patient and the doctor, it is important to consider how this new form of interaction impacts the nature of the clinical encounter. Based on the insights from the phenomenology of medicine about the nature of the clinical encounter as the “face-to-face encounter” (E. Pellegrino, K. Toombs), my aim is to find out if teleconsultation is also experienced as the face-to-face encounter? This research question is motivated by the suspicion expressed by contemporary phenomenologists (H. Carel, L. Dolezal) about the nature of online video-based interaction, namely, that it differs significantly from the embodied face-to-face contact. I am approaching the issue from the perspective of phenomenology, including both insights from the phenomenological philosophy regarding the concept of the “face-to-face relationship” and the results from the phenomenologically informed qualitative research study about patient experience of teleconsultation. Based on the work of phenomenological thinkers (most notably A. Schutz and E. Levinas), I have distinguish between three essential features of the “face-to-face relationship”: 1) temporal simultaneity, 2) spatial immediacy of the other’s presence and 3) the sense of the embodied risk. This conceptual differentiation provided a lens through which I have conducted qualitative research, the results of which show that teleconsultation can provide temporal simultaneity, sense of togetherness to the doctor (arguably even higher than in on-site consultations) and it does include the sense of the embodied risk. Thus, I will argue that based on both the analysis of the concept of the “face-to face relationship” and the results from the qualitative research, it is possible to meet with the doctor face-to-face online. 

Māra Grīnfelde holds a PhD in philosophy and is a Senior Researcher at the University of Latvia Institute of Philosophy and Sociology and Assistant Professor at Riga Stradins University. Her research interests include French phenomenology, phenomenology of embodiment, phenomenology of medicine and the use of phenomenological philosophy in qualitative research. Currently she is working on the postdoctoral research project “Healing at a distance: phenomenological analysis of patient experience of clinical encounter in telemedicine,” funded by the European Regional Development Fund and University of Latvia (http://telepheno.com/en).

In his introduction to Right to Philosophy, Jacques Derrida makes a bold claim about the relationship between his philosophical practice and the futurity of institutions. Deconstruction, Derrida suggests, should not only be understood as opening up new possibilities of thought through an interpretation of texts, but is just as much undertaken as a response to transform institutional arrangements in the name of a justice to-come: deconstruction, he says, is “an institutional practice” (4) although one for which “the concept of the institution remains a problem.” In this paper, I argue that Derrida’s philosophy of institutions is helpful in particular for thinking about the relationship to the future that is implicit in our commitments to social and political institutions. Specifically, turning to the central question of Derrida’s 1976 essay, “Declarations of Independence”—"who signs, and with what so-called proper name, the declarative act that founds an institution?” (47)—I show how for Derrida 20 declarations, as the speech acts that found institutions, presuppose a peculiarly aporetic relationship to the future. Namely, the author or subject of such an act—its signatory—is as much itself instituted qua signing subject by the declaration as the institution that this subject “creates.” The experience of declarations is in this sense always an experience of some impossible future, and the signature of a declaration is the locus of this possible impossibility. The overriding claim that I advance in the paper is that Derrida’s essay, as well as his writings on institutions more generally, articulate a quasi-phenomenological, intentional analysis of the temporality of declarations. This analysis is worth taking seriously, I suggest in the close of the paper, because it illuminates an intrinsic relation to the future inherent in our normative commitments to social and political institutions. 

Ryan Gustafson is a Ph.D candidate in the Philosophy department at The New School for Social Research. His dissertation, "Institutions in Deconstruction: A Study of Derrida's Social & Political Thought" presents a systematic reconstruction and defence of Jacques Derrida's philosophy as a critical theory of institutions. Gustafson's writings on Derrida have appeared in The Undecidable Unconscious and The Graduate Faculty Philosophy Journal.

Edmund Husserl’s The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (1936) was arguably his most socio-politically influential work. Although this is mostly indebted to his conceptualisation of the Lebenswelt (life-world), Husserl also provided an important account of the epoché as a praxis rather than the more abstract conception outlined in Ideas I. In the Crisis, Husserl’s project is to show how ‘the total phenomenological attitude and the epoché […] are destined in essence to effect […] the greatest existential transformation which is assigned as a task to mankind.’ This paper aims to demonstrate how the epoché, as a habitual attitude, can be practically carried out in order to effect an existential transformation. I will argue that personal pronouns offer an avenue through which Husserl’s phenomenological reorientation can be demonstrated as a practical, methodological, blueprint for the future. Husserl’s ‘humanistic’ phenomenological project most likely had social categories such as nationality and religion in mind. However, this paper will employ the methodology provided in the Crisis to critically reflect on the taken-for-grantedness (Selbstverständlichkeit) of sex and gender.The paper will proceed by first outlining the task of Husserl’s Crisis and its concern for the objective sciences, before characterising the epoché as a habitual attitude in need of constant renewal. Following this, I will examine how cultural and scientific traditions, and the fixed typology of language fetter the subject to life in the naïve ‘natural attitude’. By showing that sex and gender are linguistically, culturally, and performatively determined ‘types’, their bracketing will be exposed as vital for a genuine phenomenological reorientation. Finally, to avoid the danger of what Husserl calls the ‘seduction of language’, I will show the reactivation and transformation of the personal pronoun ‘they/them’ to be exemplary of the radical praxis at the heart of the Crisis. 

Tristan Hedges is currently finishing his research masters in philosophy at KU Leuven, having previously completed his BA in philosophy at the University of Essex and MA in applied ethics at Utrecht Universiteit. His research focuses mostly on the application of Husserlian phenomenology to issues of gender, political (inter)subjectivity, ideology, and neoliberalism.

In this paper I interpret the experience of boredom during the Covid 19 pandemic in light of Heidegger’s analysis of profound boredom, wherein time slows down and the world in its entirety becomes boring for one. For Heidegger, the experience of profound boredom is distressing, in that it involves a feeling of not being at home in the world. And yet it is also a revelatory experience, because it is disclosive of the structure of temporality and thereby new futural possibilities. Drawing on long-form questionnaire responses to the experience of social distancing during the pandemic, I will demonstrate that the experience of profound boredom during lockdown in many ways conforms to Heidegger’s account. I will argue, however, that in lockdown the revelatory capacity of profound boredom is constrained by an accelerated, technological conception of chronological time, which is imposed by the constantly shifting timelines for the easing of restrictions, the administration of the vaccine, the opening of borders, etc. As a result, I will argue, the revelatory capacity of profound boredom is undermined in lockdown such that, instead of disclosing new futural possibilities, it has resulted in the proliferation of alienation, despair and disillusionment. 

Dr Emily Hughes is a postdoctoral research associate in philosophy at the University of York, working on the AHRC-funded project ‘Grief: A Study of Human Emotional Experience.’ She completed her PhD at the University of New South Wales. Her 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.

We are concerned about the future of social interactions after the pandemic. In a few months, we have witnessed the loss of our traditional way of social interaction. Meeting others has become a matter of meeting an image or a voice through a computer, as face-to-face interaction recedes. Some theorists argue that social networks promote associations that lack the demands of openness, empathy and flexibility that face-to-face meetings in uncontrolled, real world spaces require. These theorists anticipate the perpetuation of these virtual interactions after the pandemic because they are both easy to access and commitment-free, making them attractive for people who reject being challenged by others. Is intercorporeal experience being lost in virtuality? Does this, in turn, mean a loss of the enriching challenges that come with being affected by others? We aim to reflect on intercorporeality in the partial absence of the bodies in virtual environments. Following the notion of the phantom limb, as conceived by Merleau-Ponty, and the phantom land, coined by David Morris, and from a perspective that combines arts and phenomenology, we present the notion of the phantom other. In virtuality, others appear in the two-dimensional images that we access through the computer, and in the limited environments that surround them. However, these limitations do not mean a lack of intercorporeal experiences: as in traditional encounters, we extend our thoughts, our emotions and our kinetic-kinesthetic experiences in others, as happens in face-to-face encounters. The loss of a common space and time in which the present bodies usually meet is replaced by virtual spaces and times that seek to simulate them through the design of a visible space; facial and linguistic expressions compensate what a whole body tends to say. In the end, the efforts to which the body and space are subjected tell us that this virtual other is referring to that other phantom, the other that seems absent, but to which habituality always refers us. In this way, virtual interaction is an occasion to think also about the nature of intercorporeality. 

IRC (Imagerie par Résonance Corporelle) is a group formed by Argentinean researchers Ariela Battán and Verónica Cohen and Colombian researcher María Clara Garavito. 

Ariela Battán Horenstein, Ph. D in Philosophy (National University of Cordoba-UNC), Independent Researcher of the National Scientific and Technological Research Council (CONICET), Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy, Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities (UNC). Her main research areas of interest are the Phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty, the “corporeal turn” in the understanding of human cognition, Cartesian epistemology and the dialogue between Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences.

Veronica Cohen is a PhD candidate in History and Theory of Arts (Faculty of Philosophy and Letters) at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina as well as at the Centre des Arts Contemporaine at the University of Lille, France. Her thesis is about the body`s experience of dance, especially in the context of the experiences of two contemporary dance groups considered from a 23 phenomenological point of view. Her doctorate is financed by the National Council of Science and Technic (Conicet). She is trained in different artistic languages - especially butoh dancing - and her artistic productions are a cross between dance, performance, photography, and video.

Maria Clara Garavito (personal site | academic site) is a psychologist, Master in Philosophy and Doctor in Philosophy by the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. Her research interests are in the intersection between cognitive sciences and phenomenology. She studies the problem of intersubjectivity and social cognition, both from a contemporary perspective of 4E cognition. She has also written and taught about topics related to psychology and philosophy of armed conflict. She has worked as a child psychologist and as a lecturer in psychology, philosophy, and pedagogy in different Colombian institutions. Currently, she is working as a lecturer in the Philosophy Department at Universidad Nacional de Colombia and in the Facultad de Filosofía y Letras at Universidad de la Salle, in Bogotá, Colombia.

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

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

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

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

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has been created a liminal state: there is no one official narrative of the events, therefore it is still open to multiple, and even contradictory, interpretations. The presentation would like to highlight some positive aspects of this liminality as an opportunity to transform our future. As Giorgio Agamben points out, we are once again in the state of exception as a cause of those numerous social constraints that the states exert to protect their citizens. Restrictions serve as a human response for uncertain times, however, the virus unveiled many of those restrictive measures that have been already the immanent part of our contemporary biopolitical regime and the underlying mode of production, the late capitalist system. The fact that the virus may have appeared globally and become a part of our everyday lives has organically grown out from the factors above, as the global economy incorporates more and more terrains for production, therefore human and non-human spheres are forced to getting closer and closer. Despite the above, the presentation would like to emphasize some positive aspects of those exceptional events that the coronavirus has caused. Currently, as a consequence of the sense of palpable insecurity at the societal level, we are forced to reflect on the normal state of life as well. The reflection is cruel in many cases but also makes us able to perceive the connections between the epidemic and the underlying economic and ecological crisis. To reveal these layers, the presentation applies Cornelius Castoriadis' philosophical and psychoanalytical term, the "imaginary." For him, human imagination is not the realm of mere fiction, but a force to shape reality as it creates meanings that are materializing in our social existence. According to this assumption, the present pandemic could be a fertile moment in which our beliefs are prompted to be deconstructed by the experience of the real. In the shadow of the ecological crisis, it is essential to replace our previous norms and develop new imaginations, connections, and meanings. The second half of the presentation introduces Donna Haraway's concept of kinship as an alternative way to imagine the cohabitation of the human and the non-human. Kinship implies a logic that somehow connects all forms of existence in contrast to the disjunctive logic of the biopolitical regime. By the imagination of kinship, we can gain a more complex view of our environment, about the species that inhabit it, and of the meaning of our "humanity" as well. To prevent further crises, it is necessary to integrate new meanings of the non-human in our social imagination, not only as mere exploitable matter or threatening Otherness but as elements of a complex and multidimensional network that we are also part of.

Kata Dóra Kiss is a third-year student of the Theoretical Psychoanalysis Ph.D. program at the University of Pécs, Hungary. Before her doctoral studies, she completed her Master's in Philosophy and Critical Gender Studies at the Central European University in Budapest. These varying scientific fields help Kiss to create a transdisciplinary and critical approach in her academic works. Her current doctoral research focuses on how the category of normality works in the system of Hungarian psy-sciences. Furthermore, she regularly writes philosophical studies on ecological and societal questions from a critical feminist and new materialist standpoint.

The body is the locus of intentionality – it is through the body that a person is open to the world and its possibilities. The possibilities that appear to a person drawing them into action depend on the bodily skills and abilities the person has developed often by taking part in social, cultural, and material practices. Young (1980) makes a distinction between an uninhibited bodily intentionality, which she describes as projecting what it aims to accomplish, seamlessly connecting the body’s 26 activities to the surrounding world. Intentionality can however also be inhibited when the person simultaneously projects an end based on their skills and abilities, while at the same time imposing on themselves an I-cannot. Inhibited and uninhibited intentionality are two ways in which the future can be of present concern for an individual. Which of these structures the person embodies depends on their social group. In this talk we will trace inhibited intentionality to oppressive forms of embodied intersubjectivity. We will describe how other’s estimations of you and your capabilities can limit and restrict your own experience of what is possible. People of colour for instance experience themselves through the eyes of the white world and its prejudices and hate. Disabled people are denied their individuality and reduced to stereotypes attached to them by the able-bodied that views them as incapable and untrustworthy. The result is that people subjected to these prejudices experience themselves as cut-off from the possibilities the world has to offer. As an example of an oppressive form of embodied intersubjectivity we will discuss microaggressions, subtle forms of discrimination performed by dominant groups that target members of minority groups (Freeman 2020). Microaggressions, we will argue, can lead to what Young described as inhibited intentionality. 

Paper co-authored and co-presented by Juan Toro. 

Julian Kiverstein is Senior Researcher at the Department of Psychiatry, Amsterdam University Medical Centre. He is trained as a philosopher and works at the intersection of phenomenology, philosophy of cognitive science and neuroscience. Juan Toro is postdoctoral researcher at the Enactlab, University of Copenhagen. He completed his PhD in 2020 and works on topics relating to embodiment, normality and pathology.

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

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

At the end of the lectures Foucault gave at Dartmouth College in 1980, ‘About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self’, and which might be said to be a summary of the second part of his overall work, he suggests that a certain history of the self has come to an end. Such a history would include phenomenology. It is ironic to speak of the ‘future of phenomenology’ in such a context. One way we might think of the end of phenomenology is how authenticity has been captured by capital. Of course, there is no doubt that phenomenology will continue to be talked about in conferences, and as a methodology distinguished from other ways of doing philosophy historically, but is authenticity still believable in a world where freedom has become a new insidious form of domination? Today it is not sufficient to work. You must be your work. This epochal shift in the history of the self can be explained by the economic concept, which Foucault himself was fascinated by, of human capital. If authenticity can no longer be an exit from a society of control, then what would be a new ethics of the self? Would it be one of anonymity rather than self-expression?

William Large teaches philosophy at the University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham and is an Associate Professor of Continental Philosophy.

The problem of tragedy of the commons is a concept developed by ecologist Garret Hardin in his article “Tragedy of the Commons.” Some common political economic solutions either involve a topdown Keynesian approach or a privatisation approach. However, both approaches have fundamental pitfalls that make their implementation implausible or come at a great cost to individual liberty. It also prioritises what the organisation of society ought to be instead of the best way to do it. Thus, in this paper, I argue that there is an alternative approach to environmental policy than what is presently dominating the current discourse. The aim of the paper is to offer reasons to accept Ostrom’s thesis for alternative institutions that are conducive to innovative solutions in addressing pressing environmental issues. Specifically, I take an Ostromian approach as it relates to environmental policy and apply it to the exact circumstances that Louisiana is in. I show how current poorly-designed regulation results in regulatory capture in Louisiana and the impact this has had on high poverty and racial minority groups in Cancer Alley. Therefore, I argue that if an alternative approach is not taken, then this will result in climate change solutions that not only pose an added risk to communities in Louisiana but also in the implementation of insufficient land use that will deplete its common-pool resources.

Siobhain Lash is a Philosophy PhD student at Tulane University, New Orleans, United States. She is currently a Mellon Fellow and studies environmental ethics, politics, philosophy, and economics, and applied ethics. Most recently, she had her article, "The Nightmare Before Christmas and Moral Responsibility" published in Philosophy Now's Issue 141: December 2020 / January 2021.

Recommendation engines, curated feeds, and personalisation systems of all kinds have long since become a domineering force in technologically-mediated spaces; the impetus to freely roam and to choose one's own path becoming increasingly rare as control is sold for convenience (Bozdag & van den Hoven, 2015; de Vries, 2010). The next logical leap for this optimising force is into an enmeshed digital and physical experience, as heralded by the advent of augmented reality technologies. In this omnipresent context, one's sense of self and place is altered and re-altered algorithmically, in a manner which may blur the line between implant and intent beyond recognition. While it has been suggested that a sister medium, virtual reality, may offer the conditions for a life-world that transcends spatial restraints (Metzinger, 2018), it is arguable that augmented reality poses a threat in the inverse – that the fracturing of perception across personalisation lines may impair the shared sense of living together within a collective consciousness. With such attention to the socially-oriented phenomenology of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, the question of how to address this alienation may be found in the adaptation of the notion of 'drifting' found in the theory of psychogeography. In extending rebellion against the practical intentions of the built environment to that of pervasive technologies, there emerges the potential to thwart one's artificial predictors and regain agency over both individuated and shared experience.

Siobhán Lenihan is a PhD candidate investigating practical ethics applications for extended reality technologies, supervised by Prof Heike Schmidt-Felzmann and funded by Science Foundation Ireland within the Research Training in Digitally-Enhanced Reality (D-REAL) programme. She holds a B.A. (Joint Honours) in Philosophy, Sociology & Political Science from the National University of Ireland, Galway, and a HDipSci in Web Technologies from the National College of Ireland. Previously, a bright-eyed graduate Content Strategist for the Central Statistics Office. They try to separate the critical segment of their life led online from the remaining recreational time, with middling success. 

This talk, in brief, aims to articulate a certain experience of the futural that can take place in a therapeutic session. I attempt to so by attending closely to the phenomenological experience of being with another person in such a context. The therapeutic process develops in a way that a certain therapeutic ‘mood’ becomes manifest in sessions over time, such that the client experiences a significantly different orientation to the future, or the futural, in their very way of engaging in the session. I pursue a predominantly Heideggerian approach in this paper, drawing on texts that convey a more dialogically-orientation to enquiry, as well as other writings that are dedicated to a critique of the currently pervasive way in which we live our lives. A common assumption is that presenting issues and problems that are brought to therapy are addressed using an approach that is very similar to that employed by the medical, psychiatric, or psychologically-oriented professions. This takes psychotherapy to be generally grounded in a Cartesian, dualist understanding of what it is to be human. However, whilst such a dualism underpins most therapeutic approaches, I argue that one, in particular, namely, existential-phenomenological therapy, adopts a distinctly different orientation and understanding that, in turn, brings out the futural in a way that is based more directly on this approach. 

Mo Mandić is an existential therapist in private practice in London, UK. He is a visiting faculty member of Regent’s School of Psychotherapy and Psychology, at Regent’s University London, and also at the New School of Psychotherapy and Counselling, London, UK. Mo’s doctoral studies focused on the psychotherapist’s experience of care in the therapeutic relationship. His current interests include the phenomenon of moods in therapy, the experience of disruptions and disturbances in everyday life, and the central ideas of openness and listening in the therapeutic encounter.

In both critical essays like “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown” and fiction like To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf presented an implicit phenomenology of social revolution. in registers of life like work and family. In particular, her work exemplified how the intersubjective experience of oppression, as felt by women or workers in a patriarchal or hierarchical society, is not only a painful form of consciousness but also a temporal and utopian form of consciousness. As a form of consciousness, oppressed intersubjectivity is defined by recalcitrance and futurity. An experience is recalcitrant when it resists being shaped or reshaped into a socially normative form that will underwrite and advance a self’s or group’s frictionless participation in currently authoritative social forms. This recalcitrance is present and intractable even when, perhaps especially when, the self or group desires for its experience to be so shaped or reshaped. Self and other are given, more or less implicitly, to consciousness in a form different from the form that social norms say should they should take, and this difference between the given and the mandated cannot be eliminated through asceticism, punishment, or sublimation. Recalcitrant experience, in turn, is intrinsically connected to an experience of futurity—a future without recalcitrance. By stubbornly refusing the teleology allotted for it, the experience of social oppression posits a possibility: a different way for the self- 29 other relation to be given in the future, and thus a different, even revolutionary, way to conceive the social forms of family and work that host and indwell all intersubjective consciousness. This project will be carried out by allowing select passages from Husserl’s Phenomenology of Internal Time Consciousness to open up an interesting interpretation of Woolf’s claim that "On or around December 1910, human character changed.” 

Dr Jeffrey McCurry is the Director of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh, PA, USA, where he is also Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Philosophy. He is additionally on the faculty of the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center. His interests include phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and literature, especially modernist literature.

The aim of my paper is to relaunch, extend and re-discuss a critical approach to Jacques Derrida's deconstructive work, and in particular to his proposal of a messianic ethics. First of all, I intend to radicalise the hypothesis, which is used by a lot of critical theory, that a whole side of Derrida's deconstructive performance, taking shape as the destruction of a full concept of authenticity and consequently as the delegitimization of a frontal critical gesture (dialectical negation; overthrow), runs the risk of a certain «complicity» with the late-capitalist interpretation of the being. Such is still the background of the messianic throw of the authentic principle of experience and historical praxis (the event, the «a venir») beyond the possible and the future (the latter as a mode of the present, again in controversy with Husserl), in the dimension of an «impossible» that the last Derrida ends up identifying with the «real». In fact, this move shows all its fruitful ambiguity in the context of the late-capitalist form of life, whose «realism» feeds essentially on the devaluation of the possible, the presentification of the future and the pre-corporation of alternatives. Only on this critical basis, in my opinion, is it possible to question the contribution that the messianic expectation and unconditional hospitality preached by Derrida could provide to the way we face the major problems of the present, from migration to ecological catastrophe, from the technological enhancement of the human to the coronavirus pandemic. I intend to suggest how Derrida's thought, particularly insofar as it is temporally articulated as an ethics of imminence, still represents the absolute «pharmakon» of our age, capable of embodying the greatest strategic potential with the same movement with which it exposes itself to the risk of complicity with the greatest problems implicated by our worldview.

Matteo Angelo Mollisi is PhD student in Philosophy and Human Sciences at University of Milan, with a project of research on the end of history in post-Heideggerian thought. His research is at the crossroads of theoretical philosophy, philosophy of history and political philosophy, taking up the legacy and challenges of some of the most influential philosophical currents of the last century and recent years (phenomenology, hermeneutics, deconstruction, post-structuralism, new realisms). He is the author of numerous papers and talks, published in some of the most prestigious Italian philosophical journals or presented at international conferences.

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

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

“Anticipate!” How many times have we heard this command in music lessons? Anticipation is crucial in music performance: while I am playing a note, I need to prepare for the next; what is about to come should already be present in the now. Why is it so crucial? How is it even possible? When I play my cello, I perform my inner song, the music I imagine in my head. Philosophically, the inner song is: (1) a phenomenon—it is given in the phenomenological consciousness— (2) of imagination—it is neither a phenomenon of perception nor an intuitive positing of past or future as true— (3) teleologically oriented toward a performance—it is given as a part of the act of performing— (4) constituted through an intention—chance plays a very little role in its constitution— and (5) sonorous but not necessarily linguistic—it is composed of sounds but language might not be involved. The inner song is at first given in consciousness as fleeting, unsteady, and obscure. However, it becomes clearer as I practice, rehearse, or perform i.e. as I hear how it actually sounds. Phenomenologically speaking, it is therefore more precisely an obscure phantasy pointing to a possible clear appearance. The clearer my inner song is, the more refined and musical my performance will be. As a consequence, it is necessary to listen to the inner song attentively in order to play musically and beautifully. In the present paper, I will argue that it is the capacity to be present in the now of the performance while anticipating what is about to come through the inner song which leads the performance forward and provides a continuity of meaning. Thus, thanks to the notion of inner song, I will explain how the future of the performance impacts its present. 

Ellen Moysan started her education in Philosophy at Paris-Sorbonne IV (France), before studying with the French and German Master Erasmus Mundus Europhilosophy at the Karl University (Czech Republic), Hosei University (Japan), and Wuppertal University (Germany). She is now a doctoral candidate at Duquesne University (USA). Over the last ten years, Ellen Moysan has researched the notion of “inner song,” interviewing more than fifty musicians from different horizons on that topic, and creating a digital archive where the collection of interviews is available in French, Italian, and English. Currently, she is working on her interviews and finishing her dissertation.

“Damn. You really confirmed my fear that I've been lonely all along and have been ignoring my loneliness by filling my life with streamers and youtubers and VTubers. It is time to make a change.” This is a comment left by a user on the YouTube video The Parasocial Problem with Livestreaming. The video presents a commentary on the loneliness people, primarily men, face in contemporary society, which has been exacerbated due to the extensive use of livestreaming platforms such as Twitch.tv. It presents the idea that people forge bogus relationships with the content creators they are watching and are enchanted with an illusion. In this paper I intend to show that men’s understanding of the lonely situation they are in, and how to get out of them in the future, are mistaken. I posit that there is an already simmering anger about the perceived causes of their problems. This paper will be split into four sections. In section one I will explain in detail what Twitch is, what parasocial relationships are, and how they operate. In section two I will show that there is a trend of men online who are lonely. I will explain that there are many men who develop parasocial relationships with streamers and grow very attached them. In section three I will highlight that in the video essays mentioned the comments section is littered with men angry at their situation. They blame women; specifically, they blame women on Twitch.tv for being the root cause of the parasocial relationship developing. I will show how these men divide women into certain categories; those that are with them and those who are against them. Finally, in section four I will highlight that the anger which these men are feeling is unrefined and misdirected. 

Jamie Murphy attained his BA and MA in University College Cork (UCC) in 2016 and 2018 respectively. His research focus then was on moral responsibility and critiquing compatibilist thought through a deterministic framework. He is currently a PhD student researching anger as a moral and non-moral emotion. He is specifically interested in the phenomenology and expression of anger and how it broadens into collective and political anger. 

The future is that which is always to come but which, for exactly this reason, is not, strictly speaking. When considering the future, we usually or implicitly think about how it appears from this present moment. With phenomenology, another approach is possible. When thinking about the future in a phenomenological way, we may be able to determine how the future appears not as the future of this present, but how the future appears in itself. In my talk, I want to consider the phenomenality of the future not as the shape of a future present, but as a way out of the present, as the present opening up, becoming foreign to itself. The phenomenality of the future has to be accessible immediately, without delay. While the future, as a phenomenon, might not take a recognisable form, it still has to be addressed at the level of experience. Something about my epistemic and 32 habitual comportment in the world has to qualify as futural. My guiding assumption is that I cannot deliberately experience the future in the same way that I can be attentive to the passing of time or as the fulfilment of a specific expectation. Rather, the future happens when I am not looking, as it were. The fact that I am in a certain sense blind to the future informs my perception of the present, and this will be my starting point for inquiring into its phenomenality, which starts from an experienced negativity, open to phenomenological description. Thus, the task is to phenomenologically assess how the future occurs in spite of the present, not as the continuous unfolding of conscious experience, but as an aspect of experience which, never being present itself, constantly escapes me, making itself felt negatively.

Daniel Neumann, born 1988 in Stralsund Germany. MA in philosophy, media theory and art studies at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in 2015. PhD project about the reception of the Cartesian dualism of mind and body in 17th and 18th century Netherlands and France to be completed this year, supervised by Iris Därmann, Humboldt University and Cornelius Borck, University of Lübeck. Since 2019 research associate in the Department for Philosophy at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria.

I am developing a paper on the work of the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) to address local and national legacies of white violence through ritual acts of public recognition and commemoration. I focus on their ritual collection of soil from lynching sites in order to consider ongoing connections between racial and environmental violence and degradation. Soil taken from an identified lynching site is placed in a jar or jars bearing the name of the person murdered there; it is made publicly available to visit in the community, then taken on a pilgrimage to and enshrined at EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice in Montgomery, Alabama. More than just jars of dirt, these are seen as relics of the lives, bodies, and experiences of victims of lynchings, both witness to and victim of white violence and claims to supremacy. They are archives of earth, experience, violence, and blood. Through research conducted at a number of these sites during Summer 2020, I hope to offer broader reflections on human porosity and vulnerability, the absent-presence of white and settler-colonial violence in dominant conceptions of American (US) spaces and places, and the ever-present Anthropo/Plantationo/Capitalocene. I would like to explore our inescapable connections to and reliance on soil, and what this means in a world where corpo-humans continuously erode, poison, and contaminate the soil beyond repair. I also hope to challenge the idealisation of natural landscapes, instead considering how they have and continue to be irrevocably changed through the work of Hannah Holleman and Anthony Lioi; this work explicitly considers the ways in which whiteness, Christianity, and settler-colonialism have fuelled an inherently violent and extractive system of environmental and social devaluation that suggests salvation through reformed capitalism and perpetuates an ethos of resurrection that suggests crucified land will become miraculously healed. 

Annie Rose O'Brien is a Religion in the Américas PhD student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her work considers race, religion, and violence in the US as interconnected elements of settler-colonialism and nation-building. Currently her work focuses on soil as medium for anti-racist work, disrupting white claims to supremacy, and unearthing buried histories, memories, and futures.

As a philosophy and a cultural movement, transhumanism is committed to the endeavour of using technology to engineer the human condition, and to realise the human future as the post-human future. This vision of post-biological evolution represents epochal change beyond any previous historical human experience. Like the future itself, the post-human does not exist yet outside of our imaginations. Both are constructs – contextualised by the past, fabricated in the present, and projected into the future. Hence, the post-human future is very much a present human concern. As such, it is an issue of philosophical anthropology. The human being is a being whose very existence poses a problem for itself – we are Nietzsche’s ‘not yet determined animal’. The imperative of the necessity to address this foundational issue means we are driven always toward self-interpretation and the need to construct a self-image. We are anticipatory beings, orientated toward what is not yet there – both in ourselves, and in time. The human being must make of itself what it is. This principle of philosophical anthropology is intensified and brought sharply into focus by the ‘promise’ of late-modern technology and transhumanism as a philosophy of the human future – the biological and the mechanical converge, the natural and the synthetic amalgamate, and the ‘problem’ of the human being becomes an engineering problem. The engineer is orientated in a practical sense toward what is not there. They do not seek to simply contemplate or describe the world, rather they see what is missing and endeavour to build a solution. This illustrates an innovative, imaginative, and hands-on engagement with the world that is inherently future orientated and techno-optimistic. This perspective is characteristic of transhumanism’s vision of the future and the underlying belief that there exists a ‘techno-fix’ which will provide a solution for all human problems – both present and future. 

Paper part of pre-constituted panel with Daire Boyle and Susan Gottlöber:

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

David O'Brien is a PhD candidate and graduate teaching assistant at Maynooth University. He holds a BA degree in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (PPE), and an MA in Modern and Contemporary Philosophy – both from Maynooth University. His doctoral project is a philosophical anthropological investigation – based on the late thought of Max Scheler – into transhumanism, human enhancement technologies, and the concept of post-biological evolution. This project incorporates various strands of his broader philosophical and research interests which include: philosophical anthropology, philosophy of technology, philosophy of mind, trans- and posthumanism, philosophy of biology, philosophy of science, political philosophy, and philosophy of information.

Today, the concept of progress has largely achieved the status of commonsense dogma. What reasonable person could deny that history is a story of progress where humanity’s ever expanding scientific and moral knowledge lead to ever increasing freedom and happiness? One only needs to look at the gains in civil liberties and the advances in medicine over the past century to see this. And who could deny that our political task is to keep up that positive trend? In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Walter Benjamin provides one of the most biting and thorough critiques of this view of progress to date, revealing this conception of history as a violent ideology which rests on a problematic way of viewing time and history. In contrast to the commonsense, progressive notion of time where each moment is discrete, Benjamin argues for what he calls an understanding of time which is Messianic. In this way of thinking time and history, historical events are not temporally distant and merely causally related to the present, but instead may constitute a unity in which we find ourselves engaged in the same struggle as the victims of history, united in a relationship in which we find ourselves having to play the role of redeemer. In contrast to the dominant view of optimistic progressivism, this paper will defend Benjamin’s pessimistic view of history as well more explicitly draw out what this means for thinking about politics, utopia, and revolution. I will show the political weaknesses involved in understanding ourselves as first and foremost fighting for a better life for future generations. Instead, we should emphasise a solidarity with the victims of history, seeing ourselves in an ongoing struggle to repair the injustices of the past. 

Paper part of pre-constituted panel with Cara Greene:

‘The Past Within the Future’: Reorienting History with Walter Benjamin Modern future-oriented political projects often express teleological tendencies: lifestyle activists organise their communities around visions of an Edenic kingdom of heaven on earth, deterministic Marxists view history as inevitably marching in the direction of classless society, and liberal reformists optimistically believe in the necessity of modern society’s movement towards progress. These views take for granted the irresistible self-movement of history without recognising the actions which actually move history. This panel will critique these perspectives using the Messianic utopianism of Walter Benjamin, who rejects the idea that history moves in a predictable course. Instead, Benjamin recognises that progress is not guaranteed. He understands that the fight for any future society free from oppression must be grounded in solidarity with the oppressed peoples of the past. In contrast with world-views which orient themselves around our responsibility to future generations, Benjamin offers a vision of politics based on a duty to the victims of history and a vision of utopia based around redemption of these people. These presentations will explore the possibility of committing ourselves to utopian ideas without falling back on abstract teleological assumptions about the future. 

Justin Pearce is a 3rd year PhD student in Philosophy at the University of New Mexico. His area of specialization is 20th and 21st century continental philosophy, especially philosophies of violence. His current research is concerned with the works of Emmanuel Levinas, Walter Benjamin, and Frantz Fanon, focusing on their different understandings of violence and how these differences affect their views on revolutionary politics. He received a BA in Philosophy from the University of Chicago in 2014 and an MA in Philosophy from the University of New Mexico in 2018.

Especially in our times, the future enters in our lives as a concern for the world we shall leave to future generations. What does it mean being concerned for something beyond the time of our consciousness, and even beyond the time of human species? To what extent does this future ‘affect’ us? The paper explores this issue borrowing insights from Merleau-Ponty, building upon Husserl’s analysis of living-present and Heidegger’s concept of time. Firstly, the paper draws a distinction between the future as part of our time-experience (e.g. protentions, expectations, open possibilities) and the future as image of a different world. It will argue that the ways in which we are concerned by the future depend on how the two levels interact. Secondly, this insight is elaborated by investigating the correlation between the ‘matter’ of the being-concern, i.e. what generates concern (e.g. exhaustion of resources, loss of cultural or biological diversity) and the ‘how’ of our being-concerned, i.e. how we ‘see’ the future, (e.g. as individual, groups, living beings). Thirdly, drawing from science-fiction and eco-semiotics, the paper considers the concrete example of a world deprived of natural and cultural variety, and discusses the implications of this scenario in relation to our perceptual experience and to how we see the future as a concern. The paper contrasts two forms of time-experience: the ‘care for things’, where the future as a concern is articulated through relations and indications of usefulness (‘what-for’, ‘in-order-to’), and the ‘care for the present’, characterised by a particular engagement with perceptual presence as a surplus of indications, where natural and cultural differences make the present meaningful to us in the form of a system of signs and symbols. On this basis, the future affects us as a present that has lost its salience, its expressiveness and meaningfulness. 

Dr Fabio Tommy Pellizzer received his PhD in 2019 from Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, with a thesis entitled “The Unity of the Manifold. Heidegger’s Interpretation of the Synthesis between Husserl and Kant”. His research interests include phenomenology (Heidegger, Husserl and Merleau-Ponty) and Kant’s philosophy. His recent investigations aim at developing, in dialogue with archaeology, anthropology and palaeoanthropology, a phenomenological approach to signs, images and symbols. He is currently a Ernst Mach Fellow at the Department of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, with a research on fetishism and rituals in a phenomenological perspective.

One of the key features of Dasein, as Heidegger analyses it in Being and Time, is its future orientation. It is by way of our future orientation that death comes forth as that limit which opens up the possibility of authenticity. Even in subsequent works, the prioritisation of the futural projection remains pivotal since Heidegger becomes increasingly reluctant toward the idea of imagining a different future here and now. Arguably, works such as the Contributions, betray an eschatological element in Heidegger’s thought: Da-sein is presented as a futural mode of being that is to come. In my paper, I reflect on another way of opening up the possibility of a different future, by drawing on Fink’s notion of play. While Fink takes on board Heidegger’s description of care as a fundamental trait of human existence, he shows how care encloses our lives into an autarchic context of determinate goals and final ends. Play is presented by Fink as an interruption to the totalising aspect of the care structure. In this respect, play has the character of a ‘pacified present,’ which is irreducible to the architecture of final ends. By juxtaposing Fink to Heidegger, I suggest that Fink’s account of play sheds light to a modality of being that relates to the future in a way that interrupts the totalising effect that the care for our existence in its past and future dimension may have. Whereas Heidegger’s thought remains fixated to the idea of a present that is always determined by the past and future, Fink shows how play transforms, albeit momentarily, our 36 relation to the past and future. Play can thus be understood as a way of relating to the possibility of a different future, which is not characterised by a ‘waiting’ but by an immersion in the immediate present. 

Georgios Petropoulos is a post-doctoral fellow in Philosophy at University College Dublin and the UCD Centre for Ethics in Public Life. He completed his PhD in 2018 at UCD with a thesis entitled: Being and Nothing in Heidegger’s Thought: The Same and the Other to Metaphysics. His research focuses on Continental Philosophy, Phenomenology, Greek Philosophy, Philosophy of Education and Philosophy for/with Children. He is currently a member of the research team for the BodyDementia project, funded by the Irish Research Council New Foundations scheme.

Can the future, as a temporal category, be understood as a present and political concern? Can the future existence of humankind be a current issue for philosophical thinking? If time is to be understood as an event which resides inside of the mere phenomenon of human existence, we must maintain, as far as human in its individual and collective existence plans himself into the future and acts according to that given or acknowledged future, that future should be a relevant category of the philosophical struggle to understand the present. This paper aims to expose how and in which sense the future is not only a projection of human dreams or expectations but something which constitutes our current existence as a such. Moreover, it expects to show that as such it is not a neutral concept, but a moral and politically orientated. In order to do so, the early writings of Herbert Marcuse will provide us a fructiferous scenario. These are in close relation with Heidegger’s thinking about time and history, which for us offers the basis for a philosophical approach to the phenomenon of time. This paper will expose the main lines of the Marcusean critique to the excess of neutrality of Heidegger’s view about history, which naturally requires to attend to Heideggerian approach to the phenomenon of temporality and historicity (Zeitlichkeit und Geschichtlichkeit). Through it, we will reach a more precise and concrete approach to time, which will allow us to prove that the future co-constitute the present we dwell in. So we would contribute to the philosophical attempts of nowadays to clarify the world-wide challenging current existence. 

Fabián Portillo Palma, born in 1994 in Almáchar (Spain), is a graduated Philosophy Student in the Universities of Granada and Sevilla and future Ph.D. student at the University of Sevilla and Erfurt, whose research topic is the concept of history in the unarticulated relation between the first generation of the Frankfurt School and Martin Heidegger. He has taken part in a Congress at the University of Granada in 2018 with a paper on the philosophy of technology by B. Stiegler and in a Summer school on Heidegger’s thinking at the Heidegger’s Archive in Messkirch in 2019. Website: 

In the history of Philosophy, history has ended over and over. Yet history is stubbornly not perishing as it supposedly should. This common philosopheme therefore begs the question if what these obituaries capture is nothing but a peculiarity of our form of life. In other words, rather than thinking history as changing or even decaying, it is our experience that needs to be understood as being 37 intrinsically attuned towards a sense of decay. Building on Umberto Eco’s 1964 irony against Apocalyptic Intellectuals in Apocalypse Postponed I argue that the apocalyptic type can be interpreted as embodying a consistent aspect of our experience. Pivotal to this hypothesis is the connection between the apocalyptic approach with the drive towards the inorganic, be that a form of Todestrieb or more appropriately of semiotic entropy. The apocalyptic thinker shows, via their negative prophecies, civilisation’s reliance on an horizon of sense, and experiences apocalypse as the loss of said horizon. Following this general setting, my contribution will be structured along two main lines of investigation: An analysis of the structure of experience within the apocalyptic worldview. Relying on the history of philosophical pessimism, I will give a general outline of experience as described by a number of apocalyptic thinkers. I will not focus on the utilitarian argument against existential pain that some of these authors have presented as the rationale of their theories, but rather, I will read them as theorist of experience qua negation of sense, of experience as a perennial night of the soul. An interpretation of some historical responses to this pessimism, such as stoic selfmastery or the transhumanist movement. I will show how these approaches only postpone the question of pessimism, by either embracing the inorganic or idealising the organic. This further proves how the call of inorganic inarticulateness is an intrinsic condition of our experience rather an extrinsic assessment of specific cultural contexts. 

Gino Querini is a researcher and writer from Italy, currently residing in Belgium. He holds a BA and MA in Philosophy from Sapienza University in Rome. He has recently defended his PhD in Philosophy of Art and Culture at National University of Ireland, Galway – IRC funded. His research focuses on Warburg, Kant and post-Kantian aesthetics.

States’ responsibilities to climate refugees are contested. In this paper we analyse how such contestation is not simply political but inherent in legal reasoning. Law is resistant to ascribing rights where there are partially indeterminate categories like that of climate refugee. Worse, law is better equipped to assert that States have new rights against the claims of these groups than that these groups (who have come into existence through State wrongs) have, thereby, gained rights. The analysis builds upon Brownlee’s account of wrongs and Brownsword’s account of tiered principles. Brownsword’s ‘Tiers’ represent a hierarchy of legal principles. Using these Tiers we can argue for a right to relocation for populations facing unavoidable environmental displacement; failure to take action now to secure the future of the populations of sinking island states will entail a failure of a ‘Tier 1’ responsibility on the part of the international community. States will, nevertheless, argue for the resource priorities of their own states (‘Tier 2’) or for an essentially mediating role for law in overcoming normative and epistemic conflicts (‘Tier 3’). It is possible for States to accept duties of adaption and mitigation, accept that a wronged party has been created, but deny that rights for that group have been created. Indeed, States may argue they have a right to resist the ‘harm’ that properly compensating climate refugees will produce. States’ wrongdoing will create new rights for them, not for refugees. We argue that this analysis highlights a key, underlying, problem related to the rights of groups and climate change. Namely, law’s tendency to prioritise the prevention of wrong over any rights arising from those wrongs. 

Paper co-authored by Alan Desmond. 

Dr Stephen Riley is a lecturer at Leicester Law School. He has published extensively on the theme of law and human dignity. He is currently working on the relationship between jurisprudence and the future, addressing connections between future generations, intergenerational justice, rights, and jurisprudence.

From the perspective of the past, the future is now: tomorrow never comes – it is already here. Walter Benjamin draws attention to this fact and his late, politically engaged thought strives to do justice to it. In contrast to prevailing traditions of revolutionary theories oriented predominantly on the future (i.e. on changing the world for the sake of the future better one), Benjamin puts emphasis on human relation to the past. Whereas Heidegger identifies the forgetfulness of being as the source of our misery, Benjamin is worried about our forgetfulness of the barbaric side of the tradition we live in: about the suffering it was, and still is, built on. The past, with its suppressed hopes, is not simply gone: it reaches for the present, or, as Benjamin himself puts it, it “has a claim” on us. It is in this (uncomfortable) sense that, as Husserl would have it, both the future and the past are “parts” of the present. And we need to do justice to this experience not (only) out of respect for past generations but (primarily) because without our doing so everything threatens to remain the same, or as it has – traditionally – been. In other words, we are – and need to be – responsive to and responsible for the past not (only) for the sake of the past itself but for the future’s sake, or simply for the sake of the present. It is our relation to the past which makes us sensible, according to Benjamin, to the future in the present, calling us to break through the tradition and to reconstruct, or reimagine, its different future. This way, we save the future, not as something which will happen, but as a possibility in the present. 

Martin Ritter is Senior Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of the Czech Academy of Sciences. From 2007 to 2020, he taught continental philosophy at the Charles University in Prague. Currently, he realises a two-years research project at the University of Vienna (http://oskf.flu.cas.cz/technology-as-medium). Martin specializes in phenomenology and critical theory. He edited (and translated) three volumes of the Czech Selected Writings of Walter Benjamin. Recently, he has published two monographs: To liberate the future by an act of cognition. Walter Benjamin's theory of truth; Filosofia 2018, in Czech), and Into the World. The Movement of Patočka’s Phenomenology (Springer 2019).

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

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

Traditionally, when it comes to picturing the relation between past, present and future from a phenomenological perspective, we pick up Husserl’s scheme: the present is the instant which harbours past (retention) and future (protention). Thus, future, as anticipation, dwells in the present, while past, as memory, is held within the «now», so that there would be an ordered sequence of time, a fluid of conscience. The aim of this paper is to reiterate Derrida’s question on Husserlian phenomenology: what if this reality still coming, that dimension which has not arrived yet, is not the future but the past? What if the past has never existed «as such»? What if we accept that the task of the present time is to reappropriate the past as something that is always coming, that is, as if it were the future? What are the consequences of this time «out of joint», as Shakespeare says? Is it possible to understand this aporia in a phenomenological manner? In this sense, the objective of this paper is to grasp that the past has never had place «as such», so future, as be-coming of the present instant, is that task of making come what has already been. Future, thus, will not be accessible by anticipation but by memory. This is something that finds its precedent in Heideggerian thought about the «first beginning» (der erste Anfang) and the «other beginning» (der andere Anfang), as the distinction between «Beginn» and «Anfang» in the Beiträge zur Philosophie, and this is something that Derrida himself recognises. However, Derrida radicalises this question and unfolds it from different strategies and perspectives throughout his forty years of intellectual work. Thus, we could state that the big question that goes through Derrida’s work is this phenomenological topic: how are related present and past as future? 

Ph. D. Candidate and Pre-doctoral Fellow at UNED (Madrid, Spain). Visiting Scholar at UTAS (Tasmania, Australia) with Prf. Jeff Malpas and at USC (California, USA) with Prof. Peggy Kamuf. My research focuses on Heidegger’s work, specially in the period 1936-1945, and in its reception in the French tradition, with particular attention to the work of Jacques Derrida. Besides, I try to 40 develop a reading of Heidegger’s texts from a topological perspective, that is, from the tension between the notions of place and space.

Technology is influencing the future of civic life, and artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the political and legal landscape of society. Algorithmic policing practices are becoming more pervasive and now, more than ever, there is an urgent need to examine the use of AI in policing to determine the ethical underpinnings of these technologies, as well as the political and legal consequences of putting them into use. Emerging literature discusses the use of algorithms in policing in the context of criminal justice and human rights, which is a valuable framework for analysing the current scenario. However, in this paper, I will argue that we ought to place the use of AI in policing within the broader discussion of settler colonialism. Framing the discussion within an analysis of settler colonialism more adequately reflects the level of discrimination and racism that is inherent in these technologies. To demonstrate, I will look to Indigenous movements such as Idle No More to argue that surveillance is a form of settler colonialism that deliberately discriminates against minority groups. I will argue that if we are to truly appreciate the problems of algorithmic policing, then this context—of settler colonialism—is crucial for our analysis. I aim to show that policing algorithms are bringing about a new stage of settler colonialism, unlike anything we have ever imagined. In outlining these background conditions, I hope to reveal the underlying power structures that mediate the use of artificial intelligence, demonstrating why AI is not neutral or objective. I will show how AI is being used in policing practices, focusing in particular on the surveillance algorithms being used by policing agencies. I hope this analysis sheds light on the complexity of artificial intelligence while also offering some insight into the ways that settler colonialism is shaping society’s future. 

Arjun Sawhney is a PhD student in philosophy at Queen's University. He is studying the philosophical foundations of artificial intelligence, political philosophy, and philosophy of law.

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

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

Most of the studies on health centres on the third-person, scientific understanding of illness which ignores the subjective, experiential dimension of the Illness. The paper aims at the phenomenological account of the Illness which defines illness as the feeling of disequilibrium and uncanniness. The paper argues that the experience of illness can be interpreted as the disorienting experience for the embodied subject who perceives the world as affordances. Hence, the illness is experienced as the loss of the affordances for the embodied subject. Based on Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of the lived space, we will argue that experience of illness makes it difficult for the embodied subject to cope up with the environment and the world no longer experienced as the horizon of possibilities. Hence, the experience of illness is fundamentally experienced as disorientation where the embodied subject is unable to orient its activities and realise its goals with respect to the future. The inability to experience the future as the horizon of various possibilities results in the disruption of narrative coherence. We will show that the experience of disorientation during illness manifests itself at the intersubjective level as the inability to form coherent narrative. According to Ricouer, self is basically the time experienced in the form of narratives or the stories we tell to ourselves. However, the experience of Illness as disorientation disrupts our ability to form the coherent narratives and result in the loss of subjective well-being. In this way, the talk will try to establish the link between the lived space and narrativity through the phenomenological analysis of Illness.

Saurabh Todariya obtained his PhD from the Center for Philosophy, JNU in 2016 wherein he explored the relationship between time, historicity and freedom in Martin Heidegger's Philosophy. He thereafter worked with school children for improving the learning levels by introducing the phenomenological insights in pedagogy. Recently, he worked as the post-doc scholar in the National Institute of Advanced Studies, Bangalore where he explored the relationship between embodiment, health and transcendence. He is also editing a book volume on Artificial Intelligence from the Multidisciplinary point of view. Currently, he is a teaching faculty in the School of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences, SRM University AP, India.

The body is the locus of intentionality – it is through the body that a person is open to the world and its possibilities. The possibilities that appear to a person drawing them into action depend on the bodily skills and abilities the person has developed often by taking part in social, cultural, and material practices. Young (1980) makes a distinction between an uninhibited bodily intentionality, which she describes as projecting what it aims to accomplish, seamlessly connecting the body’s activities to the surrounding world. Intentionality can however also be inhibited when the person simultaneously projects an end based on their skills and abilities, while at the same time imposing on themselves an I-cannot. Inhibited and uninhibited intentionality are two ways in which the future can be of present concern for an individual. Which of these structures the person embodies depends on their social group. In this talk we will trace inhibited intentionality to oppressive forms of embodied intersubjectivity. We will describe how other’s estimations of you and your capabilities can limit and restrict your own experience of what is possible. People of colour for instance experience themselves through the eyes of the white world and its prejudices and hate. Disabled people are denied their individuality and reduced to stereotypes attached to them by the able-bodied that views them as incapable and untrustworthy. The result is that people subjected to these prejudices experience themselves as cut-off from the possibilities the world has to offer. As an example of an oppressive form of embodied intersubjectivity we will discuss microaggressions, subtle forms of discrimination performed by dominant groups that target members of minority groups (Freeman 2020). Microaggressions, we will argue, can lead to what Young described as inhibited intentionality. Paper co-authored and co-presented by Julian Kiverstein.

Juan Toro is postdoctoral researcher at the Enactlab. He completed his PhD in 2020 and works on topics relating to embodiment, normality and pathology.

Currently, there is limited engagement with phenomenology in legal scholarship; the idealist tradition of law does not lend itself to situated or temporal examination of legal phenomena. However, given the intersectional concerns that ignite today’s social discourse, it is increasingly important that legal scholars orient themselves towards experience—to examine law in the everyday and to make space for the every-day in the law. In this paper I examine the international legal norms governing children impacted by armed conflict through a phenomenological lens. Specifically, I look at the effort of existing law to connect the child’s present experiences with their future possibilities. Current international law recognises childhood as a temporal space deemed worthy of protection due, partly, to the acknowledgement that formative experiences have an impact on how a person subsequently occupies the world as an adult. The approach of children’s rights is unique; violations are not merely articulated as affront on some idealised inherent human dignity, but a violation that places limits on the person that the child could become. This future orientation of the law on children’s rights is particularly evident in situations of armed conflict. The rights-violating experiences that children are exposed to in the context of conflict are not only articulated as threats to the child’s future, but as threats to future modes of relating within the wider society. By contrasting the child right’s approach with orthodox human rights theory, I illustrate how the former approach integrates phenomenologically-friendly assumptions. Further, through this demonstration of the uniquely future-considering approach of children’s rights, I propose that the international law on child rights creates a foothold for a phenomenological approach to human rights law more generally. 

PhD student in law at Durham University, UK. She works in the area of legal philosophy and peace operations. Her doctoral project uses armed conflict as a break case to examine the phenomenological considerations pertinent to the experience of being a human rights holder.

Reinhart Koselleck characterised modernity a temporal transformation of the relation between the space of experience and the horizon of expectation. For Koselleck, this transformation released the modern potential of politics as an autonomous sphere orientated towards the future and worldly progress. Today, we are constantly told that our experiences (individual, institutional) can no longer guide our orientation towards an uncertain future given the crises we face (climatic, epidemiological). Hartmut Rosa specifies the time of late modernity as an intensification of this acceleration producing a qualitatively new temporal crisis: a sense of epochal transition, marked by various crises, “without a corresponding vision of a cultural new beginning, thus without a new meaningful linkage of past, present, and future.” I read Husserl and Levinas as responding in different ways to the problem of beginning in times of crisis. Philosophy’s beginning is not legitimated with reference to the past (scholasticism), nor to the present (cartesianism), but to the future. Thus, Husserl’s notion of phenomenology as an “infinite task” carried out collectively by successive generations, presupposing a succession of new beginnings. This conception of philosophy’s rigour is a particularly modern response to a particularly modern temporal malaise, with the result that phenomenology is marked by a modern restlessness. Not resting on a foundation, it must keep demonstrating its viability by encompassing an ever growing range of phenomena. For Levinas this restlessness underestimates the problem of beginning (philosophical, societal, individual) which he develops in his post-war analysis of fatigue. To begin an infinite task, philosophy must be thought as essentially inter-generational, thereby acknowledging the alterity of the future and future generations. Crises radically dislocate the future as continuous with the present, such that questions of legitimation cannot be restlessly deferred to the future, but can be understood as vigilance safeguarding another future for others. 

Rikus van Eeden is a doctoral researcher at the Husserl Archives at the Institute of Philosophy, KU Leuven. His current research focuses on the intersection between social pathology and psychopathology, particularly on exhaustion and depression in relation to late-modern, late capitalist society, and various antecedents of and responses to this condition. His broader research interests include phenomenology (esp. Levinas and Heidegger, phenomenological psychopathology), philosophical anthropology (Scheler, Gehlen, Plessner, etc.), psychoanalysis and postcolonial thought.

For Kant, contrary to what Hegel maintained, history does not have a constitutive value, but rather a regulative value with respect to human action. In fact, history is not considered as a concluded event, nor even as the necessary development of an essence, but rather as a task to be accomplished. This way of framing history necessarily highlights the question of the future, and his role in the perception of the present. My claim is that Kant's philosophy of history, one of the least studied aspects of his thought, can provide us with extremely interesting insights into the structure of "making history”. In addition to the Critique of Judgment, my paper considers in particular some Kantian texts which are often classified as minor, such as Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose, The Contest of Faculties, On the Old Saw, and Conjectural Beginning of Human History. In order to analyse these aspects, I will also consider Reinhart Koselleck's theory, in particular his notions of "space of experience" and "horizon of expectation". Koselleck in fact tries to ground history through these categories that oscillate between the anthropological and the (quasi- )transcendental. Experience and expectation do indeed play a central role in Kant as well, but they are supplemented by a performative aspect that appears almost absent from Koselleck's theory. The writing of a story for Kant is at the same time a contribution to its realisation, and thus becomes a moral task, a part of a rational praxis. The aim of my paper is to show how such a position can provide us with a picture of a history that is not 'saturated' by past events, but radically oriented towards the future that it envisages or aims to achieve, and therefore essentially 'open'.

Davide Antonio Vicini graduated in Philosophy (B.A) at the University of Padua (110 out of 110, cum laude) and in in Philosophical Sciences/German Idealism and European modern philosophy (M. A. double degree), at the University of Padua and Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena (110 out of 110, cum laude). He is also attended the Advanced Course in Critical Theory of Society at the Milano-Bicocca University, and participated to various conferences about Kant’s thought. Right now he is working as a Philosophy teacher at the Liceo Cantonale di Bellinzona (Switzerland).

This thesis argues that human hope not only points to some future good that not yet comes, but also, and more importantly, it is something that saturates each life experience and every living moment. For this purpose, this thesis puts forward the basic proposition of hope as atmosphere. Firstly, based on the phenomenology of atmosphere proposed by Schmitz and Böhme, hope should not be understood as a psychical state that locates within the inner sphere called soul or psyché, but the atmosphere – the sphere of bodily presence and the sphere of affectivity – that we live in. In this sense, hope lies neither in subjectivity nor in the realisation of its object but in the air, in the sphere in-between where the possibility of mutual inner touch resides. Secondly, hope as atmosphere indicates an atmospheric co-existence. In atmospheric co-existence, humans are not closed entities but are open and living beings entangled and interpenetrated in-between; we constantly resonate with others and touch others from within, we breathe the being of others in and out. This existential mode constitutes the basic structure of hopeful co-existence, out of which our being, future, values, and meanings are born. As the basis and pledge, communal love keeps the hopeful co-existence constantly refreshed and open, guaranteeing more possibilities of hope. Based on communal love, hopeful co-existence shows its ontological meaning as being-towards-life. 

Xu Wang was born in 1988. Studied philosophy and religious studies at Tsinghua University in P.R. China and at Leuphana University in Germany. Doctoral thesis graded with Summa Cum Laude. Doctoral degree financed by the German scholarship Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. Doctoral dissertation will be published by the German publishing company Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Currently researcher in the Institute of World Religions, Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in Beijing, P.R. China. Special research focuses on phenomenology of religion and intercultural dialogues. Member of World Phenomenology Institute (WPI) and Wiener Gesellschaft für interkulturelle Philosophie (WiGiP).

Given the ecological disasters that have lately pummelled vast regions of our earth, the reality of the climate crisis can no longer be subject to dispute. We have collected and analysed the data—we know what is happening; yet there is very little individual or collective will to make changes. The science, it seems, has not motivated our society to secure a more promising future. The aim of this presentation is to argue that thinking about the future cannot be limited to our scientific knowledge of the present but must involve orientation toward a transcendent temporal whole. From Edmund Husserl’s On the Phenomenology of the Consciousness of Internal Time (1893-1917), I shall emphasise the way in which the Urimpression is dependent upon protentions and retentions— expansive possibilities irreducible to the present—and not (as we habitually surmise) vice-versa. From Edith Stein’s On the Problem of Empathy, I shall describe basic empathy as the sui generis perception of another being’s motivational whole, i.e., transcendent temporal form. Then, I shall argue that it is precisely the other’s ungraspable protentions and retentions that imbue a being with an expression of life. It is empathy—empathy as a means of understanding what is not present (i.e., the total motivational form of beings)—that will make it possible for us to perceive the life or ecology of the earth; it is empathy, rather than science (which places before us what is known of the present), that might save us. Furthermore, I suggest that humanities disciplines—particularly those that have been shown to cultivate empathy like music, poetry, and literature—have an essential role to play in the struggle to better secure an ecological future rich with promise and possibility. 

Jessica Wiskus, Scholar-in-Residence at the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center at Duquesne University, works at the intersection of music and continental philosophy. She is author of The Rhythm of Thought: Art, Literature and Music after Merleau-Ponty (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and co-editor of The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music(forthcoming, OUP). With articles in Continental Philosophy Review, The Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Research in Phenomenology, and The Journal of Speculative Philosophy, among others, her work has been supported by fellowships from the Camargo Foundation, Aarhus Institute of Advanced Studies, and Institut d’études avancées de Nantes.

The future is usually taken from the perspective of an absence, as a horizon that is continually projected from the present, but which is not already there. As present centered, this temporal relationship attempts to bridge the future fulfilling it with our expectations and accordingly subordinating it to us. However, a phenomenology of temporal responsibility challenges this dynamic. On the one hand, it does not consider the “absence” of the future as a sheer void to be fulfilled, for it is already meaningful to us. On the other hand, it does not take the future as something present-at-hand merely delivered by human actions, but rather, as an instance of time that resists to be determined by the present, a resistance that is related to the alterity of the future ones. Future events, as enacted by forms of alterity, are unpredictable and elude dominion and calculation. The inadequacy of conceiving future practices as mere extension of ours consists in the failure in recognising that our responsibility to contemporary others differs from that to futural others. Considering that the future presents distinct instances of world that will inevitably collide with structures, arrangements, values and meanings as employed today, and also that different communities and individuals will perform distinct courses of action, one may ask how phenomenological investigation may elaborate a temporal responsibility without making violence to the alterity of the futural ones. In order to develop these issues, this proposal focuses primarily on two subjects: first, the elaboration of phenomenological categories that render future people as meaningful in their alterity, and second, the suggestion of minimal conditions of achieving a temporal community based on the openness to distinct forms of alterity in time. 

Roberto Wu is Professor of Philosophy, Federal University of Santa Catarina (Brazil), author of numerous paper and book chapters on Heidegger, Gadamer, Levinas, and phenomenology.

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

Anna Irene Baka is a Greek jurist, senior legal associate at the Greek National Commission for Human Rights and post-doctoral fellow at the Philosophy Department of the University of Crete, where she focuses on the idea of normativity and the philosophy of legal rights from the scope of Edmund Husserl's eidetic and transcendental Phenomenology, as well as Adolph Reinach’s work on the a priori elements of civil law. She is adjunct lecturer of Jurisprudence, EU Law and Human Rights at the University of London International LL.B. Programme in Greece. She holds a Ph.D. in international law and legal philosophy from the University of Hong Kong, for which she was awarded a scholarship by the University of Hong Kong and the Hellenic National Scholarship. 

States’ responsibilities to climate refugees are contested. In this paper we analyse how such contestation is not simply political but inherent in legal reasoning. Law is resistant to ascribing rights where there are partially indeterminate categories like that of climate refugee. Worse, law is better equipped to assert that States have new rights against the claims of these groups than that these groups (who have come into existence through State wrongs) have, thereby, gained rights. The analysis builds upon Brownlee’s account of wrongs and Brownsword’s account of tiered principles. Brownsword’s ‘Tiers’ represent a hierarchy of legal principles. Using these Tiers we can argue for a right to relocation for populations facing unavoidable environmental displacement; failure to take action now to secure the future of the populations of sinking island states will entail a failure of a ‘Tier 1’ responsibility on the part of the international community. States will, nevertheless, argue for the resource priorities of their own states (‘Tier 2’) or for an essentially mediating role for law in overcoming normative and epistemic conflicts (‘Tier 3’). It is possible for States to accept duties of adaption and mitigation, accept that a wronged party has been created, but deny that rights for that group have been created. Indeed, States may argue they have a right to resist the ‘harm’ that properly compensating climate refugees will produce. States’ wrongdoing will create new rights for them, not for refugees. We argue that this analysis highlights a key, underlying, problem related to the rights of groups and climate change. Namely, law’s tendency to prioritise the prevention of wrong over any rights arising from those wrongs.

Dr Alan Desmond has been a lecturer at Leicester Law School since September 2016.  His research interests lie in the field of immigration law as it intersects with human rights law, international law and EU law.  Previously, he worked at third level institutions in Ireland, Italy and Poland.

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

Costas Pagondiotis is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Patras, Greece; His publications and research are mainly in the areas of philosophy of mind, philosophy of perception, philosophy of cognitive science, and contemporary epistemology. He is currently writing a book on philosophy of perception where he defends direct perception and the conceptuality of perceptual experience.

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

Constantinos Picolas is a board-certified neurosurgeon with graduate studies in philosophy and who is currently a doctorate student in philosophy at the University of Patras, Greece. Apart from his clinical responsibilities his theoretical interests revolve around dynamic approaches on perception and action and disorders of consciousness in brain damaged patients. He is the author and co-author of peer-reviewed articles in international journals.

Keith Crome is President of the British Society for Phenomenology and Principal Lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University. He has published work on 20th century French philosophy. He is currently working on a study of play. 

Tsarina Doyle is a lecturer in Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is the author of Nietzsche on Epistemology and Metaphysics: The World in View (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), Nietzsche's Metaphysics of the Will to Power: The Possibility of Value (Cambridge University Press 2018 pbk 2020) and numerous journal articles.

Dr Lucy Elvis is a lecturer in Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway. She is also the chair of the Board of Trustees at TULCA Festival of Visual Arts and a founder and director of the community philosophy organisation, Curo. Her teaching and research focus on two areas: the philosophy of art and culture, especially in the writing of Hans-Georg Gadamer, and philosophy outside the institution, in particular, philosophy for/with children.

Susan Gottlöber is a speaker at FPC2021: see the main A-Z index of speakers for her paper title, abstract, pre-constituted panel overview, and bio. 

Darian Meacham is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Maastricht University, Netherlands. He is also Editor-in-chief of the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology.

Felix Ó Murchadha is a Professor of Philosophy and former Head of School of Humanities at the National University of Ireland, Galway. A former Fulbright Scholar, he has published articles, papers, books and book chapters in the area of Phenomenology with specific emphasis on questions of Religion, Time, Violence and the Self. He is the author of The Time of Revolution: Kairos and Chronos in Heidegger (Bloomsbury, 2013), A Phenomenology of Christian Life: Glory and Night (Indiana University Press, 2013) and his latest monograph, The Formation of the Modern Self: Reason, Happiness and the Passions from Montaigne to Kant is due out in 2022 with Bloomsbury.