BSP Podcast

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History. This episode features a presentation from Haotian Wu Abstract: Can film do phenomenology? The short answer is ‘Yes’. As Heidegger (2001: 59) writes, ‘any exhibiting of an entity as it shows itself in itself, may be called “phenomenology” with formal justification.’ In essence, ‘phenomenology is to “let us see”.’ Accordingly, film, an artform excelling at showing, exhibiting, and letting us see, is phenomenology per excellence. It is, therefore, not surprising that many people, including Merleau-Ponty (2020), claim that film is the most phenomenological medium. However, this fertile land of film as phenomenology remains largely uncultivated. This paper contributes to this gap by showing that Farwell My Concubine (Kaige Chen, 1993), a masterpiece of Chinese cinema, is a phenomenology of modern Chinese history. I argue that it shows a structure of historical experience as a repetition of an ambivalent gesture, a farewell to the past as performative identities, which is simultaneously a beckoning to the future as an authentic self-transcendence. These two aspects of the same gesture are respectively represented by Duan Xiaolou (Fengyi Zhang) and Cheng Dieyi (Leslie Cheung), two Peking opera actors. From their first-person perspective, we witness the historical upheavals of 20th-century China, which, in the film, is foregrounded by the opera ‘Farwell My Concubine’. The opera is a historical drama about an ancient warlord, Xiang Yu, played by Xiaolou, bidding farewell to his beloved concubine, Consort Yu, played by Dieyi, after losing a decisive battle. As the opera mirrors each regime transformation, the phenomenological nature of the film is laid bare: It is not about modern Chinese history per se but about how history, enacted out and suffered by the two actors’ lived bodies, manifests a common structure of experience, worthy of phenomenological articulation. Articulating this structure, this film-phenomenology paper contributes to exploring the linear and cyclical nature of the phenomenology of history. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History. This episode features a presentation from Daniele Nuccilli Abstract: In Die neue Wissenschaft vom Recht II, Husserl’s former student Wilhelm Schapp states that, “the history of humanity is the history of its works” and for this reason the relations between self, work, value, and production can be considered as “the a priori of historical science” (p. 67). Starting from this, he proposes an analysis of the historical dimension of values and their relationship to the production and development of objects of use. This analysis proposes a phenomenology of creation that aims at dismissing the static conception of essences of classical phenomenology. In In Geschichten verstrickt, this analysis is further deepened and linked to the theory of human entanglement in histories. Central to the notion of entanglement is Schapp’s conception of the primal body. By primal body he means the body of humans when they act in the everyday life-world. It is this conception of the primal body that makes it possible to conceive of humans as being intertwined with histories and carrying histories. The life-world displays traces of the histories of the past that thicken around historical events with agent subjects, individual or collective, at the center. We can get in connection with them through what Schapp calls co-entanglement. The co-entanglement can be defined as a kind of taking part in histories, projecting ourselves into the historical horizon of something that is told to us, through narratives and books, but also through things and monuments understood as works of humanity. The past in this way emerges on the horizon as a tangle of intertwining stories of our past in which we personally or our family and nation are entangled. In my paper I will analyze the relationship between body, history and life-world taking into account Schapp conception of entanglement in histories. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History. This episode features a presentation from Philip Tovey Abstract: Breverton Pond, situated on the southern edge of Exmoor in Somerset England, is commonly cited as the source of the River Tone - its origins. Rivers often have disputed origins. A second stream, rising in Elworthy, 2.6 miles West, contends to be the source of the River Tone. Problems of origin were central to Husserl's project in Experience and Judgment (EJ), where enduring objects are constituted in the flux of an ever becoming. Judgements, like rivers, have disputed origins, creating issues with the temporal fixity modernity is reliant on. Using the temporal overlaps Jay Lampert extracts from EJ, together with David Woods eco-phenomenological outline of the plexity of time as my analytical handrails, this paper reports an autoethnography of the embodied ecologies of the River Tone, walked barefoot, from source to mouth, over three consecutive days and nights. How does the River Tone ‘originate’ in experience when I put my foot in it? As the headwaters ‘overlap’ (Überschiebung) my foot now ‘depositioning’ into the streambed of historical depositions of Devonian Sandstone, how do these ecological entanglements mediate the visibility of my origins? The implications of ecophenomenology as an analytical framework coupled with autoethnography are briefly discussed in relation to how temporality features in riverine policy formulations within the UK. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History. This episode features a presentation from Bence Marosan Abstract: We, humans, are living in a world, shared with non-human beings. Throughout our entire history, we, humans, prevailingly lived according to an anthropocentric paradigm, and we related to non-humans essentially as potential resources, obstacles, or even threats. In other words, humans instinctively, or sometimes on a reflectively elaborated ideological basis, treated non-humans in objectified or instrumentalized terms. During Modernity, due to rapidly developing technologies, this anthropological stance even had increasingly catastrophic consequences, that became apparent in the 1960s, thanks to the increasing global ecological crisis, which now has features that appear to threaten even the mere physical existence and survival of the human race. In my presentation, I would like to have a closer look at this ecological crisis from the viewpoint of Husserlian phenomenology, and I will look for possible ways of solution, again, from a Husserlian perspective. Not only from a biological viewpoint, but also for a phenomenological approach, humanity appears as a subsystem of the Earth as a global ecosystem, entwined with other ecological subsystems, and partly interdependent from them. As many authors and interpreters made it clear (e.g. Erazim Kohák, Annabelle Dufourcq, Ullrich Melle), in the philosophy of Edmund Husserl – especially in his late period, in the 1930s – we can find many ecologically relevant topics. In this regard, I would like to highlight especially his conceptions concerning life and the inherent value of life in his ethical lectures (as could be read in Husserliana Volumes 28, 37, and 42). In my presentation, I aim to show how a Husserlian notion of the inherent value of life would lead to an inescapable ethical imperative to respect life in every form and try to harmonize our relationship with the other, non-human parts of the Earthly ecosystem, with which we are essentially entwined. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History. This episode features a presentation from Andréa Delestrade Abstract: Is there a possibility to think the ecological crisis through the logic of History, or is the Modern concept of ‘History’ rather driven to its end? I examine Chakrabarty’s and Merleau-Ponty’s strategies to end ‘History’ in their reflections on Nature, and I argue that if Chakrabarty’s diagnosis of the necessity to end ‘History’ to give space to ecological thinking is right, Merleau-Ponty’s strategy proves more effective, as it enables us to think the philosophical end of ‘History’ while retaining the necessity of a political ecology attentive to differentiation and domination. I first develop Chakrabarty’s insights on the exhaustion of ‘History’ as a concept, both in its Eurocentric and anti-Eurocentric variations, and the need to replace it with a negative universal History which substitutes a positive teleology (being-toward-freedom) for a negative teleology (being-toward-catastrophe), and de-centers human subjectivity and freedom in a phenomenologically empty ‘species universalism’. I then argue that evacuating the body, the possibility of phenomenological apprehension and hence of thinking particularity, while retaining a universalising teleological dynamic, leads Chakrabarty to a Eurocentric status quo, that is, an abstract universalism that flattens out the thought of difference. I finally turn to Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of Nature, and argue that it offers us a productive articulation of the philosophical experience of Nature, including in its contemporary destruction, and the political differentiation and domination at stake in this ecological crisis. I provide a phenomenological apprehension of the climate crisis, albeit a non-Eurocentric one, which would not be predicated on European or Anthropocene-like universalism, by insisting on two features of his philosophy of Nature: first, the chiasmic intertwining of Nature and History (which recasts universality as foundational); second, the necessity of institution and expression in this intertwining, which gives space to think the political condition of the climate crisis, in its sedimentation, domination, and creativity. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History. This episode features a keynote presentation from Dr Niall Keane Abstract: 'Self and Other. From Temporality to History' This talk will examine the self-other relation in phenomenological terms, looking at how a phenomenological examination of the distinct experiences of the world, both my own and the other’s, needs to account for the transition from temporal to historical understanding. While Husserl is usually accused of not having worked out the historical nature of lived experience like those found in Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, a case will be made for a more universal concept of history using Husserl’s analyses of the appearance of the other as not only accounting for the appearance of the world in its objectivity, but also for the emergence of culture and history as understandable. Such a universal concept of history will be explored insofar as it presupposes the appearance and givenness of another embodied human being, similar to myself, but over there. The other, in Husserl’s account, is hence not only the indicator of the world’s objectivity and knowability, but also marks the beginning of history and culture. The talk will conclude with an attempt tie the abovementioned concepts of culture and history, founded on the original givenness of the other to the self, to the concept of justice understood as my responsibility to get the other right. While Husserl never claims this explicitly, it will be argued that his concepts of “absolute humanity” and “the absolute meaning of History” [Erste philosophie, 506] are at bottom teleologically guided strivings for justice and self-responsibility. Biography: I have published widely in the areas of phenomenology and hermeneutics and I am co-author of The Gadamer Dictionary (Continuum, 2012) and co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics (Wiley-Blackwell, 2016). In addition to my publications on Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Michel Henry, and Hannah Arendt, I am Treasurer of the Irish Phenomenological Circle (IPC) and executive member of the editorial board at the Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology (JBSP). Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History. This episode features a keynote presentation from Prof. Darian Meacham Abstract: In 1988 the French Philosopher André Gorz published Métamorphoses du travail: Critique de la raison économique. In this book, through an engagement with Critical theory, Marxism and to a lesser extent phenomenology, Gorz sets out a critique of economic rationality and puts forward a positive programme of a “politics or time” geared towards an idea of radical autonomy as productive work outside of the industrial economy. Gorz’s work has a close relation to Ivan Illich’s theory and programme of “conviviality” published some fifteen years prior in Tools for Conviviality (1973). Illich argues for a programme of convivial technology, where he defines conviviality as autonomous and creative intercourse among persons and the intercourse of persons with their environments. In this talk, I examine the ideas of autonomy and conviviality in relation to what can be called an institutional theory of technology and the politics of time that both Gorz and Illich set out in separate ways; and ask what autonomous time and space can be carved out within an increasingly automated world of work? Biography: Darian Meacham is Professor of Practical Philosophy at Maastricht University and chair of the philosophy department. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a recording from our 2024 annual conference, Embodiment and History. This episode features a keynote presentation from Prof. Michela Summa Abstract: Various forms of engaging with history play a crucial role in shaping personal and collective identities. Rituals, anniversaries, family celebrations, monuments, and street names are all examples of how history is embedded and integrated into the fabric of everyday actions that define these identities. Consequently, the concept of history becomes intertwined with memory practices, which involve both remembering and forgetting. In recent years, debates surrounding the relationship between history, memory, and issues of identity have gained increased significance. This can be attributed to several factors, some of which are directly linked to concrete memory practices. One example is the ongoing critical examination of how certain cultures of remembrance, particularly those relating to influential figures, often overlook or disregard their involvement in authoritarian or colonial regimes. These approaches have drawn attention to the epistemic and social injustices that are deeply embedded in certain methods of transmitting and interpreting history. Furthermore, there has been a growing unease or uncanniness associated with memory practices that have been developed and partially institutionalized since the Second World War. This debate is particularly relevant to Germany and its concept of Erinnerungskultur, which has been evolving since the 1980s-1990s. While this approach is generally recognized as an unprecedented way of engaging with the past, there are recurring critical voices that emphasize what is being forgotten within this culture of remembrance or advocate for moving beyond it. Lastly, despite the rejection of teleological and eschatological narratives concerning the meaning of history, and despite scholarly critiques of using history to justify the present, such instrumentalizations still persist in contemporary discourse. My contribution will not directly address the social and political issues related to these phenomena. Instead, I aim to discuss the structural elements that characterize how we confront the past and how our relationship with the past shapes who we are. How does the formation of historical identities depend on the embodiment of memory? Why is it that we can only engage with the past through critical analysis after a significant amount of time has elapsed between generations? Does remembering the past always involve elements of forgetting? What are the factors that, at a particular moment, bring forgotten aspects to the fore? In attempting to answer these questions, I will specifically explore how different approaches to confronting the past – including attitudes of owning, ignoring, and disowning history – are connected to particular attitudes towards the present and the future. Biography: Michela Summa is a Junior Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Würzburg. She received her PhD from the University of Pavia and KU-Leuven, with a dissertation on Husserl’s phenomenology of temporal and spatial constitution. Before joining the University of Würzburg, she worked as a post-doc at the Clinic for General Psychiatry in Heidelberg from 2009 to 2015, and at the Institute for Philosophy in Würzburg from 2015 to 2018. In 2018, she also served as a guest professor for phenomenology and hermeneutics at the Institute for Philosophy in Kassel. She is the author of Spatio-temporal Intertwining: Husserl’s Transcendental Aesthetic, published in 2014 by Springer and co-editor of several volumes and special issues, including the collective volume Das Exemplarische – Orientierung für menschliches Wissen und Handeln“ (with Karl Mertens, Mentis, 2022), the special issue of the journal Human Studies on Affect, Tendency, and Drive: Perspectives on the Basic Structures of Intentionality (with Philipp Schmidt and Nicola Spano, 2024), and the Special Issue of the journal Topoi on Double Intentionality (with Martin Klein and Philipp Schmidt). She has written several articles on topics in the theory of knowledge, philosophy of mind, social philosophy, and phenomenology. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2024, co-organised with University of the West of England. The conference was held in Bristol on the theme of 'Embodiment and History'. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Abel Franco Abstract: We both perceive and evaluate aesthetically spaces with our body, in particular by (experiencing ourselves) occupying and moving in them. Unlike simply being in a space, the experience of occupying is the experience of actively filling the space with our bodily presence and mobility. Where exactly we place our body in a space, how we place it (posture, orientation), and with which motion (activity) alters our perception of that space and our aesthetic evaluation. And vice versa: our unique perception of a space also affects how we feel our body. Saying that a space is oppressive or expansive, or warm or cold, or cozy or desolate, seems to express this. Perceiving a space shows strong similarities with the experience of touch: we touch a space with our body and our body is touched by that space. This is quite different from saying that the haptic features of our physical environment (natural or built) are relevant in our perception of spaces (J. Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin, 1996). All sensible features can be said to be, not just add-ons, but integral part of that perception (cf., e.g., G. Böhme., Atmospheric Architectures: The Aesthetics of Felt Spaces, 2017): the light and colors (vision), the temperature and the textures of materials (touch), the sounds that are altered by, and fill, that space (hearing), the smells that also fill it (smell/taste). Our aesthetic evaluations of spaces not only take this—i.e. our perception of a space--into account but bring into them (a) the uniquely personal meaning we perceive in the sensible features (coziness, warmth, expansiveness) and (b) the evaluation of two types of possibilities we see in the space: (b.1) possibilities to do what is significant for us and, among these, (b.2) possibilities that can be qualitatively enhanced (i.e. in their felt quality) by that space (“it feels better to read in the balcony”). We, thus, evaluate spaces aesthetically, not only by touching them with our body—or being touched by them--but also projecting on them (touching them with?) our ideal of life. Our ideal of life explains our perception of significance and meaningfulness in the (embodied) activities and ways of filling the space (occupying). Reading by the fire while it rains and reading under the sun in the park are experiences of reading altered in different ways by the very experience of occupying that particular space, in a particular way, and at this moment of our life. Our (changing) ideal of life makes our aesthetic choices deeply personal and dependent on the very present moment of our life. And, thus, an aesthetically preferable space reveals itself as the appropriate fit of activity, moment-in-our-life and (perceived) space. It is a space where, not only our body but our life fits well--or fits better. Biography: Abel B. Franco holds a M.A. in History (1998) from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY); a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the University of Salamanca (1999) and a Ph.D. in History and Philosophy of Science (2006) from the University of Pittsburgh (EE.UU). He has taught in different CUNY campuses, at the University of Pittsburgh and, since 2006, at California State University, Northridge (CSUN) where he is currently a Professor in the Philosophy Department. He has written, given talks and published, mainly on the History of Natural Philosophy (especially Middle Ages and 17th century), on the History of Philosophy (especially the 17th century and, in particular, Descartes), on the History and Philosophy of Mind (especially emotions), and on Aesthetics (especially the relation between emotions and art, in the Baroque and in contemporary debates on philosophy of architecture and philosophy of fiction). His most recent articles are “Our Everyday Aesthetic Evaluations of Architecture” (_British Journal of Aesthetics_, 2019) and "The Aesthetic Value of Film" (_Journal of Aesthetic Education_, forthcoming). Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Michal Lipták Abstract: Adorno always maintained that "new music"—his term for mostly atonal, avant-garde music—was not just yet another musical school within the history of music which would gradually settle down and develop its own idioms, but that it was unique in the history of music and that it introduces a certain rift—"an abrupt, qualitative leap"—due to which it would never settle down. He developed this understanding of avant-garde music in writings that, at the same time, combine a philosophy of music, a sociology of music, and an engaged music criticism addressing contemporary works, whereby this criticism was never value neutral. In this paper, I demonstrate that phenomenology—despite Adorno's explicit but misplaced distaste for it—is well disposed to ground this understanding; in doing so, I use notions developed in general phenomenology and in "classic" texts of phenomenological aesthetics, such as notion of Typik in Husserl, notions of schemata and historical a priori in Dufrenne, or conception of a schematic work in Ingarden. Interpreting Adorno phenomenologically allows us to confirm the profound rift between atonal avant-garde music and the rest of music that Adorno identified, and to disclose it more precisely, describing phenomenologically how such music places unnatural demands on us, while it simultaneously stimulates us. In return, phenomenology of music itself benefits from phenomenological absorption of Adorno's philosophy of music, too. Such absorption helps phenomenology to engage critically with contemporary musical works and thereby test the thesis of the profound rift on the current atonal avant-garde works; this approach also helps to develop criteria to evaluate the avant-garde works. Finally, this rift can be interpreted as a defining feature of avant-garde music, and therefore contribute to discussions about definition of avant-garde music, which are still unsettled in musicological literature. Biography: Michal Lipták is a researcher at the Institute of Philosophy of Slovak Academy of Sciences. He defended and published his dissertation on aesthetics of Husserl and Ingarden, and his current research involves Husserlian phenomenology, phenomenology of art (and music in particular), structuralism and post-structuralism, political philosophy including critical phenomenology, Hegelianism, Marxism and post-Marxism, philosophy of new media, and philosophy of law. He regularly reviews contemporary classical music for Slovak cultural magazines. In addition to philosophy, he also studied law and works as an attorney. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Anna Petronella Foultier Abstract: In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty introduces the notion of “anthropological spatiality” – various spatial levels related to the manner that we project the world, and that are not connected through geometrical space where each part is interchangeable, but rather through a more primordial, existential space where we are anchored as natural subjects. The experience of the dreamer, the schizophrenic or the person under influence from mescaline give examples of anthropological spatialities. Another such spatiality is said to be opened by “aesthetic perception” (1945, 333) – such as that of painting or of dance – and I will accordingly term it aesthetic spatiality. The spatiality of dance is “without goals or directions … the subject and its world are no longer opposed” (1945, 333), in a similar way that a painting is not “at the same place” as the canvas or the cracks on the wall of the cave. Now, the spatiality of a hallucinating or schizophrenic person seems available only to the subject doing the projection, while an aesthetic spatiality must be intersubjectively available: art only makes sense a cultural and shareable phenomenon. How, then, does the dancer, for example, constitute a form of spatiality that is valid for others? To resolve this problem, I will first appeal to Merleau-Ponty’s idea that the body is “the first cultural object” (1945, 401) and thus already in itself intersubjectively given with cultural meanings. Our body has, moreover, an “emblematic value”, so that our bodily positions, emotions and desires have a symbolic relation to one another (1945, 329). Finally, the characterisation of the spatiality of dance will be amended, and described, not as being “without goals or directions”, but with often unpredictable direction and as its own goal: one of the tasks of dance is to understand the very dynamics of bodily movement itself. Biography: Anna Petronella Foultier is a Senior Lecturer in philosophy at Umeå University. Her present research is focused on the dancer’s experience and aesthetic know-how. She has published in journals such as Hypatia, JSBP, Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, Chiasmi international and Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, and coedited the anthology Material of Movement and Thought: Reflections on the Dancer’s Practice and Corporeality, with Cecilia Roos (2013). Foultier also works as a translator of philosophy and fiction, and has translated Beauvoir, Derrida, Foucault, Kristeva, Kundera, Merleau-Ponty, Nora and many others into Swedish. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Jodie Russell Abstract: In this talk, I will explore the implications that our interpretive capacities have for experiences of mental disorder. The traditional view, as I call it, describes mental disorder as a dysfunction of the individual, whether that be in the brain, or in body-world interactions (de Haan 2020). By looking at the interaction between our folk-psychological tools for social understanding and the self, we see that mental disorders have an importantly intrapersonal (as well as interpersonal) dimension which should be brought forth front and centre. My thesis develops from an understanding of what it means for human beings to be ‘self-interpreting animals’ (Taylor 1985), drawn from the mind-shaping literature (Andrews 2015a, 2015b; McGreer 2007, 2015; Mameli 2001; Zawidzki 2008, 2016). Under this view, “What determines one’s being human is the image one adopts.” (Heschel 1965, p.8). Our folk-psychological concepts are inherently normative under the mind-shaping view and when applied to the self, we shape our behaviour in norm-conforming ways so we can be understandable to others. I argue that, while the ‘self-understanding as self-shaping’ thesis from Zawidzki (2016) and Andrews (2015b) is compelling as it explains the consistency and inconsistency of the self, the mechanisms at play create significant problems for individuals with mental disorders. Namely, it entails that these individuals may be overburdened to be understandable to others and themselves, feeling compelled to make sense of the inconsistent and incoherent self-experiences. This is troubling when individuals lack folk-psychological tools to make sense of experiences such as in cases of hermeneutical injustice (Ritunnano, 2022). This suggest to me new tactics in alleviating the suffering of individuals with distressing pathological experiences. Biography: I’m a 3rd year, SGSAH-funded philosophy PhD student interested in the intersection of mind and medicine. My research began with a deep dissatisfaction to our current approach and concepts of mental disorder and so I develop my project with the intention of developing a concept of mental disorder that both better captures the experiences of individuals and does better work for us politically and socially by reducing stigma and allowing people more agency in how they treated and understood. As such, I explore and am interested in all aspects of phenomenology of illness, from embodiment to agency, language and emotions. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Andrew Turk Abstract: This presentation discusses more than twenty years of transdisciplinary research with geographers, linguists, philosophers and collaborators from other disciplines. This research into landscape language (ethnophysiography) utilised applied and critical phenomenological methods to investigate practical, embodied, affective and engaged modes of dwelling which have continued for tens of thousands of years. This included the authors (second) PhD investigation and dissertation: Understanding Modes of Dwelling: A Transdisciplinary Approach to Phenomenology of Landscape (Murdoch University, Western Australia). A transdisciplinary approach, using engaged phenomenology as the over-arching meta-paradigm, was operationalised via a detailed case study and data analysis methodology, including phenomenography and other hermeneutic methods. Such collaborative research with indigenous peoples requires comprehensive ethical considerations, negotiations and protocols, involving appropriate engagement with both female and male participants. The research produced an explanatory model of factors relevant to differences in relationships with landscape, as place, (Ethnophysiography Descriptive Model) and identified language ontologies represented in landscape terms and toponyms (placenames). Case studies with Australian Indigenous language communities investigated their embodied relationships with landscape, as ‘taskscape’. Some language group members continue traditional practices; ceremonies at sacred sites, hunting, gathering and caring for ‘country’. The research recognised the central importance of their social/cultural/spiritual holistic system called (T)Jukurrpa in the central and western desert areas and other names in different languages (e.g. Bidarra Law in Yindjibarndi). This integrates social organisation, ethics and spirituality, intimately linking each specific language group to their ‘country’. It is inadequately termed ‘The Dreaming’ in English. This collaborative investigation facilitated interpretation of relationships with landscape in terms of commensurability with Heideggerian concepts of ‘care’, ‘authenticity’ and ‘topology’, while addressing ‘Eurocentrism’. Two case studies produced a Pictorial Dictionary of Landscape Terms for Yindjibarndi and for Manyjilyjarra Aboriginal languages. These dictionaries assist in language preservation, community cohesion and practical caring for ‘country’ by indigenous ranger teams. Biography: Andrew Turk has degrees in Surveying, Applied Science (Cartography), Arts (Psychology/Philosophy), PhD [1992 - Melbourne University] and second PhD [2020 - Murdoch University]. In the 1970s and 1980s he worked for the Australian Government producing topographic maps, involving surveying fieldwork in remote areas (including Antarctica) and development of digital-mapping and GIS. In 1983 he commenced research/teaching at Melbourne University. From 1993 Andrew taught human factors aspects of Information Systems at Murdoch University and researched Native Title, community development and cultural information with Aboriginal communities. Since 2000 he has conducted transdisciplinary research into cultural/linguistic aspects of landscape (ethnophysiography) using phenomenology methods. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 continues with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Janko Nešić Abstract: Autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is a psychopathological condition characterized by persistent deficits in social interaction, social communication and restricted, repetitive patterns of behaviour and interests (APA 2013). To build an integrative, ecological-enactive account of autism, I propose we should endorse the skilled intentionality framework (SIF; Rietveld, Denys, & van Westen 2018). SIF connects a number of disciplines - ecological psychology (landscape of affordances), phenomenology (selective openness to and relevance of affordances, optimal grip), emotion psychology (states of action-readiness), and embodied neurodynamics (self-organizing affordance-related states of action-readiness). In SIF, embodied cognition is understood as skilled engagement with affordances (possibilities for action) in sociomaterial environment of the ecological niche by which an individual tends toward the optimal grip. An important part of SIF is an ecological-enactive interpretation of the free energy principle and predictive processing (Bruineberg and Rietveld 2014). Predictive processing accounts point out that in ASD too much precision is assigned to prediction errors (Van de Cruys et al. 2014; Constant et al. 2020; Miller et al. 2022). Autistics suffer from suboptimal generative models that do not reach high levels of abstraction and generality (they have “overfitted” models). I will show that in SIF`s terms, autistic patterns of action-readiness pick out very specific solicitations in the environment and achieve optimal grip only in well-known situations and specifically constructed niches. They make interventions in the environment with reliable cue-effect relations. Autistic individuals lack the openness (pathological embodiment) needed to be responsive to the relevant affordances, pilling up habits and skills that are rigidly applied without adjustment to the changing environment. I argue that autistic persons favour social environments that increase predictability through ritual behaviour and routines (XXX et al. 2022) and design monotonous landscapes of affordances. Biography: I am a junior postdoctoral researcher on The Sciences of the Origin Project (University of Oxford project ‘New Horizons for Science and Religion in Central and Eastern Europe’ and John Templeton Foundation) at the Institute for Philosophy (Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade). My research is located at the intersection of Philosophy of Mind, Phenomenology, and Philosophy of Psychiatry. I focus on studying pathologies of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in autism spectrum disorder and building an integrative approach to autistic disturbances that combines phenomenological, enactivist, ecological and neuroscientific (predictive processing /free energy principle) perspectives. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 9 begins with a presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Natalia Burakowska & Danielle Petherbridge Abstract: The notions of what constitutes self and personhood are philosophically disputed, with different accounts focusing on narrative construction, others on a pure identity pole, or different phenomenological accounts pointing to a minimal or experiential notion of self in contrast to personhood, which includes habitual, social and culture aspects. In this paper, we problematise these various accounts based on the consequences for persons with neurological illnesses, such as dementia. The paper, however, has a more important aim. We draw on research arising out of engaged phenomenological workshops conducted with carers and persons with dementia to investigate the implications of assumptions about what constitutes the self and personhood in health care settings. In recent years, the ‘person-centred’ approach to dementia, first developed by Tom Kitwood (1997), has gained prominence within healthcare settings. However, we identify ways in which the person-centred approach to dementia is limited and potentially problematic. In many settings, it relies on a narrative construction of personhood, whether prior to memory loss or reconstructed from family members (McGreevy, 2015). We suggest persons with dementia should be considered to maintain personhood even after the onset of memory loss or seeming loss of narrative and linguistic capacities. We reflect on the ways in which our engaged phenomenological workshops have informed new understandings of: i) persons with dementia as dynamic and developing persons capable of expressing themselves in embodied ways; ii) the ramifications of defining what constitutes persons in the context of dementia in terms of narrative selves iii) how such reassessments might inform the practice of carers. This research will demonstrate that a shift away from understanding persons merely as narrative constructions and equipping carers with an embodied understanding of personhood can shift some of the power and dignity back to the patient. Biography: Natalia Burakowska is a PhD student in Philosophy at University College Dublin and an Irish Research Council postgraduate scholar. She works in the areas of phenomenology, philosophy of mind and applied philosophy. Her doctoral work is focused on a phenomenological approach to dementia that conceptualises it as both a cognitive and bodily condition, taking account of the lived experience of dementia, vulnerability and forms of ethical responsiveness and care. Danielle Petherbridge is Ass. Professor in Philosophy at University College Dublin. Her primary research interests include phenomenology and social philosophy, medical humanities and ethics. She writes in the area of phenomenology and illness, critical phenomenology, and social philosophy. She is currently working on a research project on phenomenological approaches to dementia, and is PI of an Irish Research Council New Foundations funded project BodyDementia. She is a team member of the EU Funded Horizon 2020 grant Policy, Expertise and Trust (PERITIA) and co-founder of Health, Ethics and Narrative Ireland. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 concludes with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern. This episode features a presentation from Emily Hughes Abstract: 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. Biography: 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. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern. This episode features a presentation from Alessandro Anzà Abstract: 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. Biography: 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. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern. This episode features a presentation from Ileana Bortun Abstract: 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. Biography: 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”. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern. This episode features a presentation from David Deamer Abstract: 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 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). Biography: 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. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern. This episode features a presentation from J. Reese Faust Abstract: 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.” Biography: 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. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/