NoSP2023 Abstracts

THURSDAY April 27^th

We, us and them

Lucia Angelino: Questioning the us vs them opposition with Freud and Waldenfels

“Us vs them” - this dichotomous opposition that dominates social political philosophy - is arguably among the most pressing issues today in societies and peoples, in cultures and religions and among them.
My aim is not only to question the opposition it hides - the distinction, honored by Carl Schmitt, of "friend-enemy" (Freund/Freind), familiar/stranger - but also, if not more importantly, to challenge its presumed dichotomous nature.

By drawing inspiration from both psychoanalysis and phenomenology, I would like to argue that the intimist rehabilitation of the stranger carried by the joint forces of Freud's psychoanalysis (Freud, Sigmund, (1985), L’inquiétante étrangeté et autres essais, dans Essais de psychanalyse appliquée) and the phenomenology of the stranger developed by B. Waldenfels contributes to overcoming this opposition. With the Freudian notion of unconscious (inquiétante etrangété) on the one hand, and the intertwining (Ineinander) between the proper and the foreign brought to light by phenomenology (Husserl, Waldenfles, Merleau-Ponty, Schütz, Plessner), on the other hand, one could argue that the involution of the stranger in the psyche loses its pathological aspect and integrates within the presumed unity of men an otherness, which becomes an integral part of us. From now on, the foreigner is neither a race nor a nation. The stranger is neither magnified, nor banished. Strangeness begins in us and not outside of us. Thus, relocated inside ourselves, strangeness becomes the very condition of our ethical openness to others and provides the foundation for an “inclusive” rather than “exclusive” “we”.

Tristan Hedges: 'We' and 'Us': The power of the Third for the first-person plural

How one comes to experience something from the first-person plural rather than the first-person singular is a central object of phenomenological study. Most discussions have focused on the relations between the I, the You, and the We, with the 'we' often treated as synonymous to the first-person plural. However, there is a tendency within phenomenology to limit the scope of analysis to collective experiences in face-to-face encounters or to collective or shared emotive experiences. In this paper, I do not wish to contend these accounts of the 'we'. Instead, I aim to demonstrate how they are not exhaustive of first-person plural experiences as such. Following Sartre, I argue for a phenomenological distinction between an experience of being part of a 'we' compared to an experience of being part of an 'us'. To have a 'we-experience' there must be a plurality of (unified) subjects experiencing a common object such that the object is experienced as ours. For an us-experience, I argue that the condition for unification is far less demanding, and there must be the additional experiential salience of 'the Third'. I take the constitutive significance of the Third from Sartrean social ontology – particularly his discussions of the 'us-object' and 'the series' – and complement it with contemporary discussions on social identity. Within this paper I outline two forms of us-experiences which are constitutively dependent on the Third: (1) the experience of being grouped and (2) the experience of seriality. These two types of collective experience illuminate the benefit of seriously considering the constitutive role of the Third for the first-person plural; namely, in how it helps us make sense of collective experiences which are spatially dispersed, polyadic, involving relations of power, and the conferral of identities.

Theodor Rolfsen and Espen Dahl: Phenomenology of pain and pleasure – Henry and Levinas

While many have explored relation between Levinas and Henry in relation to the theological turn in French phenomenology, little attention has been paid to the convergence of their analyses regarding the affectivity of pain and pleasure. Both argue that pleasure and pain cannot be derived from our intentional relation to the world, and thus constitutes a blind spot in much phenomenology.

Henry and Levinas do, however, disagree with regards to the role of externality. For Henry, pain and pleasure do not have any reference to external causes or circumstances, but must be led back to the basic auto-affection that comes with immanent life as such. While pain and pleasure have distinct tonality, they share the same essence. It is by the inner movement of their common essence that our affective life alternates between pleasure and pain.

We propose that Levinas’ alternative take on pleasure and pain comprise resources for criticizing Henry’s view. Although Levinas does not identify sensibility with transcendence, he also insists that the phenomenality of pleasure consists in “living from” an external world. This irreducible externality is even more prominent in Levinas’ account of pain. He agrees with Henry that suffering pain means that there is no escape – but precisely no escape from the sting of externality that haunts us as pain. Pain is the sensational “other” that invades us and yet cannot be integrated. Since Henry has deprived himself of any reference to such externality, it is hard to see how he can shed light on the aversive dimension of pain. We will eventually suggest that Henry’s analysis, despite his efforts, fails at accounting for the heterogeneity between pain and pleasure, and that Levinas’ analysis, due to its reference to externality, is able to do so.

Love and desire 

Rita Niineste: Three types of intersubjectivity in sexual experiences

Empathy is a fundamental notion in Husserlian philosophy of intersubjectivity (Kern 2018). As such, it forms an almost natural starting point for phenomenological analyses of sexuality. However, Husserl has been shown to distinguish between three kinds of intersubjectivity (Zahavi 1996) of which only the first one – i.e., the concrete bodily mediated encounter with the other – is directly related to empathy. In addition, Husserl discusses co-subjectivity or open intersubjectivity that does not involve a bodily interaction but is already implied in every face- to-face encounter, functioning as an apperceptive horizon of possible experience. The third concerns the individual as a member of an anonymous community that shares a variable set of conventions, models and patterns handed down through language, customs, and traditions. I will apply Husserl's three-fold structure of intersubjectivity to an analysis of everyday sexual experiences. In empathy-based understandings of sexuality, true sexual love can be seen as something more fundamental than shared sexual pleasure. I will argue that in such accounts mutual enjoyment is actually pre-supposed and therefore cannot be considered less fundamental than any other aspects that can emerge only if the condition of reciprocity in pleasure is met with. Consequently, I contend that the two other types – the open intersubjectivity responsible for the creation of horizons of expectation, and the normative influence of the anonymous community – are at least equally important, as they can be shown to play a decisive role not only in the subject's likelihood to experience sexual pleasure in partnered sex but also to make sense of themselves as a sexual being.  

Milla Rantala: Mutual Transformation: The Dynamic Structure of an Intimate Love Relationship

How could we describe being in an intimate love relationship in the context of phenomenology and ethics? In the exploration of this question, I use Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of human existence, intercorporeality, and chiasm. In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty argues that human existence is a transformative phenomenon. In his late philosophy, he argues for the ontological, chiasmic structure of the intersubjective relation. I investigate the consequences of these arguments in the case of an intimate love relationship. I propose the concept of mutual transformation as an ethical trajectory for being in an intimate love relationship.

I argue that being in an intimate love relationship is optimally a shared situation of mutual transformation. Following Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological method, I will analyze mutual transformation as an ontological and existential structure. My hypothesis is that ontologically, mutual transformation is the dynamic structure of a chiasmic relationship that allows for the differentiation, encroachment, and identity-formation of its parties. Existentially, mutual transformation is the lived dynamic of a bodily and personally shared situation, namely, the intimate love relationship.

 As I suggest that an intimate love relationship is optimally a shared situation of mutual transformation, I will also discuss the deviations from this dynamic, intercorporeal exchange model. These are such intimate relationships that do not provide the locus for mutually experienced transformation, for example the cases of negligence and mental or physical abuse. The definition in progress of an intimate love relationship covers at least relationships between adults and parents and their children. Borrowing the concept from Charles Taylor, I hold that intimate love relationships are identity-forming and as such existentially and ethically important. It is key to investigate the ontological and existential structure of these relationships in order to be able to think about them ethically.

Joni P. Puranen: Toward an ontology of (ex-) tending bodies, with Jean-Luc Nancy’s ecstatic desire

How does it feel to (at-) tend1 toward something? Be that a rock, lizard or maybe a forehead. Or a textual body: dots, letters, words and sentences spread across a surface, verba extra verba, only to be interrupted by a daydream, pleasurable at first, but then we notice that our reading was surreptitiously interrupted. How about tending to a philosophical idea, maybe the union between thought and body: thought out silently, or out loud, written down with precise words and sentences, repeated in different variations. What exactly lifts up and maintains (at-) tentional tension? Who experiences “acts” of tending toward? Should we think of tending to as a “phenomena” or, rather, as something we exist “with” or “according to”? How does (ex-) tending determine our being-toward-the-world (être-au-monde); our caring (Sorge), finite and fragile, sensitive, weighty, weighting, quasi-mineral “being a body”, which takes place always, already and each time, outside “ourselves”.

I argue that we can study our infinitely finite acts of approaching, choosing, valuing, caring and, ontologically speaking, of being-toward (être-á) some details, zones, singulars and wholes over others, if we explicate how we (ex-) tend to things as extended and exposed bodies. With the notion of desire (désir) we can explicate our bodily existence in terms of how we know and feel ourselves as ex- tending to things. Pleasure (plaisir, joui; pleasure, delight, joy, enjoyment) can further elucidate how a tending “someone” always senses-herself-sensing (-herself) when she desires, touches, listens, feels or thinks of anything or anyone. Suffering (douleur; suffering, pain) can explicate bodily being in terms of its fragility. In all senses of (con-) tact, as (spatially and temporally) extended bodily beings, we are often encroached, intruded, offended, cut off and into, removed and hurt by things, situations, bodies, persons and ailments weighing, pressing and touching us in excess.

Movement and Dance

Anna Petronella Foultier: Affectivity in the artistic experience of dance

In this paper, I will examine the role that affectivity plays in the experience and appreciation of dance, drawing on the theory of the scaffolded mind (Sterelny 2010), developed by Giovanna Colombetti and Joel Krueger (e.g. Colombetti & Krueger 2015, Colombetti 2017a, 2017b) into a theory of scaffolded affectivity (where affectivity includes emotions, feelings, moods, and motivational states). Applying this account of affectivity to the appreciation of art, I will argue, can help understanding the role that our affective life plays in artistic practice, without the usual quandaries of expressive theories of art (for a summary, see Neill 2005). While aesthetic theories of emotion commonly see artistic value as related either to the emotion expressed by the artist in the artwork, or the emotion evoked by the artwork in the audience, or both, this view of affectivity understands affects not as internal states but as hybrid processes encompassing organic states of the subject, material objects (such as clothes, cars, handbags, nature, music, cinemas) and sometimes other people, animals etc. It is thus an externalist theory, describing affective states as involving “the active manipulation of the world” (Colombetti et al. 2015, 1160; italics in text), where parts of the world serve to regulate moods, to articulate and sometimes elicit emotions. I will explore these ideas along two dimensions. Firstly, drawing on earlier work (anonymised 2021, 2022), I will examine the role that the dancer’s body – her artistic instrument – plays as an affective resource in her artistic and performative practice. Secondly, I will briefly consider a choreographic work by Israeli choreographer Sharon Eyal, Untitled Black, to see how an analysis of this piece as a vehicle of affective processes for the audience can clarify its artistic value.

Susanne Ravn: Merleau-Ponty and improvisation: reconsidering the optimal grip in movement-driven practices.

In phenomenological accounts of sports, dance, and martial art activities, the notion of optimal grip is often used to describe how a felt sense of equilibrium tells the athlete if they deviate from the optimal course of action. The notion of optimal grip is thereby used to favor progressive accounts of developing skills and expertise. However, several movement-driven activities focus on practitioners’ explorative and improvisational engagement and do not resonate the enculturated ideas of progression that typically characterize sportive performances. Fighting Monkey present an interesting case as they form part of a counterculture of activities confronting both performative oriented training paradigms as well as physiological based directions reducing movement to countable exercises. Furthermore, they continuously develop different kinds of explorative and playful activities, using between others obstructive approaches, task based or guided improvisation often in combination with different kinds of materialities and tools (e.g., sand and clay).

In this presentation I investigate phenomenological nuances of the optimal grip by analyzing the practices of Fighting Monkey. Methodologically the analysis integrates phenomenology and short-term ethnographical fieldwork, including auto-ethnographical approaches, participant observations and formal interviews. I argue that we should distinguish between optimal grip as characterizing actions where practitioners seek some kind and degree of surefooted mastery and a more basic form of optimal grip addressing our perceptual involvement in the world. Aligned with Merleau-Ponty’s work, this basic form of optimal grip describes a built-in capacity or tendency of our perception –  giving it direction. The case of Fighting Monkey invites for considering optimal grip in movement-driven explorations aiming at exposing practitioners’ world involvement. The analysis specifically indicates how these activities facilitate experiences of the world reaching back and “gripping” the practitioner moving, and how the optimal grip provides ongoing resources that underlies the practitioners’ ability to negotiate new and unpredictable situations.

Jan Halák: How intentionality matters: a phenomenological account of motor learning and rehabilitation

On the traditional scientific account of motor learning, typically defended by sport psychology and mechanistic physiotherapy, a bodily skill is achieved by mechanical repetition which gradually brings our physical behavior into conformity with a mentally (or neurally) possessed “model”. More sophisticated versions of this theory suggest that the “model” used in the execution of skilful behavior must be “predictive” and continually readjusted according to the sensory feedback. However, similar representationalist accounts of learning have been challenged with reference to the ideas developed by ecological psychology, enactivism, and phenomenology. From this latter perspective, motor skill should be understood as an intangible link between environmental (material and social) structures and intentional acts. Correspondingly, skill incorporation seems to require variable field-dependent practice rather than mental (or neural) processing combined with mechanical repetition. Building on these and similar approaches, I argue that bodily learning is best understood as the development of a capacity for transposing one’s behavior across varations within the body and the environment. As demonstrated by Merleau-Ponty’s well-known example of the organ player, acquiring a bodily skill is not best explained as becoming able to carry out a precise sequence of behavior conform to a model. Rather, it involves becoming capable to flexibly vary and differentiate one’s behaviors while maintaining an intentional (i.e. meaningful) relationship with the environment. I argue that this relational account helps us challenge mechanistic and functional universalism in health contexts. Specific bodily conditions (in particular disabilities) need not be superimposed by supposedly “correct” bodily behavior models in order to be optimized, but rather find a way to use their specifically limited physical capacities through increasing the varability of intentional relations. The theory will be demonstrated on examples taken from medical contexts (physiotherapy, rehabilitaiton) and expert skill acquisition (sport, dance).

World, style and other

Emanuele Soldinger: Phenomenology: Sense Data in Empiriocriticism and the Life-World in Husserl

In the proposed paper I would like to address the topic of the sensible in its role at the historical beginning of the phenomenological theme of the ‘natural world’, pointing at the relation between the positivistic thought of Ernst Mach and Richard Avenarius, and the phenomenological topic of the life-world. This topic originated from Husserl’s critical reception of Empiriocriticism and was influenced by Avenarius also in Husserl’s later meditation.

Avenarius played in fact an important role for the development of Husserl’s concept of the life- world, since this can be recognized as an evolution of his earlier concept of the ‘natural world’ or ‘world of the natural attitude’, which was developed under the direct influence of Avenarius’ ‘natural world concept’ around 1910; a further influence of Avenarius – in particular on the later Husserlian concept of an ‘epoché in respect to the objective sciences’ that appears in the Crisis – can be proven on the basis of Husserl’s writings and manuscripts from the 1920s.

I will first sketch the theme of the ‘natural world concept’ in Avenarius (and Mach) focusing on its connection with the topic of the sensible. I will then point out Husserl’s positive remarks on these authors, which he recognized as precursors Phenomenology and of its method – especially on their descriptive approach to the ‘natural world’ and their critique of materialism and of its devaluation of sense data (for example of perceived colors, sounds, heat etc.). Furthermore, I will address the phases of Husserl’s reception of these authors which influenced the concept of the life-world and its genesis. I will finally sketch Husserl’s main points of critique of this first, positivistic characterization of the ‘natural world’, which can be recognized especially in its naturalistic presuppositions and in its rootedness in modern Empiricism.

Juho Hotanen: Merleau-Ponty’s “Natural World” and the Diversity of Styles

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty demonstrates that sensory experience can be understood against the constant meaningful background that he calls the “natural world.” This natural world is anonymous existence and it works as the counterpart of the body schema, bodily understanding, and habituality. He famously writes that the natural world is “the style of all styles.” From here, it has been argued that Merleau-Ponty presupposes an unchangeable and universal source of meaning that unites the different singular bodily perspectives. I will argue against this view. Merleau-Ponty explains that the natural world is not something that we can fully exhaust: it remains open and incomplete. The world is not only constant and continuous but must be understood also as temporal and changing. My suggestion is that instead of an overarching universal or a priori transcendentality that would give a certain particular style to every experience, the world is the universal diversity of styles, the differentiation of styles. I will argue that there is no unchanging norm for sensory experience, only the necessity to have a background and a world which means a tradition and a past.

Alexandru Bejinariu: Sensations of Foreignness

This paper investigates the sensory structures of alien-experience (Fremderfahrung) that account for the transformation of the fundamental experience of the other self into an experience of the foreigner. How does the other appear in our experience as a foreigner? How do certain odors, visual or tactile impressions not only constitute another body (Leib) but also come forth as foreign or even as defining for a foreign group? To elaborate these questions, I first draw on Husserl’s early theory of alien-experience (1901–1909) and discuss the role of sensations in the context of his evolving conception of the content-apperception scheme. This sheds new light on the structural function of sensations in the experience of empathy and, as I argue, reveals an important isomorphism with the higher-level cultural constitution of foreignness.

Although we never experience other minds directly in adequate perception, Husserl argues that we still have intuitive access to other selves through what is originary given in our sense perception, namely their body. This originary perceptive givenness, I contend, is also central for the constitution of the ‘genuine inaccessibility’ (Hua 15, 631) of alien-worlds (Fremdwelten) that are presentified as such through what can be called ‘sensations of foreignness.’ Immanently present in consciousness, they are not mere parts of acts but complex intentional structures that challenge passively acquired cultural typifications. By considering recent research on the sensory perceptual experience of refugee camps or ethnic city neighborhoods, the second part of this paper elaborates a phenomenological analysis of the sensations of foreignness showing how they make possible and structure the experience of alien-worlds. Highlighting this structural continuity with the primordial level of individual empathy—which accounts for alien-experience without sacrificing its essential alienness—reveals that Husserl’s account of foreign cultures avoids ultimately circumscribing alienness to the home-world.

Self and normativity

Martina Properzi: Normativity and the Minimal Self

Since the half of the XX century, subjectivity like free will, personhood and similar originally philosophical subject matters turned into an interdisciplinary topic. The development of brain imaging techniques and the parallel increase of research in cognitive and behavioural neurosciences as well as in other scientific disciplines (e.g., psychology and psychopathology) have furnished not only a great amount of empirical data but also new theoretical and conceptual frameworks for interpreting the self beyond traditional philosophical accounts, such as the impactful Cartesian substantialist theory. In such an interdisciplinary context, subjectivity revealed several different aspects – some authors more radically have spoken of several selves (Strawson 1999). The minimal self is just one aspect of subjectivity. It coincides with a pre-reflective sense of oneself as differentiated from other entities in the world (Bermúdez 2018). Classical self-studies have demonstrated that the phenomenal structures of the minimal self involved basic forms of embodiment (Gallagher 2000). As such, they have been radically distinguished from higher-level kinds of bodily subjectivity shaped by intersubjective dynamics and sociocultural norms. However, recent research proved that normativity is a core component of the minimal self and of basic kinds of human embodiment (De Preester and Tsakiris 2009). This contribution aims at scrutinising the experiential sphere of affectivity related to the minimal self, starting from updated scientific evidence (Properzi 2021). The thesis that will be stressed is that the interplay between minimality and normativity brought to light by contemporary self-studies implies the rejection of a basic tenant of the traditional phenomenology of human affectivity, namely the principle of association. On this basis, this contribution argues for a shift towards a principle of dissociation, an early formulation of which may be found in the work of the Munich phenomenologist Max Scheler (Properzi 2018).1

1 More precisely, two Schelerian texts dating back respectively to 1908-1909 and 1916 are relevant for the present purpose (Scheler 1975; 1993).

Maxime Doyon: Perceptual Plasticity and Normativity

Over the course of a lifetime, our senses undergo all kinds of transformations, alterations, and changes via plasticity. These long-term changes – which are due to various factors, including genetics, growth, maturation, learning, interpersonal relations, environmental transactions, intersensory interactions, aging, etc. – impact how we perceive things. The resulting transformation of perceptual experience is what I refer to as ‘perceptual plasticity.’ While psychologists and philosophers overwhelmingly agree that these changes normally occur to promote perception in the sense of optimizing it, how exactly these transformations are reflected in the phenomenology remains an underexplored field of research. My aims to contribute to fill in this gap by analyzing perceptual plasticity in normative terms.

I proceed from three specific angles.

First, I explore perceptual plasticity as resulting from perceptual learning. According to Connolly (2019), there are three kinds of perceptual changes due to learning: attentional weighting, unitization, and differentiation. After a brief explanation of these distinctions, I show the sense in which perceptual learning is a norm-guided practice or a success term. While my view is fully compatible with Connolly’s, I argue that mine is better equipped to explain the phenomenology in all three modes of learning. I make my case by analyzing the so-called phenomenon of ‘memory color’ (Hering 1920, Macpherson 2012, Siegel 2017).

In section two, I will, drawing this time both in the phenomenological (Merleau-Ponty 1945) and enactivist repertoires (Gallagher 2005, Fuchs 2017), target plasticity from a more explicitly embodied perspective, and show how acquiring a skill and developing bodily habits bring about perceptual changes through a reconfiguration of the body schema. The argument I develop here is that the kind of brain and bodily transformations responsible for these changes follow normative patterns in the sense of optimizing or normalizing it.

If time allows, I will conclude with an argument to the effect that cases of plasticity that result from processes of compensation (Bach-y-Rita 2003) and adaptation (Noë 2009) to cope for the loss or malfunctioning of a sense can be analyzed in similar ways, i.e., as following normative patterns geared toward optimality and/or normality.

Sarah Bloem: Neurodiversity and normativity in phenomenological accounts of autistic sensory experience

In this presentation, I critically evaluate phenomenological accounts of autism as a disturbed form of intersubjectivity, by bringing them in dialogue with the neurodiversity movement. Thomas Fuchs’ and Hanne de Jaegher’s enactive accounts of autism offer a unified account of various dimensions of experience that remain isolated in certain neurocognitivist accounts of autism, namely that of sensory, social and linguistic experience. In some ways, however, these phenomenological accounts of autism still subscribe to taken-for-granted, socially constituted norms about health and pathology. In particular, there is the assumption that autism is essentially a disturbance in a person’s embodied being-with-others. Fuchs argues that autism is a disturbance in the development of primary intersubjectivity, in which bodily being-with-others is developed. Jaegher views autism a distinct kind of sense-making; while viewed in the manner through which this form of sense-making is meaningful to autistic people, this still leads to a hampered development of participatory sense-making.

Neurodiversity is based on the idea that there is no single “healthy” type of mind, neurocognitive functioning, or being-in-the-world. This challenges the biomedical model of autism as a mental disorder based on traits and behaviours located in the individual bodymind. The neurodiversity movement renews questions into what kind of health care, accommodation and social change would be meaningful for autistic flourishing, and calls for a more thorough engagement with autistic lived experience in knowledge production about autism. The movement also brings attention to sensory aspects of autistic experience, beyond autism as mindedness. I argue that phenomenological approaches can complement the neurodiversity commitment to autism as an embodied and meaningful being-in-the-world, rather than a deficit in relation to a non-autistic norm. However, to achieve this, phenomenological approaches need to more critically examine normative and affective dimensions of sensory experience.

Listening, acknowledging and faith

Nanna Hlín Halldórsdóttir: Listening to fatigue: Phenomenological interviews with ME/CFS patients in Iceland about different kinds of fatigue

How is the difference between everyday tiredness and a fatigue caused by an illness experienced? In particular by the group of the chronically ill that constantly needs to navigate different shades of fatigue: ME/CFS patients? This paper introduces preliminary results of the postdoctoral research project Listening to fatigue. Within the project, phenomenological qualitative interviews have been conducted in order to examine the different sense of fatigue ME/CFS patiens experience, and how it has evolved through their lives in comparison to their sense of fatigue and different energy levels before the original illness event. Together with the phenomenological method, the researcher herself who has lived with ME/CFS for at least 13 years is in the process of conducting an auto-ethnography concerning her own experience with fatigue that will inform the research. In philosophical terms the aim is to provide a better understanding of the conceptual framework surrounding fatigue, tiredness, exhaustion and related concepts. A special attention has been given to the particular form of chronic fatigue that characterises Myalgic Enchaphalomyalitis (and Long Covid): Post exertional malaise (PEM), which occurs after mental or physical exertion, even 48 hours after the event. Preliminary results show that the particular sense of PEM varies to a great extent but can to some extent be anticipated by the patients, many of whom report the need to learn to rest throughout their chronically ill lives after having been subjected to a strict work ethic earlier in their lives.

Ståle Finke: Knowing and Acknowledging Trauma – Psychoanalysis, Phenomenology and the Lived Body

The experience of trauma and of dissociation of traumatic experience, raises important questions concerning the phenomenology of the self. What are the conditions for us humans to be vulnerable to trauma? Moreover, how can trauma be made sense to? And what is the path to recovery? Whereas a classical Freudian account emphasizes mental forms of reaction-formation and dissociation, more recent approaches in psychoanalysis and developmental psychology point to an organization and reaction of behavior at a pre-personal and procedural level of bodily experience. Both approaches, however, suffer from a poor understanding of lived bodily experience and need to return to the symbolic body. It is clear that trauma and post-traumatic stress syndrome challenges mentalistic and cognitivist approaches to psychopathology; yet, one the other hand, one should avoid the tendencies in current approaches to conceive traumatic symptoms as reflecting merely mute procedural forms of reaction and bodily coping in abstraction from reflexive symbolic sense-making.

As I shall argue, drawing upon the analysis by Merleau-Ponty and more recent enactivist thought, trauma needs to be conceived on the background of the linguistic body, placing the experience in what I call an original communication-situation. Traumatic symptoms reflect not only a radical bodily and existential helplessness, but also a narrowing of the symbolic body in implicit sense-making couplings with others. This also carries clinical consequences. The recovery from trauma is not simply a matter of regaining bodily fluency, social skill and integrity, but of regaining sense within relations of restored symbolic acknowledgement and recognition, reflected in inter-personal as well as cultural life-worlds. Knowing trauma is a matter of acknowledging.

Elena Kalmykova: Understanding Fait through the Lens of Phenomenology of Perception

Faith is often under attack due to its violation of the normative demand to ‘proportionate belief to the available evidence’. Having faith in someone means to have a relation that is not based on the available evidence only. By having faith one allegedly defies the norms of rationality. On the other hand, faith is deemed to be a moral virtue one is obliged to have. It is good to have faith in oneself, one's spouse, friends, etc. Can we reconcile these different perspectives and demands on faith? In this presentation, I argue that faith, understood as a relation to persons, follows a certain normativity, even though it is arguably not proportionate to the available evidence. Phenomenology of perception shows that going beyond the available evidence ('sense data') is in fact inbuilt in one of the most fundamental of our cognitive faculties - in perception. Using the idea of positive presentation of I-do-not-know-what in perception (Merleau-Ponty) I devise the account of faith in humans as a relation to a complex object, protracting in time and space that is only partially available to our senses. Then I utilise Charles Siewert's account of normativity of perception based on 'a better look' in order to show that we can also identify a particular normativity of faith. We are justified in our faith as long as it is based on a better look experience. Furthermore, I show that there is no clash between faith understood this way and faith being a virtue.

Critical phenomenologies of gender and ageing

Marjolein de Boer: Myths of Menopause. A Critical Cultural Phenomenology.

Critical and feminist phenomenology emphasizes the formative role of cultural myths (or discourses) about womanhood for identity construction. Within this field, however, menopause is largely taken for granted. In this presentation, I will offer a critical cultural phenomenological analysis of this transitional life phase – asking 1) what the meaning of myths is, 2) what kind of myths about menopause roam around in our Western culture, and 3) how we may resist (oppressive) mythical thinking about menopause.

First, by drawing on Beauvoir’s thinking about myths (1947; 1949; 1970), I will show how myths not only have socio-political significance – in that they produce and sustain ideological (oppressive) systems (Weiss 2012) – but also bear ontological weight. In coinciding concrete people with allegedly universal and reality-diverging qualities, myths essentialize existence. As such, myths provide a fitting home for our desire to coincide with ourselves. Taking refuge in mythical thinking, then, constrain us from taking up our existential task to be free and actively project ourselves into the world (Bergoffen 2002).

Second, by analyzing fiction TV series about menopause (e.g. Dun’ Breeding, Fleabag, Big Mouth), I identified five contemporary myths of menopause: 1) the liberated woman; 2) the empty-nester, 3) the abject witch, 4) the wise woman, and 5) the asexual woman. On the basis of this analysis, I will argue that menopause may be conceived as a treacherous transition with oppressive mythical thinking about femininity and aging – and as such obstruct women’s (authentic and liberative) identity construction.

Finally, by taking into account both the marginalizing content of myths and their constraining ontological repercussions, I will explore a possible way to resist myths of menopause: through irony. In doing so, I take inspiration from Beauvoir’s autobiographical work about her childhood (1958) wherein she adopts this rhetorical mode as a way to fight oppressive cultural myths and to claim a more liberative identity.

Sabrina De Biasio: On gendered relevances: A Schützian conceptualisation of sexual difference

In the paper I develop a phenomenological analysis of sexual difference on the basis of Alfred Schütz’ concept of relevance. To do this, I first analyse Schütz’ “Reflections on the Problem of Relevance” and offer an explication of the concept and its different variants. Based on my critical remarks, I then revise the concept and apply it to the problem of sexual difference. Using the methods of phenomenological description to account for the lived experiences of different sexual identities, I argue that a Schützian conceptualisation of gender in terms of relevances (and/or types) complements contemporary phenomenological discussions on sexual difference in two fundamental ways. First, it allows us to further specify Heinämaa’s theorisation of sexual difference as a difference between two gendered styles of intentional life. Indeed, it provides a description of the internal structure and dynamism of different manners of intentionally relating to the world. Second, it prevents us from downplaying either the role of nature or that of culture in the constitution of sexual difference. By making explicit and clarifying both the natural and the historical-cultural roots of gendered styles, it allows us to phenomenologically assess the difference between sexual types as a naturally and culturally motivated one. Based on this, the research shows how different sexual identities are sensorily grasped and interpreted as expressions of different systems of relevance having peculiar internal structures and dynamics which are both naturally and socio-culturally motivated.

Hans-Georg Eilenberger: The Strangeness of Old Bodies

This paper considers the ways in which older people experience their changing bodies. From the perspective of critical phenomenology, the relation to my body is inevitably mediated by my social-cultural environment.[1] When it comes to experiences of ageing, this mediation may take the form of the Other within.[2] According to Simone de Beauvoir, it is only through other people’s reactions to her changed body that the subject “discovers” her old age. While the subject continues to see herself as young, these reactions feed into an internalized sense of otherness, introducing a split within subjectivity.

Beauvoir's analysis of the ageing body illuminates its objective givenness to others without, however, considering the link between objective body and lived body. There are various bodily changes that come with late life, many of which confront the older person with a diminishment of previous possibilities, an embodied sense of I cannot any longer. In my paper, I want to complement Beauvoir's account by exploring the ways in which such shifts in embodiment (lived body) resonate with mainstream discourses around ageing in Western culture (objective body).

My investigation combines critical phenomenology with qualitative research. It draws on a series of interviews that I conducted with older people aged between 65 and 93 (n=16). In my interpretation of the data, I am particularly interested in metaphorical expressions of bodily decline, illness, and ambiguity. Respondents would, for instance, describe their bodies as being “worn out” and “depleted,” or state that doctors are “tinkering” with their bodies. I will argue that expressions like these mark a shift in the dynamic of strangeness and familiarity that characterizes human embodiment.[3] This shift is not a “natural” consequence of ageing; rather, it constitutes a passage through collective affects that contribute to the othering of old bodies.[4]

The limits of experience - Derrida and Merleau-Ponty

Sujitha Parshi: Derrida and the Machine: Thinking the Future at the Limits of Experience

Scholarship on Derrida’s relevance for environmental philosophy has traditionally focused on Derrida’s rethinking of the human-animal relation or more recently on the challenging of the life-death distinction following the publication of his 1975-76 seminar. However, Derrida’s reflections on the conditionality and historicity of the future have been critiqued for their narrow concern with the futurity and survival of thought, neglecting literal survival on earth. This paper argues for the importance of Derrida’s meditation on the conditionality of the future for approaching the problematic of futurity in the Anthropocene. I do so by attending to a largely unexplored aspect of Derrida’s works, namely his insistence that the problematization of thought is essential for reevaluating our relation to nonhuman animals, technology and to the earth. This problematization calls for a measuring up against the machine that inhabits and limits in advance all thought. I first chronicle Derrida’s questioning of thinking from his 1974 text Glas to his 2002-03 seminar The Beast and the Sovereign II. I then turn to Derrida’s treatments of the aporetic experience of the limit especially in his 1991 text Specters of Marx and the more recently published seminar of 1976-77 Theory and Practice to elucidate the impossibility and necessity confronted at the very limits of experience to think the new, the future. Here, I engage with Derrida’s call for another logic of the event for thinking the event’s possibility within the machine. Furthermore, I attend to Derrida’s characterization of radical indetermination as the ultimate mark of the future. In conclusion, I demonstrate how Derrida’s approach to the future as “necessarily pure and purely necessary” is a resource for addressing a key exigency in the Anthropocene, namely to make and preserve the possibility of a different future.

Martta Heikkilä: Visions of Blindness: Merleau-Ponty and Derrida on the Invisible

In my presentation, I shall consider the notions of blindness in Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Jacques Derrida and compare the role they provide to invisibility. For both, seeing is not merely a sense that grants visibility and knowledge, but is necessarily conditioned by its reverse, the category of blindness. What is implied by blindness, if it is not mere lack of sight, but proves the condition of all visibility, being therefore an ontological condition? I shall address this question by referring to Merleau-Ponty’s essay “The Intertwining – The Chiasm” (VI, 1964) and Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind (1991) and clarify their phenomenological and poststructuralist motivations respectively. The focus on blindness in this consideration is the original contribution of my talk.  

In Merleau-Ponty, blindness – the invisible within the realm of the visible – equals what he calls the depth or “flesh” of the world. Seeing originates, not merely in the eye, but from the deeper structures of being: “the intertwining of the visible into the seeing body” that is the flesh. It includes “brute vision”, unawareness of oneself, so that invisibility and blind spots constitute our perception.  

For Derrida, too, blindness implies the questioning of the power of vision. “Vision”, however, is not limited to one of the senses only, but he extends it to include all knowledge and ideal meaning. Meanings do not emerge from signs but in intervals or “between the blinds”, in differences that give rise to signification. Referring to drawing, Derrida clarifies that in question are ruptures in the artistic presentation: the invisible traces and blind areas, which the viewer must complete.  

I shall approach the obvious touching points between Merleau-Ponty’s and Derrida’s analyses, but also suggest that there is a difference between them, namely the stress on the bodily vs. the linguistic dimension in the consideration of blindness.

Erik Lind: Absolute or relative sensations? A Jamesian challenge to Merleau-Ponty’s structural account of perception.

In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty proposes what one could call a “structural” theory of perception. Drawing on Gestalt theory, the French philosopher introduces the notion of “structure” or Gestalt to replace the old empiricist notion of “sensation.” The most primitive perception, we are told, cannot be an absolute sensation but must always and necessarily be a relation or a “whole.” The sensory value of an element within a structure is thus determined by its function within it and varies according to it. It should therefore follow that one cannot attribute a relation to a sensory content without intrinsically altering the latter.

It has been argued recently that such a structural account, emphasizing the primacy of relations over isolate sensations, is essentially Neo-Hegelian in its approach. If this is true, then Gestalt theory, and by extension Merleau-Ponty’s theory, would fall under the same objections that William James put to T. H Green and F. H. Bradley concerning the relativity of knowledge. In a nutshell, the objection is the following: If each relational attribute necessarily modified its sensory content, then we would obviously be hard pressed to tell what the content is in and of itself, independently of what it is for us.

I shall argue that while this objection is justified to some extent when applied to Gestalt psychology (notably Koffka’s early works), it does not really challenge Merleau-Ponty’s theory. Importantly, it seems to ignore one important point: structures are not relational attributes or predicates for Merleau-Ponty, but relations of difference. One would therefore need to admit an element of negativity in perception which the Jamesian approach ignores. Taking this into account, I will then defend Merleau- Ponty’s structural view by confronting it with a number of debates in contemporary philosophy of perception.

FRIDAY April 28th

Seeing things: Husserlian views on intentionality and perception

Alessandro Salice: Husserl and Disjunctivism: Reply to Overgaard

In a recent paper (JHP, forthcoming), Søren Overgaard has defended a disjunctivist reading of Husserl’s theory of perception: hallucination intrinsically differs from perception because only experiences of the latter kind carry singular content and, thereby, pick out individuals. If that is the case, disjunctivism about perception follows, or so Overgaard claims.

My talk elaborates on Overgaard’s notion of singular content. Specifically, I claim that there are two ways in which that notion can be understood in the framework of Husserl’s theory of perception, both of which put pressure on Overgaard’s conclusion.

On a first understanding, a singular content is a not-interpreted part of the experience, i.e., it is a sensation (or a bundle of sensations). This notion can’t serve Overgaard’s interpretation, though, because sensations are not intentional: they don’t refer to anything and, therefore, don’t pick out individuals.

On a second understanding, a singular content is an interpreted content, i.e., it is a sensation (or a bundle of sensations) apprehended according to a perceptual matter, where the matter is an instantiated meaning. When apprehended this way, sensations can disclose properties of individual objects. However, they disclose these properties and, in so doing, pick individuals out, if—and only if—the instantiated meaning is true. Otherwise, they just pretend to do so. It therefore stands to reason that Overgaard’s notion of singular content of perception is that of a perceptual content apprehended according to a true meaning. Said another way, a perceptual content is singular because it is true.

If all this is on the right track, then hallucination and perception share a common factor: they are experiences carrying truth-assessable content. Furthermore, because the truth-value of the content is not an intrinsic property of a content-carrying experience, hallucination and perception are not intrinsically different, contrary to Overgaard’s disjunctivist interpretation.

Sören Overgaard: In Defence of a Dogma: A Husserlian Argument for the Inadequacy of Perception

Few Husserlian theses claim as widespread support as his idea that perception is ‘inadequate’ vis-à-vis its object (Husserl 1998). This thesis (henceforth ‘Inadequacy’) has been adopted by phenomenologists too numerous to mention, and enjoys support outside the phenomenological movement, too (e.g. Noë  2004; Siegel 2010). Mostly, Inadequacy is not argued for – much less criticized – but simply assumed true. As Matt Bower writes in a recent article, it is ‘typical to suppose that [Inadequacy] is obvious enough to use as a starting point’ (2021, p. 757). In short, Inadequacy is a dogma. Bower wants to wake us from our dogmatic slumber; he does so by presenting four Husserlian argument for Inadequacy and marshalling objections against each.

In my talk, I sketch the four Husserlian arguments presented by Bower, and his objections to them. Then I reconstruct and defend a Husserlian argument not included in Bower’s catalogue. Suppose you see a cube, three sides of which are given or presented in a sensory manner – call them ‘A’, ‘B’, and ‘C’. For Husserl, your perception is inadequate if (and only if) the object as experienced or as perceived is not exhausted by A, B, and C. Somewhat simplified, the argument now runs as follows: Assume (for reductio) that the cube is experienced as exhausted by A, B, and C. Then, if in the course of experience a previously unseen side, D, comes into view, either the object will seem to have acquired a new side, or the previous experience will be corrected (A, B, and C were not, after all, exhaustive of the object). But in a typical perception, neither happens. Therefore, the cube is not experienced as exhausted by A, B, and C; hence your perception is inadequate.

Kentaro Ozeki: Phenomenological models for possibility and intentionality:
Hintikka’s interpretation of noema revisited

Social life and the experience of others

Eric Chelstrom: Remediating Oppressive Social Horizons: Embodied Practices of Sense and Trans-Others

In Visible Identities, Linda Martín Alcoff demonstrates the role of our sensory modalities, particularly vision, in how our social identities are formed and maintained. She argues, “the practices of visibility are indeed revealing of significant facts about our cultural ideology, but that what the visible reveals is not the ultimate truth; rather, it often reveals self-projection, identity anxieties, and the material inscription of social violence.” Cultural ideologies are not infallible but contain errors and incoherences as part of their operative collective meanings. Socio-cultural forms of meaning and meaning making are unavoidable, but they are not all inherently oppressive. To the extent that they contribute to oppressions and that our sensory modalities play a role in shaping these patterns of the lifeworld, this means that in order to ameliorate some of the oppressive ways of life we should develop sensory methodologies for bringing problematic practices into focus and for subjecting them to revision.

Building on Alcoff’s initial analysis, I draw upon Das Janssen’s and Gayle Salamon’s works on transsexual and transphobic experiences to focus on the intersubjective or social natures of the expectations about gender roles and gender categories, and how those manifest within our lives. This is particularly important insofar as our everyday, pre-critical enactment of norms often contribute to injustice and, at times, encourage violence against others. The way(s) in which gender has been taken up uncritically into the background horizons of our thinking contributes to our consistent moral failing in treating others with respect, especially transgender and transsexual others. The question is: how do we excavate the background phenomena in order to approach our moral obligations to the other in a manner that avoids retrenchment? And what can phenomenology do to help expose these impediments and potentially reshape them through developing sensory methodologies to critically reappraise everyday habits?

Thomas J. Spiegel: Cringe

While shame and embarrassment have received attention in both philosophy and psychology, cringe (or “vicarious embarrassment” or “vicarious shame”) has received little thought. Cringe is a social emotional reaction person A has witnessing person B’s transgression of a social norm, where A experiences a largely unpleasant emotion as a reaction to B’s transgression.

Cringe has only recently received public attention in the rise of the genre of so-called cringe comedy, e.g. shows since the early 2000s, like The Office, Arrested Development, or Veep. Yet cringing is often either overlooked as a subject of genuine philosophical interest or conceived of as a species of shame or embarrassment. For example, Zahavi (2020) views cringe as a form of shame. Empirical research in psychology also assumes that cringing is just a matter of vicariously experiencing shame or embarrassment (e.g. Killian et al. 2018, 81f.; Müller-Pinzler et al. 2016; Krach et al. 2011; Mayer et al. 2021, 3; cf. also Hye-Knudsen 2018; Welten et al. 2012).

I aim to offer a novel characterization of cringe as a hostile emotion which is both unpleasant and pleasurable and which turns out to be closer to disgust and horror. Afterwards, I suggest that cringe is an essentially hostile emotion whose most important function is to create a sense of social distinction; the answer being that cringing is a form of non-violent aggression against others and the form of life they exhibit in line with the proliferation of pluralistic forms of life. The closing part offers an explanation as to why cringe comedy has become recently more relevant: cringe allows one to express aggression and disgust in a manner which fits perfectly well within the permissible boundaries of tolerance set up in liberal Western democracies since the second half of the 20^th century.

Antonio Cimino: Lifestyle as a Philosophical Problem: A Phenomenological Outline

Over the last decades, “lifestyle” has increasingly become a buzz word in common parlance and has attracted much attention in public debates. National and international institutions conduct tireless campaigns for an active and healthy lifestyle both to increase citizens’ well-being and to reduce the economic and social burdens of diseases. Lifestyle has, moreover, become a crucial subject in various fields of research, which seek, for example, to define sustainable ways of living or to identify the cultural and natural factors involved in the emergence of lifestyles. Also, lifestyle is of major concern to virtually all citizens, who have to make decisions about how to live, when, for example, choosing food, clothes, transport modes, values etc. Despite this ubiquitous presence, lifestyle has not yet been subject to a specific and systematic investigation in philosophical studies. The paper has two aims. First, it argues that lifestyle is an urgent philosophical problem that cries out for a specific conceptualization. The question of lifestyle lies at the intersection of various philosophical fields and specializations, such as ethics, politics, esthetics, environmental philosophy, philosophy of economics, philosophy of medicine etc., and therefore requires an integrated philosophical approach that takes into account both its various ontological, ethical, political, and aesthetic facets and their interconnectedness. Second, the paper argues that phenomenology provides us with powerful methodological and conceptual tools to investigate lifestyle from a specific philosophical angle. In this regard, particular attention should be devoted to the phenomenological concepts of habit, lifeworld, embodiment, and enactment, which can help us to address crucial aspects of lifestyle and understand their characteristic philosophical significance. The paper will point out a new line of research, by demonstrating that lifestyle has to be viewed as a distinctive topic for phenomenological philosophy.

Metaphors, language and texts:

Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir: Liberating language: Gendlin and Nietzsche on the refreshing power of metaphors

In Beyond Postmodernism: Saying and Thinking in Gendlin’s Philosophy, edited by David M. Levin, Eugene Gendlin and other authors pose Nietzsche as the pioneer of a Neo-Nietzschean, postmodernist representationalism according to which our knowledge of reality is reduced to linguistic and symbolic signification. In their depictions, Nietzsche is the opposite to Gendlin’s efforts to state the body as an order of its own that partakes in linguistic articulation of reality. The goal of this paper is to show that Nietzsche’s philosophy of embodied expression offers a needed missing link in the “Neo-Nietzschean” representationalist theories under critique by Gendlin and other co-authors of Language Beyond Postmodernism. I contend that Gendlin and Nietzsche are allies rather than antipodes when it comes to renewing our understanding of philosophical thinking and its linguistic expression. This becomes evident in Gendlin’s theory of metaphoric thinking which is very much a dialogue with Nietzsche’s philosophy of metaphors. Gendlin’s concept of crossing as metaphor is an important if not groundbreaking discovery of contemporary philosophy, not the least since Gendlin accentuates the intersubjective dimension of it and thereby adds something missing in Nietzsche’s philosophy of metaphors that is more intrasubjective.

Bat Chen (Laila) Seri: ‘Seeing the Sounds’: Benjamin’s Kafka and the Sensory Experience of Text

The question of the place of tradition in modernity is at the heart of Walter Benjamin’s reading of Franz Kafka. This pertains in particular to the Jewish tradition, in which both thinkers shared as outsiders. While Benjamin explicitly employed Jewish categories in his reading of Kafka, Kafka’s works include virtually no mention of Judaism, yet are preoccupied with the major themes of Jewish thought—exile and rootlessness, guilt, law and commentary, and prioritisation of text as the conveyor of truth. Scholars have repeatedly pointed out the affinities between Kafka’s writing and Benjamin’s reading of Kafka on the one hand, and methods of interpretation in rabbinic thought on the other hand. This paper follows on and develops this course. In the rabbinic tradition, it is a famous principle that everything knowable can be derived from the scriptural text. The materiality of the text, so it is believed, precedes and conditions the materiality of the world, and therefore investigation of the world proceeds through textual study. The visual text, however, represents auditory speech, and thus one sensory experience stands in place of another, from which it cannot be divorced. This paper spells out how a rabbinically inspired focus on the sensory experience of the text offers a key for deciphering Benjamin’s reading of Kafka, thereby shedding light on Benjamin’s notion of tradition at large.

Peter Antich: Levinas and Perceiving the Good

This paper considers Levinas’ arguments, in Totality and Infinity, that properly speaking the Other – and with the Other, the ethical – cannot be perceived. Instead, ethical significance is revealed, according to Levinas, at the level of language. I explain three features of perception that, according to Levinas, make it unfit to reveal ethical meaning: perception is representational, formulaic, and finite. I then weigh each of these considerations. My basic contention is that no stark distinction between perception and language can be drawn along these lines.

Drawing on Phenomenological insights from thinkers like Merleau-Ponty and Husserl, I argue that perception cannot be adequately characterized in the terms proposed by Levinas. First, perception is not representational. While a Naïve Realist description of perception also falls short phenomenologically, neither is perception merely a matter of entertaining mental representations or projection. Perception is mediated by features of the perceiver, but this is equally true of discourse and listener. Second, I draw on Merleau-Ponty and Alia al-Saji to argue that perception occurs on a spectrum from formulaic to particularized (and the same is true of language). While perception is mediated by generalized Gestalten, Merleau-Ponty argues that it also offers opportunities to attend to the uniqueness of the perceived and transform generalized Gestalten. Third, I explain various ways in which perception cannot be characterized as simply finite. While I allow that perception may not be infinite in Levinas’ sense, I challenge his reasons for thinking that language is fundamentally different from perception in this regard.

Thus, I try to make room for the thought that, if language reveals ethical significance, so can perception. Nevertheless, I draw again on Merleau-Ponty to show how Levinas is right that language introduces a deep transformation in our experience of ethical relationships.

Voices, speech and communication

Donovan Stewart: On Articulation: Technique Before the Pharmakon 

A major insight of twentieth-century phenomenology and post-Kantian philosophy was the reformulation of human existence as being fundamentally technical, which helped overcome traditional accounts of an originally pure human life that was subsequently contaminated by technics and history. This thinking of human originary technicity, as recently summarised by Lindberg (2023), Crowley (2022), James (2019), and Hörl (2017), was offered by Derrida in his early (1954, 1962, 1967) readings of Husserl (1929, 1939), and later developed by Stiegler (1994) and Wills (1995), and was elsewhere articulated by Foucault (1976), Deleuze and Guattari (1980), Haraway (1985), Preciado (2000) and Agamben (2014). The consensus: human existence is essentially composed by finite, historically contingent, prostheses, pharmaka with toxic and curative potentials, beginning with the languages within which it becomes itself, has a world, and experiences the earth. In this text, I wish to push this thinking of technique further, emphasising not the question of technical objects, but constitutive relation––the finite manner of each singular composition. I emphasise how technique, in its most determined sense in English, describes a way, the how, of not necessarily a being or thing, but an event, that is, a finite relation or contact. For this, I turn to Nancy’s (1992, 1996) concept of “ecotechnics” which offers, at times, an understanding of such a sense of technique as the articulation of existence itself––its historical being-put-into-play that is irreducible to human activity. With Derrida (1967, 2003) and a certain Heidegger (1935), Nancy introduces another moment in the auto-deconstruction of the inherited understanding of the relation of technique and life: technique as the finite articulation of being, the rising of its limits; offering a renewed sense to originary technicity, the ramifications of which remain to be thought.

Minna-Kerttu Maarja Kekki: Empathy in media-based communication: Implementing Edith Stein’s concept of Wortleib  

The question of how other consciousnesses appear via media forces us to re-think the classical phenomenological accounts of sociality and embodiment. Here, “media” refers to all kinds of communication tools from print and audio to digital, social, and mass media. The common factor in all media forms is their function as a medium other than one’s body; such a medium is a third physical object connecting me and the other(s). In our media-based communications, we can experience the other in their message (either addressed to me or to a larger audience), but the experience of the other via media differs from the sensation of the other in their physical presence. The question that follows is, how to describe and analyze these differences. However, the phenomenological discussion has not yet developed the concepts for describing the media-based empathy as a special case distinguished from the empathic experience in a shared physical space.

In this paper, I provide such concepts by utilizing Edith Stein’s analysis of verbal expressions in her early work On the Problem of Empathy (germ. Zum Problem der Einfühlung, 1917). I use her terms Wortleib and Wortkörper, which in English mean, approximately, a living word body and a physical word body. I divide the term Wortleib in two different cases, to the empathic and non-empathic object: For Stein, all words appear as meaningful and thus living, but, as I argue, words that are someone’s communication appear otherwise than words that appear as non-personal content. Thereby, I describe and analyze the appearance of others as other consciousnesses in media-based communication. While Stein herself discussed media-based empathy merely in paper media due to her writing more than 100 years ago, I demonstrate the unique usefulness of these concepts in analyzing any media-based communication and thus the timeliness of her work.

Gústav Adolf Bergmann Sigurbjörnsson: Speech and empathy – against the parallelism view

In this talk I will show how Merleau-Ponty’s treatment of dialogue and his discussion of intercorperality might offer an example that contradicts what I call the parallelism view.

It is commonly acknowledged that in addition to understanding the words of others, empathy also plays a role in how we understand each other. In the analytic tradition, typically, empathy is seen as (at best) supplementary to our understanding of what we are being told. In the phenomenological tradition there is extensive literature on the nature of empathy, but that same literature has a marked lack of discussion of the role language plays in our empathetic understanding of others.

In both traditions the relations between our ability to empathize and our ability to understand the speech of others is framed in similar ways. I call this the parallelism view. What it supposes is that in dialogue there are two processes that run parallel with each other:

1. 1. The understanding of judgements, propositions and meanings, facilitated by linguistic communication.
   2. The empathetic understand of the others affective states, facilitated by embodied expressivity of the other.

I will claim that the parallelism view is an outlook motivated by a folk-theoretical conception of the relation between language and affect. This, I argue, has an effect on how we reconstruct our conversations after the fact, where we tend to overlook the affective, lived dimensions of our interactions. This in turn reinforces the parallelism view, a view that I will ultimately claim has detrimental effects on how we understand the testimony of others in hermeneutically difficult situations.

Panel: Imagination as Method

Christian Ferencz-Flatz: Operationalizing Perceptual Phantasy

In several notes from his Ideas II, Husserl suggests we should see imagination not only as a doxic counterpart to perception, but also as an act capable of reduplicating emotional and practical content. Consequently, we should also conceive of an emotional and practical imagination, which he designates as Quasi-Fühlen and Quasi- Tun (Hua IV: 275). Moreover, in his notes on image consciousness, he introduces the concept of “perceptual phantasy” to designate a hybrid mode of phantasy, which comes to bear in various ways within the realm of perception itself, for instance when attending a theatre play or contemplating physical images. When considering this expanded view of imagination, it might first appear rather hard to convert into a methodological procedure proper. How can one, for instance, methodologically operationalize something like emotional phantasy and is such an operationalization indeed needed for a rigorous phenomenological analysis of emotions in general and fictional emotions in particular? What are the implications of such a move for phenomenology?

In light of these questions, this presentation specifically engages with the possible methodological uses of perceptual phantasy. In contrast to plain mental phantasy proper, perceptual phantasy of course has the benefit of offering a far more explicit and stable intuition of its materials. At the same time, however, it seems to be far less flexible and manipulable in the perspective of eidetic variation. This presentation focuses on some of the ways in which perceptual phantasy could be operationalized by referring, on the one hand, to the practice of imaginative interpolation described by Husserl with the term Hineinphantasieren and, on the one hand, to the technical possibilities we now have to freely manipulate our perceived environment via images for instance by ways of “augmented reality”. In doing so, it argues for a specifically phenomenological way of using media.

Delia Popa: Moving Phantasy

While the methodological contribution of imagination has been classically considered by Husserl under the species of eidetic variation, the exact source of its intrinsic dynamism is still in need of clarification. While early intentional analysis of imagination describe it as an act that is at the same time intuitive and indirect, allowing for an absent object to be experienced as intuitively present, its dynamic operativity in dreams and daydreams is not easy to situate in this intentional framework. Following Marc Richir, in these experiences phantasy (Phantasia) intervenes as a primitive form of imagination that allows for unexpected insights into the sedimentation of multiple layers of experience. In the light of Husserl’s genetic phenomenology, the dynamism of imagination appears to be rooted in a deeply sedimented layer of sense, where the choc of other embodied subjectivities awakens us to the sense of being ourselves.

As I investigate this dynamism focusing on its implication in bodily movements and gestures, my goal is to show that in the phantasy-dimension of bodily kinesthesis and expressions a certain historicity of experience is disclosed as sedimented in diverging and ever-moving layers. Everyday gestures are carriers of this subtle transformation that takes place in time, whose consequence is a modification of our habits and, ultimately, of our subjective and intersubjective identity as it is forged through their passive formation. While phantasy opens a view that cuts through the initial arrangement of layers of sense, it also modifies their order so that certain meanings come to the fore and others are pushed in the shadows of the past. I will end my presentation with an analysis of gestures in cinematographic works of R. Bresson, A. Tarkovsky, and A. Varda, questioning the alternation of repetition and surprising interruption made possible through the act of filming their performance.

Andreea Smaranda Aldea: Self-Imagining, Re-collection, and the Future Perfect – Husserl’s radikale Selbstbesinnung and the Imagining Narrativity of the Self

Husserl’s method of radical reflection (Besinnung) understood both as historical- teleological and eidetic emerges as a self-referential affair oriented toward clarifying the sedimented presuppositions at work both in the subject matter under investigation and in the phenomenological process itself. The question arises: what makes this radical self-reflection (radikale Selbsbesinnung) possible? Though Husserl himself does not tackle this question directly, his extensive work on the imagination leaves rich clues we can follow. In this paper, I contend that imagining as self-imagining is a necessary condition for the possibility of Husserl’s mature method of radical reflection.

Building on Husserl’s analyses of Ichspaltung, Reflexion, and Wiedererfahrung, I will seek to show that the distinctive splitting of the self at work in imagining experiences is not (pace Husserl) disinterested but anchored in one’s concrete historical situatedness. The self-referentiality (Reflexion) at work here amounts to a dynamism between the imagining and imagined selves, a dynamism able to open and sustain a self-critique whose correlates are entire systems of possibilities and impossibilities. What this dynamism can uncover is the very naturalization of contingencies, thus leading to the fissuring of the patina of finality these naturalized contingencies exhibit. Fissured finality modally (rather than temporally) construed opens the possibility of new possibilities. This movement of mapping out systems of sedimented possibilities and impossibilities exhibits a qualitatively distinctive kind of imagining narrativity, which, I content, is necessary for all forms of critique (including Husserl’s Besinnung as radikale Selbstbesinnung). To clarify the dynamism of imagining Reflexion and to showcase its powerful critical potential, I turn to several telling literary examples – Rilke’s reliance on ‘blood memory’ in his novel Malte Laurids Brigge, Kundera’s employment of the future perfect in his The Unbearable Lightness of Being, and Woolf’s wonderings on flânerie, both in her autobiographical essays and in her novel Mrs. Dalloway.

Heidegger, truth and event

Jens Kristian Larsen: Naked souls and bare arguments: categorical intuition in Plato’s Theaetetus

In his lecture courses from the 1920s Heidegger uses Husserlian phenomenology for interpreting ancient Greek philosophy. He reads Aristotle as a phenomenologist “avant la lettre” (Figal) and even claims that Husserl’s threefold “discovery” of intentionality, the a priory, and categorical intuition has led “the task of philosophy since Plato” back again “to its true ground” (GA 20, 109), a ground lost sight of since Aristotle (GA 19, 223-4). Indeed, radicalized phenomenology is, according to Heidegger, “nothing but the questioning of Plato and Aristotle brought back to life” (GA 20, 185). Heidegger thus suggests that phenomenology reveals the true significance of ancient philosophy while ancient philosophy, interpreted through phenomenology, brings phenomenology’s full potential to light.

Many now question the legitimacy of Heidegger’s approach to ancient philosophy. It has thus been argued that he was blind to the ethical dimensions of Plato (Gadamer, Rosen) and the philosophical significance of the dialogue form (Hyland, Gonzalez) and that his reliance on Husserlian formal ontology led him to misconstrue ancient ontology radically (Hopkins).

Still, there are passages in Plato that clearly parallel Husserl’s treatment of key concepts in formal ontology such as being, difference, and unity. One such passage that Heidegger points to is Theaetetus 184b-6e (GA 22, 123). In this presentation I address the questions whether one may legitimately use Husserl’s concept of categorical intuition when interpreting Theaetetus 184b-6e and how this will affect one’s understanding of Plato’s argument against identifying knowledge with perception. I argue that Heidegger’s phenomenological approach, while not immune to criticism, is superior to the linguistic approach now favored by many scholars and reveals crucial features commonly overlooked of the “bare arguments” that the soul, according to Socrates, employs to reach being and goodness in isolation from the body.

Ørjan Steiro Mortensen: A New Paradigm of Truth: On Badiou's Interpretation of Heidegger.

This paper researches Alain Badiou's unconventional and underexplored interpretation of Heidegger as a key paradigmatic figure in the history of post-Kantian philosophy. Alain Badiou's seminal work Being and Event (1988) starts out with a remarkable thesis: "Heidegger is the last universally recognizable philosopher." Considering Heidegger's roots in phenomenology and Badiou's reputation as an anti-phenomenologist, this proposition is rather puzzling: What does it mean for a neo-rationalist like Badiou to ascribe universal importance to Heidegger, a philosopher of radical finitude? And which crucial philosophical consequences does Badiou draw from Heidegger's thinking?

As this paper makes clear, Badiou's Heidegger represents a new approach to the question of truth for post-Kantian philosophy. The notion of truth, nominally defined by Kant in the CPR as "the agreement of knowledge with its object," undergoes a transformation in Heidegger's thinking. Reinterpreted as aletheia, truth comes to refer to a more fundamental disclosure of reality which precedes and conditions all objectively verifiable knowledge. By overcoming the standard critical conception of truth as correspondence between knowledge and object, Heidegger opens up new avenues of development for post-Kantian philosophy, also beyond those explored by Heidegger himself.

This paper shows how Badiou distills Heidegger's approach to the question of truth into a methodological procedure he names subtraction; it goes on to show how this procedure provides a common vantage point for both Heidegger's and Badiou's contradicting interpretations of ontology. The paper concludes by examining Badiou's historical- philosophical arguments for a mathematical interpretation of ontology against Heidegger's poetical-hermeneutical interpretation. Bringing to light how Badiou's Heidegger unwittingly provides new impetus for ambitious projects in the fields of ontology and rationalist metaphysics, this paper presents a surprising dimension of Heidegger's thinking invisible to most standard interpretations.

Ingvild Torsen: Heidegger’s artwork as measure and event

Can an artwork be understood as both a measure and an event?

This is the central question of the proposed presentation, a presentation whose goal is to give a compelling interpretation of Heidegger’s characterization of art as “happening of truth” (most clearly articulated in “The Origin of the Work of Art”).

The notion of measure is potentially useful, because it allows for an interpretation of how an artwork can occasion truth and be world-opening in the important sense suggested by Heidegger. The notion of measure is central to detailed and comprehensive accounts of truth and normativity in the early Heidegger (cf. esp. McManus’ work on truth and Crowell’s on normativity). However, Heidegger’s own engagement with Hölderlin’s negative answer to the question “is there a measure on earth?” complicates these accounts and their suitability for interpreting the ontology of the work of art (cf. “…Poetically man dwells...” from Vortäge und Aufsätze). I draw on discussions of the event in later Heidegger (in particular Bahoh’s recent Heidegger’s Ontology of Events) in an attempt to spell out what the interpretive options are for understanding the artwork as both measure and event, and in particular how these offer positive content, but also constrains, our understanding of our own role(s), as “creators” and “preservers”, in relation to the work of art.

Comparing methodologies

Henriikka Hannula: Wilhelm Dilthey and Carl Stumpf on the Relationship between Psychology and Epistemology

Both Wilhelm Dilthey (1833-1911) and Carl Stumpf (1848-1936) are well-known as secondary characters in the history of phenomenology and even better as important players in post-Kantian German philosophy (and psychology). Yet, little has been written about the connection between Stumpf and Dilthey, even though these two multi-faceted scholars were friends and colleagues. Before Stumpf‘s appointment in Berlin in 1894, they were frequent (and friendly) correspondence and after that, they continued their intellectual exchange as colleagues in the same department. Most of their discussions revolved around the nature of psychological knowledge, and its role vis-á-vis philosophical knowledge.

In the presentation, I will reconstruct Dilthey’s and Stumpf’s views on the relationship between psychology and epistemology. I will limit my inquiry to their key writings from the 1890s, meaning Stumpf’s 1892 Psychologie und Erkenntnistheorie and Dilthey’s 1891 Ursprung unseres Glaubens an die Realität der Außenwelt and 1894 Ideen über eine beschreibende und zergliedernde Psychologie.

I argue that Stumpf and Dilthey were allied in many key aspects regarding this question. Both advocated for a close relationship between psychological and epistemological (or philosophical) inquiry and positioned themselves explicitly against Kantian and especially the neo-Kantian anti- psychologism. Furthermore, they agreed on the centrality of psychology in the human and social sciences, emphasized the primacy of experience, advocated for a descriptive (rather than constructive) approach to psychology, and subscribed to psychological holism. These similarities are even more instructive and interesting considering their differences: Stumpf as an experimental psychologist, and Dilthey as a historicist philosopher (whose interest in psychology concentrated mostly on the historical and social formation of the human psyche), came to psychology from different directions.

Christian Lotz: Marx, Husserl, and Crisis

Following upon recent work done by Ian Angus, I will demonstrate that Husserl’s analysis of scientific abstraction as formalization can be expanded and improved with Marx’s analysis of value in capital. While Husserl argues in the Crisis and accompanying manuscripts that the disorientation that the modern sciences introduce in the modern world stems from the projection of an objective reality that can no longer be traced back to the lifeworld, Marx argues in Capital that the value form cannot be derived from a generalization contained in the exchange relation, as the value form is the formalized condition for all social relations. Taking insights from both thinkers, I argue that we are forced to acknowledge that the rationalization of nature through the modern natural sciences can only be properly understood if we analyze it in the context of the rationalization of society through capital. The inclusion of Marx’s perspective allows us to understand the main problem with Husserl’s analysis, namely, his failure to properly acknowledge the real, social dynamics and change in the life world that the mathematization of nature introduces through technology in the life world. I argue that the latter real change can only be understood via the “mathematization” of labor through the value form and capital. In the Kaizo articles, for example, Husserl claims that we are facing a cultural crisis, by which he means a crisis of meaning. In contrast, I submit that we need to analyze this cultural crisis as a societal crisis. Accordingly, in critical and skeptical distance from what has recently been termed “critical phenomenology,” I propose that we reconsider the relation between phenomenology and Marxism by examining the relation between Husserl and Marx.

Marco Piasentier: Methodological Convergences between Naturalism and Critical Theory

Foucault and Sellars are representatives of conflicting philosophical traditions: whereas Foucault famously insisted that “power is everywhere,” Sellars argued that “science is the measure of all things.” The methodological tension between the two perspectives seems to be so strong that each of them ends up reducing the other to an epiphenomenal illusion. In this article, I shall attempt to show that the works of Sellars and Foucault are not necessarily irreconcilable. The common ground for this dialogue is what I shall define as a historico-practical conception of science. I will build this concept by tracing a connection between the Foucauldian notion of “conditions of possibility” of science and Sellars’s thesis about the “indispensability” of the manifest image. Finally, I will argue that this conception of science problematizes the clash between the scientific and manifest images of the world, paving the way for a different relationship between naturalism and critical theory.

Rethinking well-being and clinical methodologies

Mads Gram Henriksen: Psychiatric comorbidity: A phenomenological critique

During the last three decades, the concept of psychiatric comorbidity, i.e., the co-occurrence of two or more mental disorders, has become widespread in clinical practice and psychiatric research. Despite its popularity, the concept has often escaped critical reflection. The purpose of this presentation is to offer a critical reflection on the concept of psychiatric comorbidity, drawing on insights from phenomenology and phenomenological psychopathology. First, I will trace the origin of the concept of psychiatric comorbidity back to Feinstein’s original concept of comorbidity in general medicine. Then, I will illustrate how the application of the concept of comorbidity in psychiatry is confronted by a series of interrelated theoretical issues concerning inadequate definition, differential diagnostic disarray, and reification of mental disorders. Second, I will illustrate how these theoretical issues have consequences for diagnostic assessment in everyday clinical practice and psychiatric research as well as highlight important ethical issues. Despite all these issues, I will nonetheless argue that the concept of psychiatric comorbidity can be both appropriate and helpful in psychiatry. However, if it is to be applied in a scientifically meaningful way, its theoretical foundation must first be properly established. Thus, in the third and final part of my presentation, I will try to establish this theoretical foundation by capitalizing on insight from the tradition of phenomenological psychopathology. More specifically, I will propose independence of mental disorders as the defining criterion for psychiatric comorbidity. I will suggest that knowledge of the natural courses of mental disorders (especially of trait vs state conditions) as well as of hierarchical or exclusionary rules of the diagnostic manuals may be helpful for assessing independence of mental disorders and thus help pave a path toward a more scientific, restrictive, and ethically sound use of the concept of psychiatric comorbidity.

Ragna Winniewski: “The Synaesthetic Self in Engaged Phenomenology and Embodied Therapy in Dementia: multisensory methodologies toward well-being”

Following Merleau-Ponty our perception is commonly synaesthetic but we, however, have “unlearned” this layered, multiple, and yet integrated way of experiencing the world because we direct our attention to either intellectualist or empiricist views of perception, thereby consequently neglecting a crucial dimension of our lived experience. First, by framing synaesthesia as social and affective phenomenon of perception, I argue that, such a view challenges traditional concepts of perception and cognition and at the same time provides new avenues for phenomenological research and therapeutic practices in dementia. Second, by means of micro-phenomenological fieldwork within multisensory environments (MSE) in dementia care homes I will show how synaesthetic effects within affective states of wellbeing do foster and meliorate interbodily communication between relatives, caregivers, and those affected. MSE provides multisensory stimulation (MSS) and creates Therapeutic Atmospheres (Sonntag 2016) a therapeutic methodology used in the Snoezelen concept. MSE and MSS activate the body memory (Fuchs 2018) which is an important resource for sharing embodied habits and for engaging with the lived body of someone suffering from dementia. Finally, by referring to the synaesthetic self in dementia, I will address an urgent question of integrated healthcare programmes and the ethical and political dimension of selfhood in conjunction with sensory and cognitive impairments. My paper therefore critically engages with and contributes to a phenomenology of health and illness arguing in favour of an interdisciplinary and applied understanding of synaesthetic perception and orientation of the lived body to go beyond a simple body-mind or nature-culture divide.

Mindaugas Briedis: Phenomenology of Imaging Bio-Pathologies: The Question of Primacy in Detecting Diagnostic Phenomena in Image-based Medicine

The paper investigates the origins of the experiences involved in diagnostics (detection and normative evaluation) of biological entities in image-based medical praxis. The first original move is to show that we can theoretically distinct human and broader biological horizons as possible grounds for such experiences, and even suggest a third alternative (manifestation through imaging as such). Although a number of thinkers are involved in the discussion, Aristotle and Husserl are of the most importance here.

Another correlated purpose of this paper is to present in a structured manner the genesis and the unfolding of diagnostic action (embodied cognition) before the propositional differential diagnosis is established. That involves radiologist's perceptual habits which are presupposed by the embodied coping with imaging modality, knowledge of basic causal connections concerning oncological situations, establishing visual patterns and communicating with other medical professionals (clinicians, technicians, instructors, etc.). Such perspective reveals the essential regularities and sedimentations of diagnostic practices as performed by radiologist, and the “everyday background” of certain scientific-cognitive operations.

Methods:

Ethnographic observation of individual and group diagnostic radiology sessions. Phenomenological-Enactivist analysis of the observed data.

Phenomenological-enactive speculations are illustrated by actual radiograms, interpretation of which brings us back to the aforementioned question of primacy. Besides the theoretical scope, this research may contribute to the better understanding and expansion of medical diagnostic strategies as well as methods of qualitative research.

Example:

As one of the enactive strategies, radiologists use pointing, which is about the discrete features of an image, but also gesturing which signifies the causal category. When pointing happens it is already amidst the net of causal categorial meanings. On the other hand, gestures and pointing are not only tied to an image but also to the organization of radiologists’ embodied cognition (enaction)

SATURDAY April 29^th

Panel: Neurophenomenology and Beyond

Felip Leon: Neurophenomenology and Critical Neuroscience: Mapping the Terrain

Francisco Varela articulated a notion of neurophenomenology understood as “a quest to marry modern cognitive science and a disciplined approach to human experience” (1996, p. 330). His central idea was that there are relationships of “mutual constraint”, to be systematically investigated, between phenomenological accounts of structures of experience and their counterparts as researched by the cognitive sciences (in particular, although not only, the neurosciences). Although Varela frames the potential of neurophenomenology in terms of it being a “methodological remedy for the hard problem” (the problem of how consciousness arises from brain and cognitive processes), there is a certain ambivalence in how neurophenomenology stands vis-à-vis the hard problem. For, in spite of being put forward as a remedy, it isn’t clear that neurophenomenology accepts the terms of the hard problem, as traditionally conceived. As Varela writes, “neurophenomenology is a potential solution to the hard problem by casting in an entirely different light on what ‘hard’ means” (p. 340). The aim of my talk is to map the terrain of current research on neurophenomenology, by assessing pros and cons of two ways of appraising its potential vis-à-vis the hard problem. On the one hand, the potential to tackle the problem by enabling increasingly refined correlations between first-person reports and third-person measures, and thereby bridge the gap between the two. On the other hand, the potential to reconceptualize in a more holistic fashion the methodological foundations of scientific research on human subjectivity, by suggesting a move away from the hard problem. I will explore to what extent conceptualizing neurophenomenology as one variety of “critical neuroscience” (Choudhury & Slaby 2011) can help to strengthen the second interpretation.

Harald Wiltsche: Science, Naivety, and the Promise of Neurophenomenology

Three decades after its inception by Francisco Varela, many phenomenologists are still unconvinced by the promise of neurophenomenology. In many cases skepticism is fueled by methodological worries: As its name suggests, one of the driving motivations behind neurophenomenology is that of a “melding of natural science methodologies (neuroscience) and human science methodologies (phenomenology)” (McInerney 2014, 1238). From the viewpoint of more classical variants of phenomenology, however, there are fundamental doubts about the very possibility of such a melding: It is part of the lore of classical phenomenology that “[a]ll natural science is naïve in regard to its point of departure [since] the nature it will investigate is for it simply there” (Husserl 1965, 85). Phenomenology, on the other hand, is said to transcend this naivety by performing the phenomenological reduction. Yet, if this characterization is correct, questions about a possible melding of (neuro)science and phenomenology indeed seem moot because the two projects are methodologically incommensurable.

The aim of my talk is to question the background of this phenomenological orthodoxy. I will do so by engaging with the late Maurice Merleau-Ponty whose reflections on contemporary science— especially in the essay “Modern Science and Nature” and The Visible and the Invisible—go far beyond the ways in which the relationship between science and phenomenology has traditionally been described. Special attention will be paid to Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of quantum mechanics. It is precisely here, I shall argue, that Merleau-Ponty advances an entirely new understanding of the science/phenomenology relationship. The main point of my talk is that this new understanding has far-reaching consequences for the directions into which the research program of neurophenomenology should be taken, both by (neuro)scientists and phenomenologists.

Kristin Zeiler: A Merleau-Pontinian Take on Neurophenomenology

This talk engages with the Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s conceptualizations of the flesh and intra- ontology, and uses these as entrance points for a discussion of a what has been called a radical neurophenomenology (Petitmengin 2017). The distinction between “mild” and “radical" neurophenomenology has been described as related to the “hard problem” of consciousness, i.e., the problem of how to explain how a set of neurons can give rise to subjective experience. In the hard problem, the difference and gap between subjective aspects of experience and physical, neurological processes becomes central. However, if mild neurophenomenology seeks to bring

“closer the objective and subjective sides of the gap” as put by Claire Petitmengin (2017: 142), radical neurophenomenology is not about closing a gap or correlation between “sides”. Its aim is instead to “enquiry into the ‘processes of co-constitution’” of objectivity and subjectivity; of “objective” and “subjective” domains (Bitbol 2017: 152). Instead of starting from a dualism between consciousness and physical reality and asking how the two can be brought together, radical neurophenomenology entertains the possibility that the real problem is the starting point, i.e., the formulation of the hard problem in terms of a gap in the first place.

The aim of the talk is to follow Bitbol in his turn to Merleau-Ponty’s work in order to spell out what, more precisely, a radical neurophenomenology can entail. I will engage with Merleau Ponty’s concept of the flesh, in a discusssion of possible meanings and implications of a Merleau-Pontian take on a radical neurophenomenology. The talk ends with a brief discussion of implications of such a Merleau-Pontian take for a project on fatigue in post-Covid syndrome, in which an analysis of a clinical assessment of symptoms, MRI visualization and analysis, cytokine profile analysis, and a combined qualitative and phenomenological philosophy analysis of brought into dialogue with each other.

Eleanor Byrne: Phenomenology, psychiatry and the new wave

Over the past few years, the Royal College of Psychiatrists have run a campaign entitled ‘Choose Psychiatry’. Aiming to promote psychiatry to trainee doctors amid growing anxieties about physical and emotional demands on trainee psychiatrists, the campaign also reflects a deeper insecurity. Psychiatry has long faced a legitimacy crisis. Psychiatrists cannot avoid confrontations with subjective experience in all of its complexity, yet it is hard to unite this richness with a narrower study of the brain and body and the methodologies associated with it.

Phenomenologists, at home with this complexity, were well-placed to join the endeavor of making sense of the complex mental life of the psychiatric patient. A vast body of literature has been developed over the past few decades supplementing psychiatry’s approach to psychopathology – it is precisely this field that has come to be known as ‘phenomenological psychopathology’. In this talk, I suggest that as psychiatry takes a renewed interest in the connection between moods, emotions, behaviours and (for instance) immune profiles and the microbiome, phenomenologists are presented with an exciting intellectual opportunity. Phenomenologists, I maintain, are well-positioned to start a “new wave” of engagement with the medical sciences reflecting this exciting research angle in psychiatry.

Methodologically, there are many options. I discuss an example of a recent approach to phenomenology’s role in such research by focusing on how phenomenology can be a useful ally to the project of closing the gap between illnesses of mind and of body. I show how a recent body of work on self-experience in phenomenological psychopathology is importantly relevant for a variety of medical contexts which heavily implicate existential and affective dimensions of experience such as, but not at all limited to, post-covid syndrome.

Panel: Methodology in Phenomenological Anthropology

Anthony Vincent Fernandez: How Phenomenology Justifies Empirical Methods: The Case of Apprenticeship in Anthropology

Today, it’s commonplace to say that phenomenology is, first and foremost, a method. It therefore comes as no surprise that when researchers in other disciplines draw upon phenomenology, they often do so by adapting specific philosophical methods, such as the epoché or reductions, for their own empirical aims. There is, however, another way that researchers draw upon and use phenomenology, which has received considerably less attention: Phenomenology is sometimes used to justify empirical methods that phenomenologists themselves do not use in their own philosophical work.

In this presentation, I demonstrate this methodological role of phenomenology by considering apprenticeship methods in anthropology. Within anthropology, apprenticeship is used not only to gain first-hand insight into processes of skill development, but also to embed oneself more deeply within specific socio-cultural practices, interpersonal relationships, and so on. To justify the use of these methods, some anthropologists appeal to phenomenological accounts of embodied subjectivity, including accounts of habit formation, skill acquisition, tool incorporation, empathy, and intercorporeality. They use these phenomenological accounts of embodied subjectivity to explain the kinds of empirical insights apprenticeship provides, thereby justifying the use of apprenticeship methods in their own research.

I argue that this methodological role of phenomenology—as a philosophical justification for the use of empirical methods—differs significantly from the application of specific phenomenological methods into empirical research. In closing, I suggest that this use of phenomenology may be fairly widespread, and provide a few examples of how phenomenology has also been used to justify empirical methods in other disciplines, including in architecture and psychiatry.

Bernhard Leistle: Erwin Straus’ “Spectrum of the Senses” as Contribution to Phenomenological- Cultural Anthropology

There is an ongoing debate in cultural anthropology about the relation between sensory experience (or more specifically, the sensorium, the organization of the various senses) and culture. Broadly speaking, one side (e.g. David Howes) argues in favor of a strong version of relativism, stressing the cultural “diversity” of the senses; the other side (e.g. Tim Ingold) takes a one-world approach it bases on a reading of phenomenology, stressing the unity of the senses. In my talk, I argue that Erwin Straus’ (1891 – 1975) conception of a “spectrum of the senses” has the potential to bring this debate to a higher level. Straus, a psychiatrist and phenomenologist, developed his spectrum approach in his major work Vom Sinn der Sinne (1935, translated as The Primacy of Sensory Experience, 1963). It is based on Straus’ phenomenological understanding of sensory experience, or “sensing” (Empfinden), as communication between I and the World, or, as he also says, the Other. The various senses (that is, traditionally speaking, seeing, hearing, touching, smelling and tasting) differentiate themselves from each other as specific modes of this communication. This differentiation takes place in relation to a broad range of phenomenological dimensions, such as objectivity, temporality, spatiality, sociality etc. All sensory modalities are describable in terms of these and other aspects, but the senses articulate them in specific ways that mark their distinctiveness. In other words, the senses are simultaneously interconnected with each other and differentiated

from each other. By conceptualizing this essential intertwining of unity and diversity in sensory experience through structural terms like spectrum and dominance, Straus provides a phenomenological anthropology of culture with a uniquely powerful analytical tool.

Sarah Pini: Embodying otherness, reconsidering illness: An autoethnographic phenomenological approach

This presentation offers an account of a lived experience of cancer and how illness—as a disruptive event (Carel, 2008, 2016, 2021)—enables philosophical reflection and the exploration of ‘other’ ways of being-in-the-world (Merleau-Ponty, 2012 [1945]). According to the biomedical model of the body, the subject of the illness event is the pathology rather than the person diagnosed with the disease. In this view, a body-self becomes a ‘patient’ body-object that can be enrolled in a therapeutic protocol, investigated, assessed, and transformed. My study asked how cancer patients might incorporate the opposite dimensions of their body-self to avoid becoming a mere object-body. To conduct this research, I drew upon phenomenological explorations of radical illness experience that provide insights into forms of embodiment that expand and enrich biomedical views of the body. Building on a phenomenological approach to illness (Carel, 2012, 2014, 2016, 2021), and a feminist post-humanist perspective (Haraway, 1990, 1991, 2016), I present a case in which an autoethnographic and phenomenological approach grounded on embodied knowledge (Spry, 2001; Denzin, 2014: Pini, 2022) may help revise dominant perspectives.

Based on my lived experience of becoming ‘chimera’, I address the concept of alterity through an embodied perspective. Through autoethnographic video material collected over ten years of onco-haematological treatments, video dance performances and physical explorations, I ask if an embodied ‘chimeric-thinking’ can be used to question established notions of alterity and reshape our relationship with ‘otherness’ (Leistle, 2015, 2016b). By interrogating the kind of epistemology that can emerge from the incorporation of such radical complexity, I aim to provide an example of how phenomenological insights can be used in anthropological research to explore profound biopsychosocial and somatic transformations.

Jared Epp: Making Bad Movies: An Experiment in Collaborative Research Practice

In this presentation, I reflect on my performance-based ethnographic fieldwork. I describe how I used a phenomenological approach to situate the encounter between researcher and interlocutor as well as frame the content and reception of the performances. My research involved collaborative film making with one individual living on the social margins in Toronto. Together, we made a series of films highlighting his unique socio-political and philosophical concepts. Following an approach developed by the phenomenological anthropologist, Cheryl Mattingly (2019), I centred my interlocutor’s experience, desire and imagination as an individual, as opposed to reducing him to a “third-person” or “token of a type”— a mere product of social, historical processes that led to his marginalization. Instead, we encountered each other as fellow thinkers, collaborators and creators. To establish this mode of relation, I relied on a phenomenological understanding of intersubjectivity, ensuring that my interlocutor was never reduced to a kind of static object or mere research subject. We encountered each other as fully constituted selves or “I”s, allowing for open possibility within the research encounter (Merleau-Ponty 2012). He wrote the scripts, we both acted and I rendered his ideas in film. What emerged from our collaboration were a series of laughable and bizarre speculative fiction films.

Grounded in phenomenology, my research on marginality, creativity and imagination centres possibility and process over the finality of product and representation. This foregrounds the direct experiences of an interlocutor in the unfolding moment of research, rather than extracting material within a predefined frame. However, the films are a final product of my dissertation and must perform for adjudication. By presenting creative content to an audience (thesis committee) as a mode of performance, the films represent a kind of experiment that hopes to challenge preconceptions of what constitutes legitimate and meaningful research.

Embodiment, imagination and political ontology

Kristian Klockars: Experientially anchored immanent critique and political ontology

I aim to test political ontology as a theoretical device designed to bridge three experiential (sensory methodology), seemingly non-compatible, dimensions at the heart of immanent critique. I will understand political ontology as a constructive project (phenomenological constructivism) aiming to conceive new schemes of political co-existence to aid resolving conflicts between utopian, but well-grounded, ideals and possible, but not sufficiently radical, normative conceptions.

Immanent critique relies on an experiential dimension of the contextual intelligibility and possibility of normative ideals: ideal conceptions should arise out of how we already experience the world and as present possibilities. It is thus simultaneously context-dependent and context transcending, e.g. a solution to the climate crises should be developed by route of an intelligible and presently possible exit-scheme. One might pose green growth as such an immanent ideal.

However, the criticism of green growth is severe: it has so far proved more of an ideological hoax to preserve economic growth than a successful solution. For this reason, some pose degrowth as an alternative ideal. Degrowth (see Kallis), again, appears highly utopian and not immanently anchored as a real possibility rooted in the present.

To remain pertinently critical, immanent critique needs to avoid ending up with meagre compromises such as green growth. This implies to preserve a dimension of radical imaginary, while somehow resolving the lack of real possibility often present in radical imaginaries.

I pose political ontology as a possibly fruitful route of connection. This implies to develop new but immanent (from out of present political ontologies) schemes of staging (Lefort) that bridges the gap between radical imaginaries and present possibilities. In other words, to view what Merleau-Ponty and Lefort calls the flesh of the political in terms of conceiving of new, future-oriented and global political ontological schemes.

Mattias Lehtinen: Embodied political imagination: Reconfiguring political imaginaries to account for embodied experientiality

In my presentation I will conceptualize and offer a possible solution for how to think about the materiality and sensoriality of the construction of political imaginaries. There is a growing literature using the concept of political imaginaries to denote how the coexistential world appears as a configuration of intersubjectively constituted meaning. This concept has, however, rightly been criticized for not paying enough attention to the embodied, sensory, and material dimensions of political reality.

In my presentation I will examine the possibility of using phenomenological methodological means to conceptualize how political imaginaries also involve embodied and sensory dimensions. At the same time, I argue that research concerning political imaginaries can provide phenomenological methodology with a powerful tool to think how bodies are socially and politically coded: gendered and racialized components of political imaginaries which circulate in society certainly affect our experiences of both other bodies and our own.

Political imaginaries constitute semiautonomous fields of meaningfulness, constructed between individuals entangled in changing and complex social-historical fields. It is therefore not apparent how the immediate presence of the living and experiencing body should be situated in relation to political imaginaries. But political imaginaries also work through bodies and are conditioned by the lived experiences of the bodies which construct political imaginaries. It therefore seems clear that there is an embodied dimension present in their construction.

I argue that the entanglement between embodiment and political imagination can fruitfully be conceptualized by introducing methodological considerations from Jean-Luc Nancy's philosophy. Having introduced such a Nancyan "intercorporeal understanding" of political imaginaries I will argue that the affect theoretical considerations of Laurent Berlant can then be used to conceptualize the ambivalent relations formed between "individual" bodies and the inertia of the given political imaginaries.

Ville Suuronen: Heimatgefühl: On the Affective Ground of Judgement in the Work of Hannah Arendt

Hannah Arendt would state on numerous occasions: “I need to understand.” It is in this context, in which she elaborates the notions of understanding and judgment that Arendt also notes: “And when other human beings understand – in the same sense (Sinne) as I have understood – then that gives me satisfaction (Befriedigung), like a feeling-of-being-at-home (Heimatgefühl).”

What is this almost untranslatable “Heimatgefühl” that Arendt mentions? How is it related to her concepts of understanding and judgment? How can this affect or feeling of sharing a mutual homeland constitute an internal part of the process of understanding, which one senses when someone thinks (and perhaps judges?) in the same way as I do?

This presentation argues that the concept of Heimatgefühl denotes a thus-far uncharted region in Arendt’s work: a space of immanence that can (1) either be curiously passive/apolitical space, thus being a space in which no discussion and rhetorical judgement is necessary, a space where shared pre-judgments constitute a kind of a realm of self-evidence, even if this does not reach the same depth as the wordlessness experienced in such emotions as love; (2) or a an active realm of shared understanding that constitutes the basic presupposition for a specific political group to act and change the world effectively, to “act in concert” as Arendt would put the matter.

It is maintained that with her notion of Heimatgefühl, Arendt not only acknowledges that political judgment is grounded in pre-judgments or prejudices (Vorurteile), but also argues for a certain affective background for political judgments. Thinking through Arendt’s political theory from this novel perspective, the presentation criticizes the prevailing Kantian-rationalistic readings of Arendt’s work and aims to recover the affective background of her notion of judgment through a phenomenological reading of her work.

Astrid Grelz: Sensible exaggeration and ‘systematik après coup’: philosophizing with Günther Anders at the intersection between metaphysics and journalism

The aim of my presentation is to show upon the retroactive effects of Günther Anders’ atypical philosophical method. From where (or rather: in reaction to who) comes his persistent resilience towards minimizing metaphysics, homogenous systematization, and obscure language? And how is it reflected in his work? Drawing on key concepts in Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen (vol. 1–2), I suggest that Ander’s anti-method filled a unique ethical and political function in Post-war Europe, and discuss its strengths and weaknesses in light on contemporary ethical challenges.

Sound and the Senses:

Andrzej Krawiec: Search for a new methodology to analyse the hidden phenomenality of a musical work

Sounds are not identical with music since they only constitute the external appearance of a musical work and its most explicit layer, while aesthetic perception is certainly not limited to the superficial perception of sounds. Taking into account a distinction between artistic properties and aesthetic properties of a musical work, the question of their interdependencies still remains unanswered. However, finding the answer to this essential question requires a methodology, which involves examining musical work as an acoustic artefact, as well as a phenomenon. It seems, that the methodology of contemporary phenomenological aesthetics is heading for that direction, and the significant effects of such analysis can be already seen in the academic discipline of the art history. Gottfried Boehm (2014) and Georges Didi-Huberman (2005, 2015, 2017, 2018) showed new possibilities of revealing the hidden phenomenality of a work of art. Yet, is it possible to apply the methodology of research on the invisible visuality of a painting to the field of the non-acoustic phenomenality of a musical work? What kind of additional research problems does a work of music cause, bearing in mind the fact that it is not only created by its author-composer, but it also requires a re-creational performance to phenomenally exist? This presentation indicates the need to expand the research horizon as regards the issue of non-sounding elements of music. The relevant question is how musicology and music theory could effectively contribute to the detailed phenomenological analysis in the area of musical arts. The main aim is to bring new research perspectives to a work of music and its performances in the light of contemporary phenomenology. Finding a methodology, which could reveal a transition from sensory data to aesthetic properties is what will significantly help us to understand the inner aesthetic content of particular works of art.

Remus Breazu: The Surpass of Every Measure of the Senses. On the Sublime

In my presentation, I will analyse the peculiar intentional modification of the consciousness that occurs when experiencing the sublime. My paper will have the following structure. As an introduction, I will briefly present the most influential conception of the sublime that one finds in Kant (1790). The purpose of this section is to break free from Kant’s constructive method of his transcendental idealism, which incorporates his architectonics and its specific concepts, in order to focus on the phenomenon of the sublime. Every philosophical conception, as Merleau-Ponty showed in his writings, is not entirely false because it is based necessarily on some experience. In this light, I will only use Kant’s analyses of the sublime to grasp the phenomenon as it is given in experience. The main part of the presentation will be a careful phenomenological Husserlian-inspired analysis of the consciousness of the sublime, focusing on the two sides of the essential correlation between subject and object. Thus, on the noematic side, I will highlight the inherent sensible aspect of the phenomenon upon which the sublime is founded, and I will use some insights from Fink’s (1976) works to show Husserl’s conceptual limitations. On the noetic side, I will point out a special kind of possibility that surpasses the meaning-bestowal (Sinngebung) of consciousness. This will be accomplished through two micro-analyses of two concrete examples of the sublime: the gazing at the sky, and the contemplation of a violent storm. There will be two main contributions to the existing research: (i) a phenomenological account of the sublime that expands on and contribute to the scant literature already available (e.g., Richir 1993, 2008, Welten 2011, and Goble 2017), and (ii) showing how this phenomenon relates to a phenomenology of nonsense.

Thor Magnusson: A Phenomenology of Instrumental Intent

The human use of technology is always relevant to phenomenological analysis although often sidelined. However, from Heidegger through Merleau-Ponty to Ihde, we read accounts of how technology extends the human body, articulated more profoundly by Bernard Stiegler who argues that technology is the very constitution of humanity. Segueing into today’s cognitive science, the 4Es (embodied, embedded, enactive, and extended) highlight the role of the environment with its technological equipment. Our mind is not independent of our environment but rather entangled in what Karen Barad calls material-discursive practices of thought and technology. In my own work I have framed musical instruments of all kinds as epistemic tools, investigating how the technology incorporates and encapsulates musical theory which the musician engages with when composing or performing. But what happens when those technologies become intelligent, exhibiting agency and goal directed behaviour? How do we relate to such technologies? What is the new phenomenology of musical instruments with agency? In this talk I will introduce some of the new theoretical directions emerging from the Intelligent Instruments Lab hosted by the Iceland University of the Arts.

Martin Nitsche: Sonic phenomenology: an audition-centered phenomenological methodology for describing sonic environments

Our life-environments are increasingly affected by sounds, noises, voices, and music – yet, the phenomenological approach to describe them is still built upon a methodical primacy of visual perception. In this talk I aim, therefore, not to phenomenologically describe sonic environments, but primarily to develop an audition-centered phenomenological methodology to enable this task.

The presentation I propose is based on two premises: 1. Phenomenology of perception gives priority to visual experience; consequently, its basic notions and methods are traditionally modelled according to visuality. 2. Once it describes aural experience, phenomenology thematically prefers listening to a voice or a music over less articulated sonic experiences (i.e., sounds without an obvious meaning, melody, or rhythm). To avoid these omissions, I designate with a “sonic environment” the acoustic shape of our life-environment – where “acoustic” is understood in a multisensory sense and does not exclude visual, tactile, olfactory, and gustatory sensations connected with sounds or their sources. Sonic environments (as they are lived) are not composed of separate sounds, but created by “sonic phenomena” – i.e., lived (real or imagined) experiences with sounds, noises, voices, and music.

The talk briefly introduces the phenomenological topology in order to claim the insufficiency of analyzing sonic environments only as sound-spaces, i.e., environments created by different sounds. Rather, they must be explained as lived phenomenological spaces. Following a critical reading of Husserl’s Thing and Space the presentation focuses on the topological significance of the reciprocity between emerging of an object (e.g., a sound) and its perceiving. This reciprocity enables then to propose a conception of emergent places and to explain how they establish the phenomenological space of sonic environments.

Finally, proposing the project of “sonic phenomenology” the presentation offers methodological self-reflections of phenomenology at the inter-disciplinary borders with sound-studies.