Episodios

  • Prof. Rebecca Braun - Literary Futures: How Fiction Can Help Policy Makers

    Prof. Rebecca Braun - Literary Futures: How Fiction Can Help Policy Makers
    Apr 6 2026
    Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern. This episode features a keynote presentation from Prof. Rebecca Braun Abstract: This lecture sets out how literary texts both engage with methods that are central to futures studies – notably forecasting and back-casting – and are themselves a method for linking past, present and future in new, socially-meaningful ways. Because narrative plots routinely upend any straightforward chronological understanding of causality, literature can itself be seen as a tool with practical application for work in social futures. Accordingly, I provide a broad survey of how canonical literary texts and genres have developed blueprints for different ways of living in the world that draw alternately on forecasting and back-casting methods, and then work through the specific example offered by one of the founding novels of the European canon, Miguel de Cervantes’s Don Quixote (1605/1615). In so doing, I show how literary texts allow their readers to reposition themselves in relation to multiple possible worlds and sketch out distinct plans of action, for both themselves and others, that are informed by powerfully imagined lived experience. Literature provides valuable insight into the different kinds of agency and resilience that are needed to sustain such future-forming activity and which other, more technocratic models of scenario planning tend to overlook. Biography: Rebecca Braun joined NUI Galway in 2021 to take up the position of Executive Dean of the College of Arts, Social Sciences & Celtic Studies. Before then, she was Professor of Modern Languages & Creative Futures at Lancaster University in the UK, where she was also Co-Director of the Institute for Social Futures from 2017-2020. She has held further lectureships and research fellowships at the Universities of Liverpool, Manchester and Oxford in the UK and at the Freie Universität Berlin. She grew up in West Cork and Tipperary. Rebecca's work explores how literary texts can drive new ways of thinking about the future, both as objects of analysis (traditional literary criticism) and as a co-creative process (practice-focused workshops using creative writing techniques). This futures work builds on a deep understanding of the power of people and stories, which she has traced in numerous books on authorship, world literature, transnationalism, and cultural value. Most recently, these include World Authorship, co-edited with Tobias Boes and Emily Spiers (Oxford: OUP, 2020) and Transnational German Studies, co-edited with Benedict Schofield (Liverpool: LUP, 2020). Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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    39 m
  • Prof. Andrew Benjamin - Future as Suspension

    Prof. Andrew Benjamin - Future as Suspension
    Apr 3 2026
    Season 8 begins with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern. This episode features a keynote presentation from Prof. Andrew Benjamin, University of Technology, Sydney and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, Melbourne Abstract: In Walter Benjamin’s review of Junger’s edited collection War and Warrior, Benjamin links the possibility of the future to the overcoming of myth and magic. He writes in relation to the essays comprising the book that, Until Germany has broken through (gesprengt hat) the entanglement of such Medusa- like beliefs that confront it in these essays, it cannot hope for a future (eine Zukunst erhoffen). While the term ‘breaking through’ occurs in this passage, a similar strategy is at work in terms such as ‘divine violence’, ‘destruction’ and ‘caesura’. What is significant about them is that they define the future in terms of the openings created by the suspension of dominant logics. The aim of his paper is to investigate this particular conception of the future. Biography: Andrew Benjamin is the Distinguished Professor of Architectural Theory at the University of Technology, Sydney (and Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at Monash University, Melbourne). Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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    44 m
  • Enactive Autopoiesis and the Future of Dynamic Affective Science

    Enactive Autopoiesis and the Future of Dynamic Affective Science
    Apr 1 2026
    Season 7 concludes with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Matthew Menchaca of City University of New York, United States Abstract: There are two sub-theses to the Embodied Mind’s (1991) core five theses which I contend Engaged Phenomenology needs to reconcile: phenomenology and autopoiesis. In particular, how is what is revealed in experience (phenomenology) connected to the neuro-immuno-cognitive-networks that make us living (autopoiesis)? In Evan Thompson’s 2007 book Mind in Life, he provides a history of autopoiesis and a genealogy of phenomenology which attempts to provide such an answer. In later work, Giovanni Colomobetti, in the book The Feeling Body (2013), views autopoiesis as too restricted a concept for the purposes of characterizing the features of a field she has invented (for the purposes of better understanding the intersubjective reality of emotions): Dynamic Affective Science. In this essay, I present the core features of autopoiesis, give examples of failed attempts to artificially generate such living structures, and situate the sub-concepts on the conditions of life and meaning of “adaptation” (according to autopoiesis) against evolutionary theory. In particular, I suggest that the autopoietic formulation of “adaptation” properly understood is what Colombetti describes in her genealogy of phenomenology (Chapter 2) as “primordial affectivity”. Thus an engaged phenomenology premised on shared life-worlds, in particular in their affective complexity, can rely on autopoietic criteria to ensure their phenomenology is of the living. Biography: Matthew Menchaca is a 4th year Ph.d student in philosophy at City University of New York (CUNY). A pipeline mentor and himself of minority descent (Mexican and Native American), he most recently presented at Dubrovnik Conference on Cognitive Science (DUCOG) 2021 Linguistic and Cognitive Foundations of Meaning, applying Devitt and Kripke’s causal theory of reference to the acquisition of “standard” arithmetic. Currently at the prospectus stage, he is looking forward to writing a dissertation at the intersection of phenomenology and cognitive science Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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    24 m
  • Do we have a dreamworld?

    Do we have a dreamworld?
    Mar 30 2026
    Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Chu Ming Hon of The Chinese University of Hong Kong, China Abstract: The aim of this paper is twofold: first, to suggest that phenomenological studies of worldliness are crucial for dream research; second, to indicate that dream research can in return enrich our understanding of world-consciousness. Dreaming is a rare theme in the classics of phenomenology. It is not easy to determine the nature of dreaming in the light of other kinds of experience. As Jean Héring has neatly summarized, phenomenologists are divided by two opinions: dreaming is either perception or representation. However, as this paper aims to show, subsuming dreaming under either category is equally perplexing, for it will then become either a special case of perception, or a special case of representation. A solution is thereby proposed, according to which oneiric phenomenon should be studied in the light of its presumptive worldliness. Dreaming is special so long as it opens a field of experiences encompassing our being-there, to the extent that dream appears as if a reality. A phenomenology of dreaming therefore focuses on the borderline between dream and reality, in order to ascertain how far they can be confused. Such a study is preceded by controversies over the worldliness of dreams. For example, while Edmund Husserl and Theodor Conrad affirm that dreaming implies immersion in a dreamworld, for Jan Patočka and Jean-Paul Sartre dreams essentially involve the privation of worldly structure. Provided that worldliness is a minimal condition of the position of reality, determining whether dreams are worldly (welthaft) or worldless (weltlos) is decisive for determining how far dreams resemble reality. Phenomenological debates on the nature of dreaming will also prove crucial to dream research in general. Despite advanced methods of observation, pioneering dream researchers are still fundamentally divided regarding the experiential characters of dream. And a significant portion of their disagreement lies in the presumptive worldliness of dreams. Biography: I am a doctor candidate in the Chinese University of Hong Kong. My research focuses on the motivations of phenomenological reduction, and extends to altered states of consciousness. In 2020, I have published a book on dreaming, titled Formen der Versunkenheit. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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    20 m
  • Making Sense of the “Common Sense” on the Ground of Trust in the Others

    Making Sense of the “Common Sense” on the Ground of Trust in the Others
    Mar 27 2026
    Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Wun Chung Yan of The University of Cologne, Germany Abstract: In ordinary language, “common sense” is understood as certain “sense” that is taken for granted (selbstverständlich). However, is the “sense” of common sense an unquestioned feeling towards the world or is it rather certain common understanding of it? Through a phenomenological investigation of schizophrenia, I argue that the common sense does not only encompass both but also a third dimension, namely, the affective trust and familiarity (Vertrautheit) with the world constituted intersubjectively. In their study of schizophrenia, Blankenburg and Thomas Fuchs understand the common sense (Selbstverständlichkeit) lost in the schizophrenic patients principally as a kind of feeling or affectivity. Blankenburg terms it the Feingefühl and identifies it with the Heideggerian concept of Bewandtnis- and Verweisungszusammenhang, as distinguished from the objective apperception of things that remains unscathed. Fuchs, similarly, argues that it is the disorder and modification of the mood (Stimmung) into the Wahnstimmung that underlies the modification of lived-experiences of the patients characterized by their constant questioning (Infragestellung) of one’s existence and paranoiac delusions. Revisiting Heidegger’s account of Bewandtniszusammenhang as constituted by both understanding and attunement (Befindlichkeit), I contend with two concrete arguments that the basic sense of the world as Bewandtniszusammenhang is preserved by the patients. What is lacking in the patients is instead the “capacity” to devote oneself to (sich hingeben) the retained sense of world. Here I introduce Husserl’s distinction between the simple value-perception (schlichte Wertnehmung) of something as valuable/invaluable and the subject’s affective position-taking (Gemütsstellungnahme) towards those apperceived qualities. The dedication (Hingabe) requires the subject’s affective trust and familiarity with the world and others, which is established throughout one’s lived-experiences in the intersubjectively constituted life-world. Once this essential sense of trust, or Urvertrauen, is destroyed (through e.g., traumatic experiences), the subject would no longer be able to truly embrace any kind of common sense as unquestioned. Biography: Graduated from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, I am now a PhD candidate of Prof. Thiemo Breyer and a DAAD-scholarship holder at the a.r.t.e.s. Graduate School from the University of Cologne. My research project is dedicated to the problematic of the unconscious, understood as the sedimentations in the Husserlian sense, and its relation to the normal as well as so-called pathological life of consciousness such as schizophrenia and borderline-personality disorder. Last year, I held a presentation titled “Der Urboden des Bewusstseins – die Stimmung und die Frage nach dem Unbewussten” in the colloquium organized by Prof. Thomas Fuchs in Jena. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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    17 m
  • What Phenomenological Pathology Can Teach Us About Anxiety Disorder: Anxiety Disorder as Self-Disorder with Disrupted Self-Specifying Processes

    What Phenomenological Pathology Can Teach Us About Anxiety Disorder: Anxiety Disorder as Self-Disorder with Disrupted Self-Specifying Processes
    Mar 25 2026
    Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Alexandra Jewell of University of British Columbia, Canada Abstract: Anxiety disorders are the most common psychiatric disorders and are associated with a high burden of illness. Given the increasing reports of anxiety symptoms in the face of climate change, pandemics, and socio-political relations, anxiety disorders are due additional analysis that might aid our descriptions and explanations. I propose that a phenomenological approach to anxiety disorders can do just that. Specifically, we ought to examine the ways in which the self plays a role in anxiety disorders. While previous accounts have highlighted the importance of the self in the occurrence and maintenance of anxiety disorders, their dealing of the notion lacks the phenomenological richness to capture the multidimensionality of selfhood. Borrowing the notion of self-disorder from phenomenological pathology, I argue that anxiety disorders similarly exhibit an alteration to our most fundamental experience of a self-immersed-in-the-world via disordered/disrupted organization of self-specifying processes. To substantiate my claims, I refer to empirical work on anxiety from clinical psychology and cognitive science regarding disruptions in experience of selfhood, on the one hand, and corresponding alterations of worldly experience, on the other. Next, I consider and respond to reasons theorists might have excluded anxiety disorders from the class of self-disorders. I then propose that interoception, which plays a fundamental role in forming our basic sense of self, is a good place to start when looking for the disruption of self-specifying processes in anxiety disorder. After considering empirical evidence to support this hypothesis, I will suggest a possible, causal explanations for this disruption in interoception by drawing from emotion theory and recent work in neuroscience. Biography: Alexandra Jewell is a PhD Candidate in Philosophy at the University of British Columbia. Under the supervision of both Christopher Mole and Evan Thompson, Alexandra researches the intersection of philosophy of mind, phenomenology, cognitive science, and philosophy of psychiatry. She is interested in bringing the phenomenological approach into our understanding of psychiatric disorders in hopes to improve our descriptions and explanations within psychiatry. Having a background in Tibetan Buddhism, Alexandra also incorporates this worldview in her investigations of the subjective experience in cases of psychiatric disorder. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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    21 m
  • Towards a phenomenology of environmental shame

    Towards a phenomenology of environmental shame
    Mar 23 2026
    Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Sergio Pérez Gatica of Ecole Normale Supérieure de Paris, France Abstract: This contribution aims to study the phenomenon of environmental shame and its role in awakening of ecological consciousness. It starts with the problem of asymmetry of human power that marks the current ecological transition. On the one hand, the growing ecological footprint testifies to excess of human power over the environment which leads to the sixth mass extinction and endangers planetary balance. On the other, facing ecological crisis, human, paradoxically, finds himself more powerless than ever. Powerless to slow down and to challenge his daily production and consumption practices by refusing to take their consequences into account. In a word, powerless to suspend his own power. One should ask then how to catalyze this suspension. My argument is to consider shame as such a feeling that turns an excess of human power over the environment into “potential-not-to”. Making use of this ontological concept developed by Agamben in order to think the negativity of human power that shame activates, the paper elaborates a phenomenology of “environmental shame”. Since suspending power requires to challenge its ethical justification by measuring the extent of its destructive consequences for other species, it is nothing but shame where freedom becomes aware of its murderous character that answers the need of self-limitation of human power over the environment. My concept of “environmental shame” develops Levinasian approach that defines shame as a discovery of injustified facticity of power and freedom, but rethinking it from the human relation to other endangered and vulnerable living beings. Shame, I argue, is a revolutionary feeling able to operate a conversion of environmental consciousness and transform our manner of being in the world by actualizing the “potential-not-to”, i.e. the negative potential that allows inoperativity of human power. Biography: Maria Galkina is a PhD student in Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris working on phenomenology of environmental shame and negative dialectic of human power. Her research interests cover Phenomenology of emotions and affects, Ethics and Metaphysics. Maria holds a B.A. in Creative writing from the Maxim Gorky Literature Institute of Moscow and an M.A. in Contemporary Philosophy from the École Normale Supérieure de Paris, which has focused on the dialectic of negativity and creativity of shame through analysis of works of Levinas, Agamben and Dostoevsky. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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    18 m
  • Pain, suffering, and mood - a Husserlian proposal

    Pain, suffering, and mood - a Husserlian proposal
    Mar 23 2026
    Season 7 continues with another presentation from our 2022 annual conference, Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Spatiality. This episode features a presentation from Niklas Noe-Steinmueller of University Hospital Heidelberg, Section for Phenomenology, Germany Abstract: The concept of suffering is part of a new way of thinking about pain that tries to take patients’ individual perspective seriously instead of reducing their experiences to a biological mechanism (Ballantyne & Sullivan, 2015). I will briefly summarise the preliminary result of a systematic review of operationalisations of suffering (authors anonymised, in prep.), point out a fundamental disagreement within the literature, and then show what phenomenology can contribute to resolve it. Suffering is usually defined as emotional distress related to a loss of identity and resulting from insufficient coping resources (Cassell, 1982; Chapman & Gavrin, 1999). However, some argue that suffering is a strictly individual experience only understandable from within a life narrative (Frank, 2001; Kleinman, 1988). Defining it is said to be futile and even harmful for the patients because it thrusts a foreign perspective on their illness upon them (Charmaz, 1983; Frank, 2001). To sum up, while most authors believe the concept of suffering to widen the scope of medicine, others warn against the danger of patronizing patients. I propose that phenomenology can solve this problem by analysing suffering in terms of (gradual) presence. In suffering, my lifeworld becomes less present to me, i.e. less forceful, less vivid – with one exception: That, which I suffer from, becomes more present to me. This is a particular form of presence that I call ‘pre-intentional’ (Bernet, 2014). This analysis contributes to the reconceptualization of pain by offering a working hypothesis about the core of the suffering experience. By focussing on the structure of suffering rather than its content, it avoids patronising the sufferer and acknowledges that suffering is as heterogenous as the lifeworlds of the suffering subjects. I conclude by comparing my analysis to an insightful phenomenological account of suffering as an alienating mood by Frederick Svenaeus (2014). Biography: PhD student at the Section for Phenomenology, University Hospital Heidelberg - starting in July 2022: Clinical psychologist at the Clinic for General Psychiatry, University of Heidelberg - 2020-2022 MSc Psychology at Heidelberg (thesis about the operationalisation of suffering in pain research, systematic review) - 2015-2020 BSc Psychology at Heidelberg - 2015-2019 MA Philosophy at Heidelberg (thesis about the phenomenology of pain and depression) - 2012-2015 BA Philosophy at Heidelberg and Oxford - born 10 December 1991 in Freiburg, Germany. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2022: Engaged Phenomenology II: Explorations of Embodiment, Emotions, and Sociality (Exeter, UK / Hybrid) with the University of Exeter. Sponsored by the Wellcome Centre, Egenis, and the Shame and Medicine project. For the conference our speakers either presented in person at Exeter or remotely to people online and in-room, and the podcast episodes are recorded from the live broadcast feeds. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/
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    17 m