Scholar in Residence, Duquesne University

Rather wonderful news: after a lunch with the Dean of the McAnulty College of Liberal Arts at Duquesne University, I was invited to be Scholar in Residence. I’ve filled in the forms and means I’ll be able to have regular visits to the wonderful library, with its Center for Phenomenology. This section of the library has archives including Straus’ papers, who I had read for my thesis all those years ago. Look forward to spending long afternoons getting lost in books and papers, re-reading phenomenological texts and formulating postphenomenological plans…

The library at Duquesne

2011: This blog in review

The WordPress.com stats helper monkeys prepared a 2011 annual report for this blog.

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,600 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 43 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

The after-life of phenomenology

Months ago I was invited to speak at an event in a seminar series at Northwestern University, Illinois. The title of the series: The After-life of Phenomenology. So how could I refuse? So on October 27th I flew out to deliver the paper. It turns out there aren’t many phenomenologists there any more, but some of the grad students were highly active in this area, and they treated me really well. The paper: ‘The Case of the Seeing Tongue. Technologies of Sensory Substitution after the Molyneux Question’.  Material from this, co-written with Mazviita Chirimuuta, will appear in an OUP book edited by Mohan Matthen and Dustin Stokes next year. A great opportunity to test out some of the ideas and to ask others what is actually happening ‘after’ phenomenology.

Having spoken to an ex Husserl archivist and now Professor from nearby Loyola University, Hanne Jacobs, I had happened to be reading a paper by one of her ex-colleagues, Filip Martens, on the plane. The paper was dealing with some Husserlian ideas about touch and updating them to consider technological cases similar to the one I was speaking about in the seminar. If there really is an after-life, I want to know more…

World Blind Union Newsletter – Article

‘Seeing with the hands’: Philosophical Approaches to Touch and Blindness

This is the 700 word article that I was asked to write for the Newsletter of the World Blind Union. This was an opportunity to speak to a non-sighted readership about some of the issues, concepts and ideas in my forthcoming book Seeing With the Hands. There are two arguments in particular that I have highlighted, one about the role of blind and vision impaired subjects’ experience, and the other about the nature of touch and why it has been neglected within Western philosophy.

The full text can be read in the ‘Blindness‘ section of this site.

BBC Spotlight: Blind man perceiving an elephant

In May I was interviewed on a local news programme for the South West of England, BBC Spotlight. The story concerns a blind man in Paignton Zoo encountering a real elephant for the first time. Although I was interviewed in the TV studio for a while, I only appear for seconds – oh well. The dormouse features for as long as I do, although is far cuter. The story (about 2m 40s) is here:

The Philosopher’s Magazine: Touch

A couple of years ago Julian Baggini, author of a large number of popular philosophy books and the editor of The Philosopher’s Magazine  asked me to contribute an essay for a special issue on the senses. Obviously I would be writing on touch. The link is posted here because it works as an overview of some of the research I’m most interested in, and ideas from this crop up in other talks and presentations in more detail. In other words, this works as a map of the tactile terrain of thinking.

The article is available here as well as in the print version, issue 45 (2009).

Interview for CBC Radio, ‘Spark’

In May, the presenter of the long-running technology and ideas show on Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, ‘Spark’, asked me to be interviewed for the programme. So off I went to the BBC studio in Exeter to record it, having never listened to the programme before. The end result of the programme was pleasing – they intercut the whole episode with the words of Marshall McLuhan as part of the centenary of his birth, and this worked well.

The whole programme can be found here – I’ll subscribe to the podcast, it’s a great show. You can scroll down that page to listen to my 10 minute section, ‘C’mon get haptic’ (not my title, by the way). Or you can listen to my section here, with appropriate images added by myself, like a gentle educational slideshow of old…

Eurohaptics 2010 presentation ‘Haptics in philosophy: The touching, feeling, flourishing body’

Last year I was invited to present a talk for a workshop on the History of Haptics for the Eurohaptics Conference in Amsterdam, June 2010. Unfortunately I was unable to attend in person, so instead filmed my talk. There was a Powerpoint presentation running on another screen, but you won’t see that. This film is bare bones. No special effects, transitions, music or sound effects. Just the talk, the ideas, but for a general audience of engineers, computer scientists and psychologists, so written and presented in an accessible way without excessive terminology.

Some comments on the new site

Rather than updating a tired old site through HTML and uploading by FTP, the impetus to make things more dynamic and to update more frequently comes from the imminent migration to the US – moving to Pittsburgh in August – so it was about time to edit an existing blog that I maintained for ‘GeoTheory’ postgrad reading group at Exeter and repurpose it. There will be echoes of that group, some material posted that I want to keep although might seem incongruous. I’ll miss the group, the regular readings and discussions, but my research is mutating a great deal. And my teaching is going to change radically.

So, with the updated website, a new mantra: to update one’s thoughts and blogposts more frequently. Also pages will disappear, new ones will be added to better reflect the research. Media appearances and writing from the past few years will be added in the next few weeks to bring everything more up to date. In the meantime: browse and enjoy.

Experience and Erlebnis

The pragmatist and writer Richard Sennett, in the conclusion to his book The Craftsman (2008), revisits Heideggerian language to write about the kinds of experience involved in crafting and shaping materials:

Philosophically, pragmatism has argued that to work well people need freedom from means-ends relationships. Underlying this philosophical conviction is a concept that, I think, unifies all of pragmatism. This isexperience, a fuzzier word in English than in German, which divides it in two, Erlebnis and Erfahrung. The first names an event or relationship that makes an emotional inner impress, the second an event, action, or relationship that turns one outward and requires skill rather than sensitivity. Pragmatist thought has insisted that these two meanings should not be divided. If you remain in the domain of Erfahrung alone, William James believed, you may be trapped by means-and-ends thinking and acting; you may succumb to the vice of instrumentalism. You need constantly the inner monitor of Erlebnis, of ‘how it feels’. (p.288)

I love the fact that Erlebnis, or life experience, involves some ‘inner impress’ i.e. is affective. Experience is also something that is lived through (Erfahrung in German implying a journey). The genealogy of this comes through Willhelm Dilthey and thence Heidegger. I also love the fact that much of what Sennet writes about craftsmanship, also in his previous book The Culture of the New Capitalism, also tries to distance craft and labour from purely instrumental thinking – another Heideggerian point we have discussed in The Question Concerning Technology and elsewhere.