Matthew J. Barnard 

Heidegger's Conception of Freedom: Beyond Cause and Effect (2024)

This book provides a thorough exploration of Martin Heidegger's distinctive understanding of freedom, examining how it departs fundamentally from traditional metaphysical conceptions rooted in causality. Heidegger's conception positions freedom not merely as the absence of constraints or the capacity to choose among alternatives, but rather as an existential phenomenon intimately bound up with the structures of human existence itself. Drawing deeply on Heidegger's key texts, the analysis reveals freedom as fundamentally tied to authenticity, possibility, and the temporal unfolding of Being.

By disentangling Heidegger’s notion of freedom from the conventional binaries of determinism and free will, the book illustrates how Heidegger locates freedom in the existentiality of Dasein, its destiny as the ultimate ground of all of its meaning and being as the abyssal locus of guilt. Crucially, freedom emerges as the condition that enables meaningful existence and genuine engagement with the world, thereby redefining human agency beyond mere cause and effect. Further, the volume argues against the consensus that Heidegger’s writings on freedom from 1927-1930 offer multiple changing conceptions of freedom, demonstrating instead that these writings work together to clarify and elaborate one unified conception of freedom. 

Matthew J. Barnard is senior lecturer in Philosophy at Manchester Metropolitan University and serves on the Executive Committee of the British Society for Phenomenology, as well as founder and editor of their podcast. His primary research has focused on Kant, Bergson, and Heidegger, culminating in his recent book, Heidegger’s Conception of Freedom: Beyond Cause and Effect (Palgrave, 2024). He is currently developing work on two new projects: the role and implications of generative AI in higher education, and the philosophical contributions of traditionally excluded early modern women philosophers. 

Respondent: Felix Ó Murchadha

I am Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Ireland, Galway. My research and teaching is informed by Phenomenological Philosophy, but ranges over such areas as Philosophy of Religion, Philosophical Anthropology, Political Philosophy, Philosophy of art and Metaphysics, as well as the History of Modern Philosophy. In addition to my work on Heidegger, I have published on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Ricoeur, Levinas and Marion. 17 PhD students have completed theses under my supervision in Ireland and I have also taught undergraduates in Canada, Germany and the US. Currently, I am the President of the Irish Philosophical Society and am Co-Director of the Centre for the Study of Religion at NUI, Galway.

Aengus Daly

Heidegger's Metaphysics: The Overturning of 'Being and Time' (2024)

Heidegger’s Metaphysics explores how Heidegger continued the project of Being and Time, developing a new kind of metaphysics through a critique of Kantian transcendental philosophy. Drawing on Heidegger’s published work, lecture courses, drafts, and correspondence from the late 1920s, it reconstructs the philosophical justification for this project and its implications for Heidegger’s phenomenology of time and his understanding of philosophical concept formation.

Daly proposes that Heidegger’s project neither failed nor remained indebted to a Kantian transcendental framework and challenges the widespread interpretation of Heidegger as a critic of metaphysics. This work examines a wide range of themes that have been largely neglected in discussions of Heidegger’s work, including a phenomenology of the mythical world (in dialogue with Ernst Cassirer’s work), the origin of religious concepts, the development of a temporality of thrownness, and Heidegger’s critique of Kantian transcendentalism. It finishes by challenging the separation of Heidegger’s philosophy from his politics and asks what we can retrieve from his project today.

Aengus Daly teaches philosophy and is a researcher at the Institute for Transcendental Philosophy at the Bergische Universität Wuppertal, Germany. He has also translated philosophical works and numerous articles from German and French into English.

Respondent: Georgios Petropoulos

Georgios Petropoulos is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Galway and the Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics, involved in the “Critical Thinking in Communities of Inquiry” research project. His research interests include phenomenology (classical, applied, and critical), philosophy of education (with an emphasis on interactive and dialogic pedagogies), philosophy of childhood, and ancient philosophy. His work has been published in journals such as the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, Critical Horizons, Childhood & Philosophy, and Angelaki.

Susi Ferrarello 

Online Presentation

Phenomenology of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood (2025)

The Phenomenology of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood is a recently published book that provides an ethical, social, and psychological investigation of the process of becoming a mother. Through a phenomenological analysis that engages with feminist philosophy, medical ethics, philosophy of care, and phenomenological psychology, I unravel the intricacies of this transformative phase of life to shed light on layers of lived experiences that impact the well-being of the woman. This book addresses the complexity of common lived-experiences characterizing this transition; the overarching period from the first to the fourth trimester, issues concerning maternal-fetal bonding, breastfeeding, PDAM, loss of identity and coming back to work. Enriched by case studies from my philosophical counseling practice, the book provides a compassionate and insightful exploration of the struggles, triumphs, and moments of self-revelation that mothers encounter in their daily lives. By exploring the heart of the maternal experience, this book shows the often-unspoken realities faced by women as they strive to balance their roles as caregivers, partners, and individuals. The book offers a powerful means for everyday reflection on early motherhood and the ethical, as well as practical, dilemmas it raises. This text explores phenomenology, ethics, feminist philosophy, and moral psychology, making it valuable for therapists and professionals interested in the complexities of pregnancy, motherhood, and women’s mental health.

Susi Ferrarello, PhD, is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at California State University, East Bay. She specializes in phenomenology, bioethics, feminist philosophy, and mental health, with a focus on perinatal care and the ethical implications of technology in healthcare. She has authored and edited several books, including Phenomenology of Pregnancy and Early Motherhood, The Ethics of Love, The Origin of Bioethics and Human Emotions and Bioethics and Technoethics. Beyond academia, she is the co-founder of NoBumpNoCare (U.S.) and Slancio (Italy), nonprofits dedicated to perinatal care and social solidarity. She actively mentors students and healthcare professionals and organizes international conferences on bioethics and philosophy. She works also as a philosophical counselor and writes for Psychology Today. 

Respondent: Tanja Staehler

Tanja Staehler is Professor of European Philosophy at the University of Sussex. Her main research areas are Plato, Hegel, Husserl, Heidegger, Levinas as well as aesthetics, phenomenology, philosophy of pregnancy and childbirth. 

Laura Jane Nanni

The Porosity of the Self: Husserl's Philosophy of Self and Personhood (2024)

The Porosity of the Self delivers an original interpretation of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology and one of the most important philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This recently published book challenges one-dimensional accounts of self and personhood that fail to capture the intricate double-sidedness of how we experience ourselves, others, and the world. The book demonstrates how Husserl's philosophy offers an important alternative account of the self as porous - a notion that emerges through a thematic reconstruction of Husserl's conceptions of embodiment, habituality, temporality, relationality, personhood, intersubjectivity, and sociality. Here, the case is made that the self should be understood as multidimensional, dynamic, and complex by highlighting its fundamentally permeable nature. The main argument of the book is that no one element of the self is experienceable in isolation, and that Husserl's understanding can equally accommodate the uniqueness of subjective experience as well as social, cultural, and historical inflections, without yielding constitutive priority to one dimension over the other. The book offers a renewed way of engaging with Husserl's philosophy and demonstrates how it can provide a rich supplementary perspective for fields such as critical phenomenology and feminist philosophy, as well as theories of self and personhood.

Dr Laura Jane Nanni holds a PhD in philosophy from UCD where she currently works with the Centre for Ethics in Public Life. She is an APPA certified philosophical counsellor, a philosophical facilitator on "Thinking Changes" project (funded by the Irish Government Department of Foreign Affairs), and a member of the "no bump no care" non-profit network. Her area of expertise is in the field of classical, critical and applied phenomenology, and her current research focuses on the embodied lived experience of childbirth and infant-maternal relations within the obstetric led, and midwife managed medical model of maternity care in Ireland.

Respondent: Timothy Mooney

Timothy Mooney is Associate Professor of Philosophy at University College Dublin. Together with Dermot Moran he edited The Phenomenology Reader (New York and London: Routledge, 2002). He has published articles on process philosophy, phenomenology and deconstruction, and has more recently become interested in the philosophy and phenomenology of embodiment. Some of his work on the latter can be found in Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception: On the Body Informed (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023). 

Sarah Pawlett Jackson

The Phenomenology of the Second-Person Plural (2025)

This book presents the case that there are forms of human interaction which should be understood as properly second-person plural. It engages with the work of Sartre, Levinas and contemporary phenomenology to show that this claim is not just about grammatical forms of address, but about the phenomenology and structure of our intersubjective experience.

While there has been plenty of recent work exploring the phenomenology of the second-person singular and the first-person plural, we have not so far seen a systematic account of the second-person plural: the I-yous or we-you. This book outlines the phenomenology of the specific structures of interlocking intersubjective reciprocity which need to be in place between multiple subjects for an interaction to be properly second-person plural. The author considers and defends her account from various possible objections – both a conceptual worry, and a range of empirical worries. These objections are shown to be misguided, and the thread that runs through them – a problematically disembodied conception of the human subject – is exposed. She proceeds to offer a positive account of the second-person plural, supported by an understanding of subjectivity as necessarily embodied and embedded in the world. This account opens an exciting path for further analyses of complex multi-person intersubjectivities in small group contexts.

The Phenomenology of the Second-Person Plural will appeal to scholars and graduate students working in phenomenology, social ontology, and the philosophy of intersubjectivity.

Sarah Pawlett Jackson is Tutor in Philosophy, Religion, and Ethics at the University of London, UK. Her published work has appeared in journals such as Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, Phenomenology and Mind, and Synthese.