Center for Subjectivity Research

As promised in a previous blog post, The Cambridge Companion to Philosophical Methodology has now been published!

Co-edited by Giuseppina D’Oro (Keele University) and myself, the book offers clear and comprehensive coverage of the main methodological debates and approaches within philosophy. The chapters in this volume approach the question of how to do philosophy from a wide range of perspectives, including conceptual analysis, critical theory, deconstruction, experimental philosophy, hermeneutics, Kantianism, methodological naturalism, pragmatism and, last but not least, phenomenology.

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Together with Dan Zahavi and Thomas Szanto, I have been involved in the organization of the upcoming CFS conference “Shared Cultural Context and Interpersonal Understanding”.

The conference will take place on May 18-19, and is part of the CFS project “Empathy and Interpersonal Understanding”, financed by the VELUX Foundation.

The main aim of the conference is to explore the interrelations between shared cultural context and interpersonal understanding from an interdisciplinary perspective.

Some of the questions to be considered at the conference are:

• How do shared cultural contexts and in-group/out-group dynamics enable and influence different forms of interpersonal understanding?
• Conversely, what is the impact of interpersonal understanding on shared cultural contexts?
• In this regard, is there a specific role for empathy, sympathy, and mutual recognition?
• Furthermore, how do processes of stereotyping and typification contribute to our understanding of the interrelations between interpersonal understanding and shared cultural context?

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Intuitively there is a clear difference between attention, curiosity and interest. Still, I have managed to be very confused on the question of what the differences exactly are. Recently, I have been interested in Husserl’s descriptions of how we are affected and motivated towards what is given and pegiven. My interest in these aspects of Husserl’s writings (in particular Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis) stems from my discomfort with on the one hand a sharp distinction between sensory and conceptual curiosity in the existing literature and the other hand the tendency to require to much of curiosity (that it is directed towards something specific and is aware of some information, knowledge, or the like, that it lacks).

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After a year and a half of work (not counting maternity leave!), my involvement with the project on The Genomic History of Denmark is slowly drawing to a close. Working in it has been both fun and enormously challenging, since I had to learn a lot about population genomics, ancient DNA research and genetic ancestry testing.

But you may wonder: why is someone from CFS working for such a project? Well, the answer is that one can often hear claims that genetics has something to tell us about our identity, about who we are. In the case of ancient DNA research and genetic ancestry testing, the claim is specifically that it can unlock the mysteries of our ancestry and tell us where we really come from, which is supposed to be a key to who we really are. All such claims spark controversy to a higher or lesser degree, and raise questions about what identity means. My job within this project has been to reflect upon the implications that this research may have, and should or should not have, for personal identity (for identity self-ascription, group-identification and the sense of group belongingness) and group membership.

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On April 28-29, CFS will host a two-day workshop on the theme of “Shared and Temporally Extended Agency”. People exercise shared agency when they intentionally do things together. Think about two or more people having a conversation, cooking dinner together, or navigating across the sea in a sailing boat together. These joint actions all consist of many “smaller” actions that are all performed to bring about some common goal (mutual understanding, eating food, safely reaching a destination). Similarly, temporally extended actions consist of many smaller actions that are all organised around a common goal.

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The Ego is not monolithic, but complex phenomena. It contains inner complexity. Husserl encounters this complexity in terms of temporality in his later manuscripts. Against this background, he works out the ultimate inseparable nature of ego and non-ego. However, this is different from the encounter with the world as a non-ego. So far I had interpreted that the primal ego is the only condition for the possibility of appearance. In fact, in a passage in some research manuscripts, Husserl himself also stated that the primal-ego is the innermost. However, we can find the following very strange expression in the manuscript of the same period. “The streaming is always in advance, but also the I is in advance”. I have attempted to interpret these statements in terms of precedence of the primal ego. 

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Can there be experience without self-consciousness? – In analytic philosophy of mind, this question is usually affirmed. It is argued that experience is the so-called “hard problem” of consciousness, the problem that deserves the most attention, while self-consciousness is thought to be a comparably easy problem to solve. In my recent book “The Pre-Reflective Self. Subjectivity as Minimal Self-Consciousness” [“Das präreflexive Selbst. Subjektivität als minimales Selbstbewusstsein”, Mentis 2016] I question this claim and the separation of mind that it brings with it. Following Zahavi, Kriegel and others, I argue that every phenomenally conscious state involves a minimal consciousness of myself, since every phenomenally conscious state is such that there is something it is like for me to have it. Thus, experience and self-consciousness cannot be separated. They go hand in hand.

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A couple of days ago we, the Network for Woman in Philosophy, organized a conference at the University of Copenhagen in a cooperation with a similar network in Bergen, Norway. The aim of the conference was to pay attention to women philosophers. All speakers were women and presented work including women philosophers. The two keynotes were Sabrina Ebbersmeyer from University of Copenhagen and Anne-Marie Søndergaard’s Christensen from University of Southern Denmark and they were followed by student as well as senior researchers presenting on a great variety of topics (e.g. Iris Murdoch on moral visions, on the question of whether there is a female way of composing (which made me think of the paper ”Throwing Like a Girl” by Marion Young), on universal basic income and Hannah Arendt, on Anne Conway’s metaphysics, etc. etc.). The variety of topics is fun and interesting, since it provides an inspirational platform, where you most likely hear about something that you did not expect or knew of before, but it also might have it’s backside. Because the main focus on the conference was female philosophers (rather than a focused topic) the conference did not attract many male students/researchers (in fact there were only a couple).

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