Philosophy and Thinking Differently,
SWIP Ireland 2023 Conference
‘Philosophy and Thinking Differently’
November 17-18, 2023
We would like all who attended, delivered papers and engaged in conversation at our 2023 conference on ‘Philosophy and Thinking Differently’!
We would also like to thank the Maynooth University Conference Fund, Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute (MUSSI), the Dean of Social Sciences Maynooth University, and University College Dublin School of Philosophy, for their very generous support of the conference.
The need for the analytic tools and critical thought that philosophy cultivates has never been more urgent.
This was reflected in the wide range of papers and discussions across sessions on The Potentialities of Philosophy; Re-thinking Communities; The Category of Sex as Limited and Limiting; Restructuring Learning and Collaboration; Resistance and Being-Becoming; The Complexities of Embodiment; Memory, Commemoration and Beliefs; and Subjectivities and Spheres of Practice.
Danielle Petherbridge, our first keynote, spoke on Embodiment, Personhood and Dementia: Reconsidering Relational Vulnerabilities in Aging. She challenged the view that subjects with dementia can simply be understood in terms of diminished cognitive capacities or that they have lost all vestiges of personhood or the capacity for meaningful interaction. Offering a body-orientated and relational view, she argued that cognition is always already embodied and both embodiment and embodied memory is central to personhood. Such a phenomenological approach provides the basis for empathetic responses to dementia and also points to the intersubjective constitution of subjects more generally.
In her keynote address ‘Wild Thought: Metzger, Freud and Lévi-Strauss’ Stella Sandford argued that there is a central ambiguity in Lévi-Strauss’s 1962 book Wild Thought. He argues that Wild Thought is a universal form of thought ‘always present and alive among us’ but he also identifies wild thought with the ‘logic of sensation’ that he finds exemplified in the symbolic systems of what he sometimes calls the ‘indigenous thought’ of various peoples. Lévi-Strauss stressed the huge complexity of symbolic systems of differences and connections in ‘indigenous thought’. Professor Sandford suggested that this complexity of differences and connections can also be seen in Freud’s conceptualisation of dream analysis. She argued that Lévi-Strauss and Freud, in different but overlapping ways, reveal the infinite possibilities with regard to how signifying systems can be organised, but that a concept of what Helene Metzger called ‘spontaneous thought’ as the vitality that mobilises thought, is missing from their analyses. She concluded that the lesson we can take from Metzger, Freud and Lévi-Strauss is that we already have the capacities and instruments to ‘think differently’ if we could only liberate ourselves from the rigidity of Western scientific thought which has historically arrogated to itself the undeserved title of universality. She proposed that Wild Thought can be understood as the acknowledgement of the existing open-ended complexity within the systems of differences in which we already think, and as the possibility, with Metzger’s spontaneous thought, of new configurations within them that are more adequate to the demands of this time.
In her keynote address on Senses of Encounter: Becoming-with as Transformative Possibility Sharon Todd argued that sensory encounters with elements of our environment are not only tied to cultural and social scripts of racialisation, engenderment, colonisation – all of which ‘enculturate’ the subject – but are also acutely singular in their event of sensation and mark a passage of becoming. Drawing on the work of Yunkaporta, Mika, and Machado de Oliveira, Professor Todd highlighted how they conceptualise sensory encounters as sources for singular and collective transformation that is profoundly educative. Mobilising the idea of ‘touching and being touched by’ the environment we are part of, she suggested that aesthetic, sensory encounters offer a way of putting the living body at the centre of struggles for justice as education.
Lisa Guenther’s keynote address ‘Towards a Critical Phenomenology of Collective Memory’ centred on how collective memory can be conceptualised, drawing on the experiences of a memorial collective’s advocacy work for a memorial garden on the grounds of Canada’s first prison for women, which is in the process of redevelopment into luxury condominiums. Mapping the journey of the memorial collective Professor Guenther proposed a fourfold account of the ontological, social, ethical, political dimensions of collective memory. She argued that at an ontological level, the site of collective memory is not intentional consciousness, but rather the lifeworld itself, understood as an historically-sedimented context for meaning and mattering. The social dimension of collective memory is structured around an antagonism between hegemonic public memory and insurgent counter-memory. The ethical dimension issues a command to anyone to listen and respond to the counter-memory of the oppressed. And the political dimension of collective memory commits to building a world that refuses to repeat past oppression. Using the concept of ‘procedural memory’, which is the memory of how to do something and is held in the body, Professor Guenther proposed that the political dimension calls us to reclaim and reinvent a collective procedural memory of how to build a world that does not allow for the kinds of violence that destroys lives in the name of criminal justice.
Massive congratulations also to Aisling Phipps, winner of the 2023 Maria Baghramian Prize for her paper on ‘Distorted body image and shame in borderline personality disorder’. Aisling is a third year PhD candidate supervised by Assistant Professor Ruth Boeker in UCD School of Philosophy. Her work is funded by the UCD College of Social Sciences and Law research scholarship. Her primary research interests include phenomenological psychopathology and philosophy of psychiatry.
Aisling Phipps, 2023 Winner Maria Baghramian Prize, with Alissa MacMillan, SWIP Ireland Executive Committee
A recurring theme across the conference centred on the need to re-think how we understand and make sense of our ways of being, and to build worlds that refuse to repeat past violence. This is something we take forward into 2024 and commit to building on at our next conference.
Míle buíochas to you all for all your contributions and support!
