The University of Reading philosophy visiting speaker sessions are now online, and take place every Thursday, 2-4pm GMT. All welcome!
This year the philosophy visiting speaker sessions at the University of Reading are online, on MS Teams. They take place every Thursday, 2-4pm GMT. This week, the speaker will be Professor Havi Carel (Bristol), with a talk titled “Pandemic Phenomenology”. You can access the talks via the following site: http://blogs.reading.ac.uk/philspeakers/.
University of Reading philosophy visiting speaker sessions online
“Pandemic Phenomenology”
Professor Havi Carel
26/11/2020
2-4pm GMT
Abstract: In this talk I analyse the recent phenomenon of social distancing, arguing that recent restrictions aimed at preventing the transmission of covid-19 have had a profound impact on our personal and social worlds. Using key phenomenological ideas, such as being in the world, being with, the intelligibility of our shared world and the centrality of touch and embodiment, I suggest that our everyday experience has been profoundly disrupted by the restrictions, causing significant changes to the ways in which we inhabit our social and physical world. I argue that these changes amount to what Laurie Paul calls ‘transformative experience’. I end by characterising these changes as global uncertainty: the loss of a once pre-reflective trust or confidence that envelops one’s experience of the world as a whole and suggest that this global uncertainty is both transformative and collective.