Aurora Lecture Theatre, IMAS Building
Summary:Martineau Lecture Series 2024
Presenter(s):
- Professor Shaun Gallagher, Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy, University of Memphis, USA
Professor Shaun Gallagher is Lillian and Morrie Moss Chair of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis, USA. He is known for his work on phenomenology, embodied cognition, social cognition, agency, intersubjectivity, the philosophy of time, and the self. He is also known for his philosophical work on the effects of solitary confinement and the philosophy of psychopathology. Professor Gallagher was awarded the Anneliese Maier Research Award by the Humboldt Foundation (2012–2018). He was part of the research project Minds in Skilled Performance with funding from the Australian Research Council (2017-2020). He was principal investigator on several previous grants, including a European Commission Marie Curie Actions Grant: TESIS: Towards an Embodied Science of Intersubjectivity (2011-15), and a Templeton Foundation grant (2011-2013) which funded an empirical and phenomenological study of astronauts' experiences during space flight. Since 2014 he has been Professorial Fellow at the University of Wollongong in Australia. He has held visiting positions at Keble College, Oxford; Humboldt University, Berlin; Ruhr Universität, Bochum; Husserl Archives, ENS (Paris); École Normale Supérieure, Lyon; the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen; and the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit, Cambridge University. Professor Gallagher is the founding editor and a co-editor-in-chief of the highly cited journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.
An adventure in ethics: The virtue of the virtual self
In a series of lectures on Ethical Know-How, Francisco Varela explains that he is venturing ‘into the territory of ethical thought … Ethics is a new terrain for me, and what I have to say here must be taken in the sphere of adventure more than anything else'. On this adventure Varela is very much influenced by Hubert Dreyfus and his analysis of expertise. Similar to the way that Dreyfus attempts to formulate an ethical theory derived from his analysis of expertise, Varela attempts to do this based on his enactive principles. I’ll argue that, despite being inspired by Dreyfus’ account of expert practice and embodied coping, and retaining the term ‘ethical expertise’, Varela offered important correctives to the specific limitations that can be found in Dreyfus’s view. I’ll also argue that we can resolve some tensions in Varela’s account, and extend it to include a skillful form of deliberation that can play an important role in setting up environments or even rules of society, which through the enactive reciprocity of relations between agentive organism and environment, can facilitate our actions and make us who we are.
This is a hybrid event with online and onsite attendance modes. For online attendance please register here.
