Congratulations go to David Hurrell, who has successfully defended his PhD thesis on Nietzsche’s conception of decadence.
David was supervised by Manuel Dries, Sophie-Grace Chappell and Cristina Chimisso. The examiners were Andrew Huddleston (Birkbeck) and Derek Matravers.
L-R: Manuel Dries; David Hurrell; Andrew Huddleston; Derek Matravers.
We are happy to announce the programme for the Department of Philosophy’s Values and Reason Research Seminar Series, for the academic year 2019/20.
Thursday 3rd October 2019: Carolyn Price (The Open University)
Wednesday 6th November 2019: Natalia Waights Hickman (University of Oxford)
Wednesday 4th December 2019: Constantine Sandis (University of Hertfordshire)
Wednesday 8th January 2020: Giuseppina D’Oro (Keele University)
Wednesday 5th February 2020: Solveig Aasen (University of Oslo)
Wednesday 4th March 2020: Anil Gomes (University of Oxford)
Wednesday 1st April 2020: Josh Habgood-Coote (University of Bristol)
Wednesday 6th May 2020: Ema Sullivan-Bissett (University of Birmingham)
Wednesday 3rd June 2020: Michael Frazer (University of East Anglia)
All of the seminars take place in the Walton Hall Campus in Milton Keynes, 2pm-4pm. If you would like to attend, please contact Mark Pinder.
In June’s Philosophy Research Seminar, Dr Antonia Peacocke from New York University spoke to us about how literature expands the imagination.
According to Dr Peacocke, poetic devices in literature can direct your attention to previously unnoticed phenomenal properties of your own experiences. allowing you to conceptualize those previously unnoticed properties. One upshot is that literature can help you form new phenomenal concepts to expand the range of your active phenomenal imagination.
Congratulations to Susanne Mathies, who recently completed her PhD “The Simulated Self – Fiction Reading and Narrative Identity”.
L-R: Manuel Dries (internal examiner); Carolyn Price (supervisor); Susanne Mathies; Kathleen Stock (University of Sussex, external examiner).
In the thesis, Susanne develops an account that explores the relation between fiction reading and the reader’s narrative identity. The account is based on two starting assumptions: first, that human beings are entangled in stories throughout their lives, and second, that emotions are complex and have a narrative structure. During the reading process, the fiction reader creates her own narratives which contain not only the story provided by the work of fiction, but also event sequences from her own experiential memories. This involves the creation of self-conscious emotions, which can continue after the reading is finished, and can motivate the reader to engage in self-reflection and to refigure her self-narrative. Susanne’s account thus examines a new topic: the interactive influence of fiction reading and the fiction reader’s narrative identity.
Dr Susanne Mathies, who recently passed her PhD viva at the Open University, has published “The Simulated Self – Fiction Reading and Narrative Identity” in Philosophia. The article develops a new model of fiction reading, built on two assumptions: that human beings are entangled in stories, and that emotions are complex and have a narrative structure.
The article is open access, and can be read here.
Susanne was supervised by Dr Carolyn Price and Professor Derek Matravers.
The Aesthetic Mind: Second Conference
Fiction and Cognition
Derek Matravers and seven others will be giving talks. Derek’s paper is called ‘Fiction, internal inconsistency, and belief’. Click on the link above or the image for information.
In May’s Philosophy Research Seminar, Dr Paulina Sliwa from the University of Cambridge gave us a new perspective on “Hermeneutical Advice”.
You can listen to the talk below. The handout for the talk is here.
John Shand, a long-standing OU Tutor and Associate Lecture, has edited A Companion to Nineteenth-Century Philosophy, which has just been published as part of the prestigious (not to say incredibly useful) Blackwell’s Companions series.
Contents below. Follow the link to the publisher’s site for more information.
Early Bird registration is still available (until May 15th) for the first Heritage in War conference, which is on the theme of:
Cultural Heritage and the Ethics of War
The aim of the conference is to begin to develop a robust account of the status of heritage in war by exploring philosophical work on such matters as incommensurability and incomparability, the nature and status of cultural heritage, risk imposition, and the reconstruction and replacement of damaged or destroyed heritage.
For more information about the conference, including registration and the latest news on the wider project, visit the project website.
The Heritage in War blog has a new post, written by the University of Buffalo’s Carolyn Korsmeyer, reflecting on the replication of historical artifacts.
Heritage in War is an AHRC-funded project, co-directed by Derek Matravers (OU) and Helen Frowe (Stockholm), combining aesthetics, value theory and the ethics of war.
