Here you can find the video recordings of our events
Abstract: In this presentation I start by briefly mapping out different theories of empathy. I then suggest that Colwyn Trevarthen’s work on intersubjective interaction, which he characterizes as involving sympathy (an older term than empathy), provides an alternative view of basic empathy, and some important insights that can inform these debates. I conclude by highlighting a problem about the role that narrative plays in Trevarthen’s account. I suggest that there is a continuity between basic and higher-order empathy based not on narrative, but on the continuing role of primary intersubjectivity – the music of intersubjective relations – that extends throughout the lifespan.
Abstract: Enactivism has greatly benefitted contemporary philosophy by demonstrating that the traditional intellectualist ‘act-content’ model of intentionality is simply insufficient, and showing how minds may be built from world-involving bodily habits. Many enactivists have assumed that this must entail non-representationalism concerning at least basic minds. Here I argue that such anti-intellectualism is overly constraining, and not necessary. I sketch an alternative enactivism which draws on Peirce’s pragmatic semiotics, and understands signs as habits whose connections with rich schemas of possible experience render them subject to increasing degrees of self-control. The talk’s key innovation is to align this cyclical process of habit cultivation with Peirce’s representationalist icon-index-symbol distinction, in a manner which I will explain.
Abstract: Enactivism assumes that every cognition, perception, or thought results from the interactive relations that occur between an organism and the environment in which it is situated. From a cognitive semiotics’ point of view, this environment is not a “natural” one, but a semiotic environment crowded with objects, norms, habits, institutions, and artefacts that shape our minds. Starting from the structural coupling between organism and environment, a subset of the myriad forms of coupling with the environment that are appreciated as meaningful by the organism, emerge. In his last works, Varela called this relationship “sense-making”, thus identifying its semiotic structure from its name onwards. In my talk I will deal with sense-making from a cognitive semiotics’ point of view, dealing with both arts and perception, claiming that cognitive semiotics understands cognition i) as an“enactive” skillful activity that involves the ongoing interaction with the external world; ii) as something that brings forth the world through meaning, whereas meanings are not representations of the world, but habits and sense-making activities; iii) through a point of view that thinks at the way in which texts, languages and semiotics systems scaffold the way humans come to know the world and represent the background of our perception of the environment.
Abstract: Looking at one's face in the mirror and finding one's self in the mirror are not the same. The former capacity is something we share with other animals; the latter is a skill: something we have to learn. What does it mean and what does it take to find oneself the mirror? This lecture, and the book from which it derives, attempts a comparative anthropological enquiry into the unity and diversity of mirror gazing. We will discuss a range of case studies weaving together anthropology with philosophy and semiotics. Our master metaphor will be that of the mirror as trap. Mirror gazing is viewed on a par with hunting. Mirroring signifies the hunt for self-knowledge. In a time obsessed with the digital self-image, we reflect on the structures of consciousness that underpin the different ways of looking at and through the mirror. Combining metaphor, comparison and estrangement, we gesture towards a therapeutic alliance between body and mirroring.
Abstract:Narrative practices can support mental health. Or so this paper argues. It offers a way of defending at least some narrative-based therapies from three crippling challenges. Its action unfolds as follows: Section 1 considers, in detail, a particular philosophical analysis of the aims of narrative therapy and how it is assumed to work. It gives close attention to McConnell & Snoek’s (2018) account of how narrative interventions might positively influence the prospects of recovery from addiction. Section 2 details three sceptical challenges that threaten to cast doubt on the acceptability of the aims and methods of narrative therapy, as depicted by McConnell & Snoek (2018) as well as, potentially, casting doubt on the acceptability of other, similar narrative-based approaches to mental health. Finally, Section 3 makes an effort to show that it is possible to address these trio of challenges by recasting certain assumptions about the core aims and methods of narrative therapy. It is proposed that by focusing on the ‘fictive’ rather than the ‘factual’ character of its narrative practices, it is possible to rethink how narrative therapy might work in practice in such a way that would protect it from the sceptical challenges outlined in Section 2. To achieve this outcome, it is proposed that we adjust the way we understand that aims and methods of narrative therapy, and potentially other narrative-based approaches to mental health. In the end, it is concluded that there is a way to see off the three sceptical challenges identified in this chapter and thus improve the philosophical credibility of narrative-based approaches in mental health, opening the path for their wider uptake.
Abstract: Capitalizing upon Pragmatism, Pierre Bourdieu and Practice Theory, the relationship between body, habit, practice, rituals and its bearing on the creation of symbolic objects and cultural artifacts is analyzed from a neuro-pragmatist approach, which emphasizes the procedural and implicit forms of human cognition. The suggested gradual transition from tool-making to symbol-making, grants the following: 1) It shows that utilitarian and symbolic behavior are both chapters of the same cognitive technology trajectory; 2) It doesn’t require one to assume that symbol-making is the late externalization of a previously existing inner symbolic thought, because symbolic thought and symbol-making are the co-constructive outcome of the development of shared performative practices and habits; 3) It is fully compatible with the neurobiological characterization of human relational potentialities as instantiated by embodied simulation. It is proposed that through the repetition, combination and memorization of particular shared behaviors and actions, and their mimetic ritualization, the social group infuses new cultural meanings into reused bodily performances.