Wednesday 8th February

The Question Concerning the Climate Crisis

Dr David Hall (University of Bristol & University of Gloucestershire)

For over 50 years scientists and campaigners have argued that we should listen to scientists on global warming. Yet despite decades of IPCC reports and international conferences and agreements, global greenhouse gases levels continue to rise, as do temperatures and sea levels. This is because our increasing prosperity and longer lives have largely been driven by burning coal and gas, so there is no simple fix. This means that the big question of the climate crisis, whether we can save ourselves and the planet, is not a straightforward scientific question. It is conventional to argue that we cannot solve the problem because of human nature, that we put ourselves ahead of other people and of future generations. The only alternative to disaster is an increasingly authoritarian international order, which enforces environmental targets to stop climate change.

I believe that we need a different approach. Martin Heidegger put forward an approach to understanding the development of our modern world, arguing that we are driven by what he termed the “essence of technology” to turn everything, including ourselves, into resources. From this perspective, the central problem is a human crisis, and the environmental crisis is inextricably linked. Only changing our way of being can answer this question, so that we can use the most powerful technology at our disposal to save the planet while freeing ourselves from being merely human resources, to be used and disposed at the whim of capital. I will argue that this is not utopian, but is both possible and necessary, showing how a vision of the future through art can show that there is an alternative to crudely rationalistic approaches.

David Hall joined the Green party in his teens, before his politics ripened. A PhD in theoretical physics led to a 30 year career in the NHS, where he advises on the medical use of radioactive materials across Bristol and Somerset. A certificate in moral philosophy in Newcastle is now being followed, 25 years later, by an MA by research in philosophy at the University of Gloucestershire, applying the thinking of the leading 20^th century German philosopher Martin Heidegger to the Climate Crisis

Monday 20th February

Karl Polanyi and the Sacred

Dr Ben Trubody (University of Gloucestershire)

Karl Polanyi is arguably one of the 20th century’s most prophetic critics of capitalism. Whilst his magnum opus The Great Transformation is a prescient analysis of what can happen when the market economy is ‘freed’, disembedded from the limits of social-relations and treated as its own special independent reality. The same story can be told in terms of what happens when we no longer regard social-relations as ‘sacred’. That humans are on a course for self-annihilation because we hold some things more important than well-being, nature and life.

Dr. Ben Trubody is a lecturer at the University of Gloucestershire and tutor for the WEA.

Wednesday 17th May

The existential predicament of anticipating transitions at older age

Jessie Stanier (University of the West of England)

As an integral aspect of lived experience, anticipation is a mode of temporal orientation of crucial interest to philosophers and especially to phenomenologists. Anticipation can be understood as a mode of active expectation; it is a given set of norms that presents possibilities which bear on the present, calling for some response. The demographic of older people is predicted to increase substantially over the coming years, and this increase is often discursively anticipated as a problem to be solved or, in more hyperbolic cases, as an impending catastrophe. In a neoliberal context, such anticipations can perhaps be understood in relation to speculation, risk perception, and policy.

 Like many other public health issues, this demographic shift is widely addressed in an anticipatory mode by neoliberal interventions which aim at encouraging older people to live more healthily as individuals—particularly in anticipation of key moments of transition in later life. In this talk, I explore how phenomenological analysis of anticipation might serve to support existing critiques of top-down public health interventions. In the first half, I explore just how difficult it can be—or indeed impossible—to know in advance what the best approach to healthy ageing is, especially given that public health interventions aimed at improving transitions at older ages tend to advocate individual responsibility. In the second half, I explore phenomenologically how intersubjective norms pertaining to social imaginaries play an important role in structuring anticipations in personal experiences of ageing. I argue that social imaginaries can be understood as sites of potential transformation in experiences of anticipation at older age.

Jessie Stanier is a Lecturer in Philosophy at UWE Bristol. She is also a PhD student (nearing completion) at the Wellcome Centre for Cultures and Environments of Health at the University of Exeter. The PhD project draws together Jessie’s theoretical interest in critical phenomenology with her ethical and methodological interests in working together with participants on qualitative research. Jessie is Chair of the International Symposium for the BSP and she set the conference themes on ‘Engaged Phenomenology’ in 2020 and 2022. She completed her MA in Philosophy at KU Leuven, Belgium, in 2018. She is also a keen climber.

Wednesday 3rd May

Execs, Lies, and Videotape: How We Pay for the Misdeeds of Modern Media

Matthew Alford (University of Bath)

Matthew Alford is a writer of memoir and non-fiction, whose output is typically rooted in his application of Noam Chomsky’s Propaganda Model to contemporary Hollywood.
In postdoctoral work, Matthew focused on examining related conspiracy theories – on the alleged assassination of a maverick screenwriter and on the role of the military-industrial complex in the entertainment industry – which entailed archival and interview-gathering trips to Los Angeles and Washington, DC. Meanwhile, he developed his creative outputs and consequently co-produced and presented two feature-length documentaries based on his research, The Writer with No Hands (2014) and Theaters of War (2022).
In 2023, Matthew spoke about Julian Assange’s legal case for the Universal Periodic Review of Human Rights at the United Nations in Geneva. 

Wednesday 12th October

Born into Conspiracy: Social Media and an Inadequate Understanding of Reality

Dr William Large & Dr Martin Randall (University of Gloucestershire)

There are conspiracies and conspiracy theories. Conspiracies are real, concocted by the shadow modern state machineries of disinformation and espionage. Conspiracies haunt the political spectacle in which we live. Conspiracy theories are fantasies of paranoia and longing. In the Digital Age, conspiracy theories have been intensified and accelerated by the economic model of the internet: surveillance capitalism. How do we resist the seductive allure of the conspiracy theory? With irony? With a better understanding of the nature of how we are born into conspiracy? Or, finally, with ethics and decency?

Both William and Martin teach at the University of Gloucestershire in the School of Education and Humanities.

Wednesday 26th October

Learning to live: Philosophy and Architecture

Rex Richards (University of Gloucestershire)

Today I want to talk to you about the connection between architecture and philosophy, the reason for this is twofold; first I am doing so because it is the chosen topic for my dissertation, and secondly it is because over recent months I have come to the conclusion that there needs to be more open discussion on the subject. Having seen the title to this presentation, it should become clear to those who have read the work of Pierre Hadot which direction I mean to take this discussion philosophically. For those who have not read his work, I am using Hadot’s text on spiritual exercises to help clarify what I mean when speaking about this connection between architecture and philosophy.

With Hadot’s work used as a focusing lens, I will be making a comparison between a positive and negative example of architecture. For the negative example, I will be speaking about prisons and more specifically what Foucault has to say about them, in order to better illustrate how damaging architecture can be. As for the positive example, I will be speaking about the Danish architecture firm the Bjarke Ingels Group so that a clear demonstration of the positive effects of architecture can be articulated.

Wednesday 9th November

Knowing the Future

Andrew Curry (The School of International Futures)

The futurist Andrew Curry will discuss the ideas underpinning futures work, and the claims that futurists make when they talk about the future—from forecasting, to images of the future, to notions of anticipation. 

Andrew Curry has been a practising futurist since the turn of the century, working for The Henley Centre, The Futures Company and currently The School of International Futures. He has worked extensively with clients across the public, private and non-profit sectors, while also engaging actively with future theory and practice. 

He is on the Advisory Boards of the Institute of Social Futures at Lancaster University and of the World Futures Review.

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Wednesday 23rd November

Who dictates the language of violence: ‘terror’ versus ‘security’ 

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan

Poet and writer Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan will explore the importance of the language employed to talk about violence. Why acts of violence perpetrated by racialised individuals categorised as ‘terror’, whilst state-sanctioned systems of brutalisation are named ‘securitisation’? How does the categorisation of violence hide, displace or reveal its causes? Why is it important to think about violence as relational? And what happens when we change the language that we use to describe it?

Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan is the author of the poetry collection, Postcolonial Banter (2019), which features eight years of poetry including her viral poem This Is Not a Humanising Poem, which placed her as runner-up of the 2017 National Roundhouse poetry slam. Her latest book, Tangled in Terror: Uprooting Islamophobia, was published in 2022 with Pluto Press to wide acclaim – described as ‘courageous’ by rapper, Lowkey, ‘one of the most exciting voices of her generation’ by channel 4 journalist Fatima Manji, and ‘fierce’ by feminist activist Lola Olufemi. Suhaiymah’s poetry and prose has appeared across radio and TV, she has written for The Guardian, Independent, Al-Jazeera and gal-dem and has essays in multiple anthologies. Currently she is Writer in Residence at the Leeds Playhouse and under commission to write plays for Kiln Theatre and Freedom Studios. Suhaiymah is the co-founder of the Nejma Collective, a collective of volunteers working in solidarity with Muslims in prison. 

Wednesday 7 December

Why are Common Notions  anything but Common? An Introduction to the Physics of Thought.

Matthew Hammond

In this talk, I will attempt to communicate my confusion and delight in Spinoza’s concept of Common Notions. First of all, a few words need be said – If you read Spinoza’s ‘Ethics’ somewhat hastily you can almost miss them entirely. They are the second type of knowledge introduced in Book 2, prop. 40, scholium 2, and discussed briefly in subsequent propositions without seeming central to the work. 

Now for me personally it was the great French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, who points out in his otherwise problematic book  ‘Expressionism’, the unsatisfactory nature of such a rendition.     

Common notions are after all, the one form of knowledge that significantly changes during the course of Spinoza’s life in its meaning and power. In this discussion I will look at the ‘monster’ (a Deleuzian term) which they become by the end of Spinoza’s thought, and exactly how he replaces reason, formal reason, with common notions – which open up the body and therefore the mind, to the world beyond, in ever-changing and evolving patterns, rooting reason in physics and physiology. My reading is unashamedly idiosyncratic and it will attempt to understand the monster which Spinoza is breeding by breeding new ‘monster crosses’ of my own. 

 A close reading of ‘Ethics’, it seems to me, reveals that Spinoza introduces and develops the theme of ‘common notions’ four times. These four, form an effective schemata which criss-crosses ‘Ethics’. However, in order to understand this monstrous schemata, I will look to four characters from a very different time, author and book. This author and this book being Charles Dickens ‘Bleak House’. A book remarkable in so ways. One of which is absolutely in it’s sustained attempt to understand the power of reason to grasp at a world of madness and greed, and change it for the better. So that the theme of Dickens is the theme of Spinoza – How reason can still leave one to scream  – ‘I see and approve the best but must do the worst’ – a theme so very relevant today.

 By breeding a ‘monster’ suspended between ‘Ethics’ and ‘Bleak House’, I will develop the fourfold schemata of Spinoza’s ‘common notions’; of habit, of reason, of the surprise and of the unknown. All these common notions have their own timbre and rhythm, but all, at different levels and in different ways, ask that most pertinent of modern questions: How can I set myself free? As an individual within society, but also set society free, from the tyranny of ‘great men and their reasoning’?

This might all sound a little abstract, but as I will try to show, for me, understanding Common Notions is very much the stuff of life and livelihood, and this for the most practical of reasons. In a parallel world, I am a maths teacher and I daily use my understanding of Spinoza’s common notions to navigate pupils through the rigours, trials and tribulations of higher maths, and do it in two countries. Common notions don’t just set one personally free, they necessitate sharing that freedom, and the understanding that is integral to it, wherever that is found. 

Matthew Hammond was educated at Cambridge, and Keele Universities, and then taught Maths, self-employed, working in the afternoons and evenings, so that he could study Philosophy every morning. He has tutored political philosophy at Exeter University and at the LSE Summer School in Philosophy.

He is a professional artist and independent thinker, mixing the two whenever possible, especially in his ‘performance philosophy’ shows, where when he lived in the UK, he brought alive both the history of philosophy, and ideas that people might find useful to think with – billed up as ‘Matthew Hammond jumps about the stage, making theatre out of all those books you meant to read but never got around to…’ As a professional storyteller he has performed at countless events, in the UK and France, including returning from where he now lives in the south of France, to appear regularly at the Glastonbury Festival. 

He has presented many papers including one on Jane Austen at the Centre for Research in Philosophy & Literature at the University of Warwick’s conference on ‘Coleridge, Friendship, & the Origins of Modernity’, on Philosophy as Comedy at the ‘Philosophy As…’ Conference at the Senate House, in London, a paper on Foucault’s middle period, at the Brave New World Conference in Politics at the University of Manchester, on Hume at The Strange Encounter of Kant & Deleuze Conference at the University of Greenwich and on Philosophy as Performance at the University of Leeds. 

His paper on Deleuze, Leibniz and Spinoza, delivered at the Deleuze & The Fold Workshop at the Centre for Research in Philosophy & Literature, University of Warwick, features in “Unfolding the Deleuzian Fold; Gilles Deleuze’s Fold: A Critical Reader’ edited by Darren Ambrose and Siobhan McKeown, (published by Palgrave Macmillan). 

You can see some recording of his performances on YouTube https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6849E6A1C17FA1FA.

Location

All the talks (apart from talks that will take place on Zoom) will be at FCH campus, University of Gloucestershire, Rm. HC202

All talks will begin at 7 pm and will usually last for 1 hr.

26th January

Professor Havi Carel (University of Bristol):  What is it to be vulnerabilised?  

This talk proposes the concept of vulnerabilisation to refine common talk of ‘vulnerability’. I introduce the concept and distinguish several ways individuals can be made vulnerable by interpersonal encounters and interactions with social structures. I then offer two concepts from contemporary philosophy of illness to help us understand the dynamics of vulnerabilisation: the structural phenomenon of ‘institutional opacity’ and the clusters of person-level failings we call ‘pathophobic vices’. I end by suggesting that these concepts can illuminate the dynamics of vulnerabilisation in ways that may be of use to philosophers of illness and disability.  

Havi Carel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol and the author of Phenomenology of Illness (2016), Illness (2008, 2013, 2018 shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize), and of Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (2006).

This talk will be a Zoom talk and will begin at 7 pm. If you want to join the meeting please email glosphilsoc@gmail.com who will send you the invitation.

23rd March

Professor Lisa Guenther (Queen’s University) Solitary Confinement and the Meaning of Existence.

The testimony of prisoners in solitary confinement shows that prolonged isolation has a profound effect on their sense of time, space, and identity, to the point of making some people feel like they no longer exist.  Why do we do this to people in the name of justice?  And what does this testimony teach us about what the meaning of existence? 

ALL WILL BE REVEALED in this informal chat.

Lisa Guenther is Queen’s National Scholar in Political Philosophy and Critical Prison Studies. She is the author of Solitary Confinement: Social Death and its Afterlives (2013) and The Gift of the Other: Levinas and the Politics of Reproduction (2007), and co-editor of Death and Other Penalties: Philosophy in a Time of Mass Incarceration (2015) with Geoffrey Adelsberg and Scott Zeman. Recent publications include “Seeing Like a Cop: A Critical Phenomenology of Whiteness as Property” (in Race as Phenomena, 2019) and “Police, Drones, and the Politics of Perception” (in The Ethics of Policing, forthcoming).  As a public philosopher, Guenther’s work has appeared in The New York Times, The Globe and Mail, Aeon, and CBC’s Ideas. She was a member of the P4W Memorial Collective from 2018-21, and she worked with REACH Coalition in Nashville, Tennessee, from 2012-17. She is currently working on the relation between prison abolition and decolonization in the context of Canada and the United States. 

This talk will be a Zoom talk and will begin at 7 pm. If you want to join the meeting please email glosphilsoc@gmail.com who will send you the invitation.

April 6th

Dr Robert Booth (Liverpool Hope University) When Talk is not Cheap: Phenomenology and Environmental Activism.

COP 26 has been and gone, leaving, for many, something of a bitter taste in the mouth. Delegates failed to make good on Alok Sharma’s imperative to ‘consign coal to history’. Moreover, COP 26 perhaps signalled the death knell of our already slim hopes to limit global temperature increases to a level that avoids the catastrophic consequences of a ‘hothouse Earth’ trajectory which guarantees unprecedented fatalities and further global warming to come. This all sounds horrifying, but in an important sense, it is just business as usual: huge advances in our scientific understanding of the ‘issues’ constitutive of our environmental crisis just have not brought about the requisite attitudinal and behavioural changes to disrupt them at root. In this talk, with the help of the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, I pursue the suspicion that this disconnect between thought and action may be traced back, in part, to the violence already implicit in the limited and often dualistic models that natural scientists offer of those ‘issues’ in the first place. If tackling the behavioural and attitudinal violence of our crisis situation also requires tackling the conceptual violence implicit in the basic terms of debate, I will suggest, then, largely in virtue of the kind of critically self-reflexive mindset it demands, a specifically Merleau-Pontian ecophenomenology may have much to offer impactful and sustained environmental activism.

Dr Robert Booth is a Senior Professional Tutor in the School of Education at Liverpool Hope University. Most of his work asks how the respective theoretical insights of phenomenology, feminist theory, and new realism might helpfully reorient our approaches to various environmental and social problems. His most recent monograph Becoming a Place of Unrest: Environmental Crisis and Ecophenomenological Praxis is out now with Ohio University Press.

Meeting will begin at 7:15 pm in Rm HC203 on the FCH campus at the University of Gloucestershire.

September 29th

Philosophy After Covid.

In our first session we are going to meet up as a social event. After 18 months off because of Covid-19, we thought it would be a great idea to meet up again and discuss the future of the society, but also the future of the society itself. Are there any philosophical lessons to be learnt from Covid? If you are concerned about the future of the society (and maybe even society itself!), then do please come along.

For this session we are actually going to meet in the The London Inn, Charlton Kings in Cheltenham at 7pm. So you can have a drink too if you want. This is their website, which gives you a description and how to get there: https://www.londoninncharltonkings.uk/

October 13th

Professor Havi Carel (University of Bristol):  What is it to be vulnerabilised?  

This talk proposes the concept of vulnerabilisation to refine common talk of ‘vulnerability’. I introduce the concept and distinguish several ways individuals can be made vulnerable by interpersonal encounters and interactions with social structures. I then offer two concepts from contemporary philosophy of illness to help us understand the dynamics of vulnerabilisation: the structural phenomenon of ‘institutional opacity’ and the clusters of person-level failings we call ‘pathophobic vices’. I end by suggesting that these concepts can illuminate the dynamics of vulnerabilisation in ways that may be of use to philosophers of illness and disability.  

Havi Carel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol and the author of Phenomenology of Illness (2016), Illness (2008, 2013, 2018 shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize), and of Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (2006).

This talk will be a Zoom talk and will begin at 7 pm. If you want to join the meeting please email glosphilsoc@gmail.com who will send you the invitation.

Unfortunately this talk has been cancelled for personal reasons. We will reschedule this talk for the winter programme.

October 27th

Dr Omar El Masri (University of Gloucestershire) When does street art become ‘art’? The Value of Art on the Street.

Street art, or more broadly, vernacular images in the contemporary urban environment, have quickly become part of the modern discourse of cities – whether commenting on controversial social issues, praising the daily life, or making it humorously unfamiliar. In the last fifteen years, street art has come from being a trendy urban novelty to gaining a permanent position in official tourist guidebooks on cities and individual neighbourhoods, such as Berlin’s Kreuzberg, Paris’s Belleville, London’s Shoreditch, or New York’s Williamsburg. Street art is ephemeral, free and transforms once derelict areas into open air art galleries.  However, raging within the art world, is street art considered real art? What would Rembrandt van Rijn think of artists painting on the streets with the likeness of his works? Why does Banksy and Connor Harrington receive much praise and value to their work over others? Or is street art a public nuisance created by unknown artists who ‘seek’ to vandalise a location? Who decides? Here, the distinctions between what is street art and art on the street are juxtaposed against the backdrop of disagreements in the ‘high art’ world of museums and art galleries.  

Omar El Masri is a Lecturer in Criminology at the University of Gloucestershire. His research focuses on the emotional, economic, and social relationships which street artists have with cities emerging from conflict.

This talk will take place at the FCH campus, Cheltenham in Rm HC204 and will begin at 7 pm. Directions can be found here: https://www.glos.ac.uk/visit-us/our-campuses/francis-close-hall/

November 10th

Professor Martin Parker (University of Bristol): Should we shut down the business schools?

The history of the business school is a history of how the conventional carbon economy was built. There are around thirteen thousand business schools world-wide, and in the UK they teach about one in seven Higher Education students. Globally, the figure is more like one in five. In order to help produce a green, inclusive and democratic economy we need a new form of business education – the School for Organising. This talk explains what is wrong with how we teach business now and what we should do about it.

Martin Parker is Professor of Organization Studies and Lead for the Inclusive Economy Initiative at the University of Bristol. His recent books are Life After COVID19 (Bristol University Press 2020), Anarchism, Organization and Management (Routledge 2020) and Shut Down the Business School (Pluto 2018).

This talk will take place at the FCH campus, Cheltenham in Rm HC204 and will begin at 7 pm. Directions can be found here: https://www.glos.ac.uk/visit-us/our-campuses/francis-close-hall/

November 24th

Dr Linda Finlay (Open University & Psychotherapist) will share her experience of COVID-19. 

I will offer an autobiographical narrative of my experience of succumbing to COVID-19. I felt invaded, attacked by an unseen—but vividly imagined—presence. Although my condition was a so-called “mild” version, my radically transformed world forced me to question the taken-for-granted relationship between my Self, my body, and my sociomaterial world, both then and now. The lifeworldly focus of my story offers a way of unpacking and applying various philosophical ideas.   

Dr Linda Finlay is an existentially-orientated Integrative Psychotherapist (UKCP registered) in private practice. She also teaches psychology and counselling  at the Open University, UK. Her many publications include her book, Phenomenology for therapists: Researching the lived world (published by Wiley). Website: http://lindafinlay.co.uk/ 

This talk will be a Zoom talk and will begin at 7 pm. If you want to join the meeting please email glosphilsoc@gmail.com who will send you the invitation.

December 8th

Dr Patrice Haynes (Liverpool Hope University) Decolonising Philosophy of Religion in Conversation With African Indigenous Religions

Increasingly, philosophy of religion is charged with failing to attend to the diversity of religions in the world, typically focusing on a narrow, abstract vision of Christian theism. This talk first historicises modern philosophy of religion in order to disclose the field’s entanglement with a colonial global order. Following the work of decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter, I argue that a mandatory task for decolonising philosophy of religion is re-conceptualising the human beyond European ‘Man’ hailed as normative humanity. Drawing on the rich yet often-neglected resources in African indigenous religions, I develop the notion of an animist humanism. In developing this notion, my aim is not simply aim to expand the content of philosophy of religion but to renegotiate the field altogether, pointing to constructive possibilities that defy its colonial legacy

Patrice Haynes is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Liverpool Hope University. Her research interests focus primarily on issues in philosophy of religion, particularly as these are reframed by continental, feminist and decolonial philosophies. She is currently working on her second book, tentatively titled Decolonising Philosophy of Religion in and through an African Cosmo-Sense, in which she challenges the Eurocentric focus of philosophy of religion and explores how African indigenous religions could reorient the field in exciting new ways

This talk will be a Zoom talk and will begin at 7 pm. If you want to join the meeting please email glosphilsoc@gmail.com who will send you the invitation.

30th January

Professor Alessandra Tanesini (Cardiff University) will talk on Passionate Speech: On The Uses and Abuses of Anger in Public Debate

Anger dominates debates in the public sphere. In this talk I discuss two types of anger: the arrogant anger of those who arrogate special entitlements, and the liberatory anger that can be used to good effect in the struggles for equality and recognition. I show that arrogant anger is often at the root of intimidation and behaviours designed to humiliate. I also explore how on occasion calls for civility actually promote the silencing of liberatory anger.

Alessandra Tanesini is Professor of Philosophy at Cardiff University. Her new book The Mismeasure of the Self: A Study in Vice Epistemology is forthcoming with Oxford University Press.

12th February

Paul Bridges (Gloucestershire Philosophical Society) will speak on A short history of Determinism; but you knew that already didn’t you.

There cannot be anybody that has any interest in philosophy that hasn’t pondered on the subject of determinism at some point.  Does the universe behave rationally, in accordance with the laws of cause and effect or is there an element of randomness, of irrationality inherent in it?  And the same question can be posed at the sub-atomic and quantum levels as it can at the biological and human level, and the ultimate expression of the conundrum lies in the question of free will.  Are we really the moral agents of our own destiny or simply clockwork constructions acting out the play that was predetermined at the Big Bang?

In this talk Paul Bridges will look at the history of determinism and the current landscape of deterministic thought as well as how determinism has been portrayed in some aspects of modern culture.  And there will be plenty of time for attendees to bring their own thinking and ideas to the table.  Although we won’t resolve all of the questions that determinism poses in the time available, we can hopefully have a lively and stimulating discussion.  But you knew that already didn’t you?

Paul Bridges has been a member of the Gloucestershire Philosophical Society for the last three years.  Paul, along with 8 billion other people on this planet, is almost uniquely qualified for this talk in having suffered the vicissitudes of good and bad fortune for over 60 years whilst still doggedly clinging to the belief that he ‘makes his own luck’.

26th February

Professor Adam Hart (University of Gloucestershire) will speak on Killing for conservation – the ethical tangle of ‘trophy hunting‘.

With Love Island providing the latest “controversy”, trophy hunting is never far away from the headlines. In this lecture Professor Adam Hart will explore the reasons why a great many conservation scientists and international conservation organisations support the activity, and why many people loathe it. Through some real-world wildlife and habitat management problems, Adam will show how nothing is black-and-white when different ideas of ethics and morality meet conservation.

Adam Hart is Professor of Science Communication at the University of Gloucestershire.  He is a biologist, broadcaster and author and, among other things, researches conservation management in southern Africa. He is a frequent commentator on the trophy hunting debate for national media. 

10th March

Professor Havi Carel  ‘It’s hard to think without your pants on’: Patients as Knowers.

Event Cancelled due to Illness

In this talk, I will examine how patient accounts are discounted, ignored, marginalised or otherwise deemed uncredible. Using Miranda Fricker’s concept, epistemic injustice, I characterise this problem as endemic to modern healthcare structures. I end by offering ameliorative strategies.

Havi Carel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol and the author of Phenomenology of Illness (2016), Illness (2008, 2013, 2018 shortlisted for the Wellcome Trust Book Prize), and of Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (2006).

25th March

Dr Patrice Haynes (Liverpool Hope University) will talk on Decolonising Philosophy of Religion in Conversation With African Indigenous Religions

Increasingly, philosophy of religion is charged with failing to attend to the diversity of religions in the world, typically focusing on a narrow, abstract vision of Christian theism. This talk first historicises modern philosophy of religion in order to disclose the field’s entanglement with a colonial global order. Following the work of decolonial theorist Sylvia Wynter, I argue that a mandatory task for decolonising philosophy of religion is re-conceptualising the human beyond European ‘Man’ hailed as normative humanity. Drawing on the rich yet often-neglected resources in African indigenous religions, I develop the notion of an animist humanism. In developing this notion, my aim is not simply aim to expand the content of philosophy of religion but to renegotiate the field altogether, pointing to constructive possibilities that defy its colonial legacy.

Patrice Haynes is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Liverpool Hope University. Her research interests focus primarily on issues in philosophy of religion, particularly as these are reframed by continental, feminist and decolonial philosophies. She is currently working on her second book, tentatively titled Decolonising Philosophy of Religion in and through an African Cosmo-Sense, in which she challenges the Eurocentric focus of philosophy of religion and explores how African indigenous religions could reorient the field in exciting new ways.

All sessions will be held at the Francis Close Campus of the University of Gloucestershire, Swindon Road, Cheltenham at 7 pm in room HC203 (apart from the session on the 10th March, which will be at 5:30 pm). All sessions are free.

2nd October

Professor Ken Gemes (Birkbeck, University of London) will talk on Nietzsche, Trump and Brexit.

• Man is the animal that seeks meaning, possibly even more than happiness.
• Narratives, stories, are the primary vehicles of meaning.
• Religious narratives no longer grip many of us, and liberal democrat narratives no longer serve to ground meaning, merely offering the prospect of better economic conditions.
• Furthermore, liberal democratic societies are now seen as failing even in their promise to deliver material benefits (economic well being/consumer happiness).

The failure to provide meaning conferring narratives coupled with economic malaise paves the way, as it did in the 30s, for radical populist, nationalist narratives that promise both meaning and material benefits

Ken Gemes was a professor at Yale University for 11 years before moving to Birkbeck College, University of London in 2000, where he continues to teach.  He has published articles on logic, philosophy of science, Nietzsche, and other topics in journals such as the Journal of Philosophical Logic, Philosophy of Science,  Synthese, Erkenntnis, Nous, Philosophical an Phenomenological Research, and The Journal of Philosophy. His work has covered a wide range of philosophical issues, from technical concerns of logical content to Nietzsche’s account of philosophy as the ‘last manifestation of the ascetic ideal’.

16th October

Dr William Large (University of Gloucestershire) will talk on Atheism one last time.

This talk offers a broad historical analysis of atheism and a new conceptual definition. It describes three kinds of atheism: atheism of being, atheism of the idea, and atheism of the word. The first is an atheism of a metaphysical order and science; the second an atheism of morality; and the third an atheism of the community and the word. Each atheism comes in an historical sequence but are conceptually distinct. In terms of the traditional divisions of philosophy, the first atheism is ontology, the second is ethical, and the third is aesthetic and political. This historical sequence is not a necessary one, but contingent, and because each atheism is conceptually distinct, they can emerge at any time. Cutting across this horizontal historical series of atheism, is a vertical distinction between essence and existence. Theism responds to atheism through the passion of religion which sets the next form in motion. When, philosophy says, ‘God is being’, religion responds, ‘God is a hidden’. If philosophy replies, ‘God is an idea’, then religion responds again, ‘faith is the passion of a life’. Only in the last form is the dialogue between philosophy and religion reversed. Religion says, ‘faith is the word’, but philosophy responds, ‘the word is spoken by no-one’. The last atheism has a political consequence. What binds a community without a word?

William Large is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham. He is the author of Maurice Blanchot [co-authored] (Routledge, 2001) Ethics and the Ambiguity of Writing: Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, (Clinamen, 2005), Heidegger’s Being and Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), Levinas ’Totality and Infinity: A Reader’s Guide (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015), and numerous articles in continental philosophy. He was president of the British Society of Phenomenology from 2010-14.

30th October

Dr Niall Keane (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick) will talk on Philosophy and the Eclipse of Plurality.

This talk will address Hannah Arendt’s interpretation of Greek thought, specifically her reading of Homer and Socrates as ‘proto-phenomenological’ thinkers of actualized plurality and discursivity. Drawing inspiration from these thinkers, she addresses the means of actualizing plurality today, understood as the ‘existential truthfulness’ that emerges from the conflict in thinking, speaking and acting plurally. She does this by contrasting how, after the trial and death of Socrates, thinking became ‘philosophy proper’, or what she calls after Kant ‘professional thinking’, in shifting its focus from the reciprocal interdependence of thinking and acting well in the political sphere and towards a reflection on truth, unity, and necessity that takes its start from an order that is either outside or beyond the world of appearances. Assessing her claims, this talk will examine the so-called deformation of thinking since Homer and Socrates, the impoverished nature of opinion, and whether its falling away from the human world has had a deleterious effect on understanding the relationship between freedom and politics. This is the idea according to which politics is the means of reaching the highest ends of human freedom, where philosophical freedom is understood as the eventual freedom from politics. For Arendt, this marks the decisive split between philosophy and the world of common sense, between doctrinal thinking and active thinking, between inner freedom and public freedom. The talk will attempt to tease out the implications of Arendt’s claims and their relevance for today’s society.

Niall Keane is Senior Lecturer and Head of the Department of Philosophy at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. He has published widely in the areas of phenomenology and hermeneutics and is the co-author of The Gadamer Dictionary (Continuum 2012) and co-editor of The Blackwell Companion to Hermeneutics (Wiley-Blackwell 2016). In addition to his publications on Husserl, Heidegger, Gadamer, Michel Henry, Hannah Arendt, he is Treasurer of the Irish Phenomenological Circle, and cofounder and coordinator of the Irish Centre for Transnational Studies. His current research focuses on the nature of subjectivity and self in Heidegger’s and Arendt’s work, focussing on the themes of singularity, plurality and participation.  

13th November

Dr Sarah Nixon (University of Gloucestershire) will talk on ‘I just want to give something back.’ Peer work and Desistance in Prisoners, Probationers and Former Probationers.

The talk will explore the transformative potential of peer mentoring and peer work upon prisoners, probationers and the wider context in which they occur. Offenders/ex-offenders engage in positive activities that support transformations of self, leading to the creation of new identities that can help to shift away from further offending. Peer work can support the desistance process through creating new prosocial relationships with others, and criminal justice staff are key to supporting these transitions and validating new non-criminal identities. This talk will explore how space and place can be either an enabling or constraining factor in the emergence of a new desisting identity. The talk will reflect on the positionality of the researcher; an ex-prison officer who is passionate about offender rehabilitation and supportive of the utility of offenders/ex-offender mentors as assets to the criminal justice system.

Dr Sarah Nixon is a lecturer in Criminology at the University of Gloucestershire. Her teaching expertise is around prison, penology and desistance/rehabilitation. She worked as a prison officer at HMP Leicester between 2003 and 2009. HMP Leicester is a category ‘B’ prison housing adult male offenders. She started her PhD in 2013 around peer work and desistance, looking solely at adult male offenders, which aligns with her professional work experience. She is in her third year of HE teaching and is currently writing papers around her PhD research, and also looking more widely at her prison experience from a sociological autobiographical perspective.

27th November

Red Kellino will talk on Extinction Rebellion

The planet is in ecological crisis: we are in the midst of the sixth mass extinction event this planet has experienced. Scientists believe we may have entered a period of abrupt climate breakdown. This is an emergency.

In this talk, speakers from Extinction Rebellion will share the latest climate science on where our planet is heading, discuss some of the current psychology around climate change, and offer solutions through the study of social movements. There will be time to ask questions and discuss afterwards

Red Kellino is an activist within Extinction Rebellion and has been offering talks about the movement since it came into existence just over a year ago.

11th December

Dr Martin Randall (University of Gloucestershire) will talk on ‘Skip this Ad in 3 Secs.’ Inching towards a Philosophy of Advertising.

What does advertising actually do? What is advertising actually for? How have we reached the point in 2019 that the advertising is now more powerful and more influential than ever before? These, and other, questions have been bugging me for some time now. I’ve been thinking, reading and writing about advertising and I think I’ve inched a little closer towards what might, generously, be thought of as a philosophy of advertising. This has gradually arisen from a broader project of trying to understand (and teach) digital culture. So, I’ll see why our greatest invention, the internet, has contributed, unwittingly perhaps, to an entirely new form of economic exploitation and how advertising has played a defining role.

Martin teachs prose on all three undergraduate levels in Creative Writing at the University of Gloucestershire, and his specialisms include the American short story, experimental writing, theories of the novel, historical fiction and transgressive writing. His PhD looked at the representation of the Holocaust in contemporary British writing. He has published poetry, short fiction and a monograph entitled 9/11 & the Literature of Terror (EUP, 2011/13).

All sessions will be held at the Francis Close Campus of the University of Gloucestershire, Swindon Road, Cheltenham at 7 pm in room HC203, and are free.

8th May

Professor Ken Gemes (Birkbeck, University of London) will talk on Nietzsche, Trump and Brexit.

• Man is the animal that seeks meaning, possibly even more than happiness.
• Narratives, stories, are the primary vehicles of meaning.
• Religious narratives no longer grip many of us, and liberal democrat narratives no longer serve to ground meaning, merely offering the prospect of better economic conditions.
• Furthermore, liberal democratic societies are now seen as failing even in their promise to deliver material benefits (economic well being/consumer happiness).

The failure to provide meaning conferring narratives coupled with economic malaise paves the way, as it did in the 30s, for radical populist, nationalist narratives that promise both meaning and material benefits

Ken Gemes was a professor at Yale University for 11 years before moving to Birkbeck College, University of London in 2000, where he continues to teach.  He has published articles on logic, philosophy of science, Nietzsche, and other topics in journals such as the Journal of Philosophical Logic, Philosophy of Science,  Synthese, Erkenntnis, Nous, Philosophical an Phenomenological Research, and The Journal of Philosophy. His work has covered a wide range of philosophical issues, from technical concerns of logical content to Nietzsche’s account of philosophy as the ‘last manifestation of the ascetic ideal’.

22nd May

Cate Cody will talk on Almost Zero Waste and how to Achieve it.

Cate gives a passionate and inspiring talk about her own environmentally conscious lifestyle which includes sending less than a wheelie bin to landfill in two years.  Come and find out how Cate Cody (life-long environmentalist, ace waste-reducer and writer of the ‘Eco Cody’ blog) does it. A light-hearted presentation, with plenty of tips and encouragement if you are interested in achieving something similar.

Cate Cody has lived in the Tewkesbury borough for 25 years. She has many years of experience in the environmental sector and is an expert in recycling and waste reduction, she also writes a Green Blog and is a regular public speaker. As well as being a passionate environmentalist, Cate is also a jazz singer and bandleader and her hobbies include walking and cycling, Lindy Hop dancing and organic gardening. Cate is also the first Green to be elected onto Tewkesbury Borough Council

5th June

Dr Kasia Narkowicz (University of Gloucestershire) will talk on Fragile Citizens: Muslim and European Values

The talk will focus on Europe and European values in relation to Muslims and Islam. It will discuss how Muslims and Islam fit into Europe, and what the consequences for them are when they are narrated outside of it? The talk will draw on research around citizenship and exclusion in Poland and the UK.

Dr Kasia Narkowicz is Lecturer in Sociology and Criminology at the University of Gloucestershire. Before that she was post-doctoral researcher at the University of York and at Sodertorn University in Sweden. She holds a PhD from the University of Sheffield. Kasia has published on Islamophobia and racism in both the Polish and British contexts. Kasia tweets at @kasianarkowicz

All sessions will be held at the Francis Close Campus of the University of Gloucestershire, Swindon Road, Cheltenham, at 5:30 p.m. The dates in May will be in room HC202a&b, and in June in room HC203.  There is an entrance fee of £3

January 30th

Dr William Large (University of Gloucestershire) will talk on Atheism of the Word.

Kant marks a fundamental break in the history of philosophy of religion and the concept of God. God is no longer interpreted as a being necessary to understand the existence of a rational universe, but as an idea that makes sense of our morality. Cohen supplements this idea with the concept of personality, which he argues is the unique contribution of Judaism. For Rosenzweig and Levinas, the monotheistic God is neither a being nor an idea, but the living reality of speech. What would the atheism be that responds to this theism? Linguistics makes a distinction between direct, indirect, and free indirect speech. In the latter form, the origin of speech is not a subject, but narrated language. It is this difference between direct and indirect speech that is missing in Rosenzweig and Levinas’s description of God. It would mean that God is produced by language rather than the subject of language. What menaces the reality of God is not whether God exists, or is intelligible, but the externality of language without a subject.

William Large teaches philosophy at the University of Gloucestershire, Cheltenham. He is the author four books, Maurice Blanchot [co-authored] (Routledge, 2001) Ethics and the Ambiguity of Writing: Emmanuel Levinas and Maurice Blanchot, ( Clinamen, 2005), Heidegger’s Being and Time (Edinburgh University Press, 2007), and Levinas ’Totality and Infinity: A Reader’s Guide (Bloomsbury Academic, 2015]. His articles have appeared in The Journal of the British Society of Phenomenology, Theology & Sexuality, Textual Practice, Literature and Philosophy, The Journal of Nietzsche Studies, Angelaki, Journal of Cultural Research, The Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory and Religions . He was also special editor of the Parallax issue on Maurice Blanchot. He was elected by the trustees as a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in 2009 for his contribution to philosophy in the UK and in particular the RAE. From 2010-2104, he was also elected President of the British Society of Phenomenology

February 13th

Professor Paul Innes (University of Gloucestershire) will talk on Misogyny Sells: Shakespeare’s Problem Plays.

Less well-known plays by Shakespeare, such as Much Ado About Nothing, Troilus and Cressida, Measure For Measure and All’s Well That Ends Well have become known as ‘problem plays’. The reason for this seems to be their mixed nature: events that take place are often deeply unpleasant in tone, while formally there is no standard tragic ending. This means that they do not fit easily into categories such as comedy or tragedy; instead, they contain elements of both, and they are not the only Shakespeare plays that mix genres. This talk will discuss the ways that women are treated in this kind of drama, pointing towards the ethical dimension of the gendered social worlds created on stage.

Paul Innes is Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Gloucestershire.  He is author of five books, including Shakespeare and the English Renaissance Sonnet (1997) and Shakespeare’s Roman Plays (2015), as well as numerous articles and book chapters.

February 27th

David Garnett (Gloucestershire Philosophical Society) will talk on Understanding Anxiety.

The quality of our mental health and the effect of anxiety upon our daily lives can be just something that we take for granted. However, when anxiety starts to control our lives and biases our actions, lives can start to disintegrate and we can become unrecognisable to our friends and family. To support individuals who are suffering with anxiety, I have been liaising with the Independence Trust to create a course with the aim of helping and assisting individuals with anxiety problems. The course is designed to provide help on an individual basis by creating a personalised template to assist with existing and futuristic anxieties. I intend to argue the ideology and research behind the construction of the course, while examining how we construct our knowledge and understanding of ourselves and the world we inhabit. The main aim of the course is to provide an insight into the practicality of combating the unhelpful effects of anxiety.

David Garnett has been an attendee of the Gloucestershire Philosophical Society over the last seven years. During this time he has completed a degree in psychology at the University of Gloucestershire. He is now working with the Independence Trust to develop and run courses to help and support individuals with mental health issues

March 13th

Dr Mark Sinclair (University of Roehampton) will talk on Being Inclined.

We commonly talk of being inclined to do something (‘I’m inclined to think …’), or, using the nominal rather than adjectival form, of having an inclination to do that thing (‘my first inclination was to …’). We speak of natural tendencies or inclinations (the OED treats ‘inclination’ and ‘tendency’ as synonyms) as well as of acquired tendencies or inclinations as habits. But such talk is as opaque as it is familiar. What is an inclination exactly? What is it to be inclined? It is difficult to understand inclinations as providing reasons for an action, for when I act by inclination my action is not a function of reflective thought. That said, it is, arguably, not much more feasible to interpret inclinations as causing my action in a mechanical sense, for when I act by inclination it is still I who act. Is there, then, a sense in which inclinations, as the late Paul Hoffman asked in his 2011 ‘Reasons, Causes, Inclinations’, are irreducible to both intellectual ‘reasons’ and physical, mechanical ‘causes’ in action? In this talk, on the basis of the work of Felix Ravaisson, the most influential philosopher in late nineteenth-century France, I argue that there is. In his 1838 Of Habit, Ravaisson claims that in habit there is a form of tendency and inclination that is continuous with but irreducible to voluntary deliberation, and in this talk, I assess his thesis in the light of the contemporary metaphysics of powers, wherein ideas of tendency and inclination have recently come to prominence.

Mark Sinclair is Reader in Philosophy at the University of Roehampton and Associate Editor at the British Journal for the History of Philosophy. He is the author of Being Inclined: Felix Ravaisson’s Philosophy of Habit (OUP, 2018), Bergson (Routledge, 2018) and co-editor of the Oxford Handbook of Modern French Philosophy

March 27th

Professor Viv Burr (University of Huddersfield) will talk on Being Critical, Being Constructivist, and why it Matters

We live in an era characterised by the search for detailed truths about people. The 20th and (so far) 21st centuries have witnessed the emergence of numerous claims from psychologists and other scientists about the nature and origins of diverse phenomena such as intelligence, mental illness, dyslexia, sexual orientation, gender identity, addictions and personality characteristics.  Drawing on examples from my own current research, I will illustrate why we should adopt a ‘radical scepticism’ toward all truth claims, and search not for truths but for ‘alternative constructions’. I will argue that the moral relativism that appears to derive from a constructivist stance, far from being a weakness, as argued by some critics, is actually a necessary safeguard against the dangers of ‘certainty’

Viv Burr is Professor of Critical Psychology at the University of Huddersfield. She is known internationally for her book Social Constructionism, has also published widely in the fields of Personal Construct Psychology and Gender and is Co-Editor of Personal Construct Theory and Practice. Her research interests focus on the application of innovative qualitative methods to real-world issues. Her recent work includes an exploration of the experiences of and challenges faced by working elder carers, cross-cultural perceptions and inter-generational perceptions, and the psychological meaning of the natural world.

April 10th

Dr Charlotte Alderwick (University of the West of England) will talk on
Why Value Nature?

Event has been cancelled

It’s clear that as humans we have a variety of impacts on the world around us – some positive, some negative – and that we have the ability to radically change and even destroy some parts of our environment.  And we generally think that some of the things that we do, or could do, to the natural world are bad; for example if a species is made extinct because of our activities.  But why is this?  Is it bad for us to treat nature in certain ways because it means that the world is a worse place for humans?  Or is there something about nature that means it is valuable in its own right?  In this talk I discuss two different philosophical views of the value of nature, and explore the implications of these views for the ways that we should live and interact with the world around us.

Charlotte Alderwick is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England, Bristol.  Her research applies work in the history of philosophy to contemporary debates, and she is especially interested in human freedom and agency, the concept of nature, and our relationship to the natural world.

All sessions will be held at the Francis Close Campus of the University of Gloucestershire, Swindon Road, Cheltenham, at 7 p.m in room HC202a&b.  £3

Wednesday 26^th September

Chloe Mullet (University of Gloucestershire) will talk on a question of refinement: towards exposing the means and methods of musical creativity

As a musician and music educator for the past twenty years, I became fascinated with how music I created could be, in one moment, ‘fantastic’ – and ‘absolutely awful’, just a short time later. The PhD I am engaged in takes elements of questions implied by this familiar problem, to explore musical processes, by applying Gibson’s theory of affordances (1977) to a series of reflexive case studies. The research reflects the range of my musical interests, and encompasses solo projects, including collaboration/arrangement for John McGrath with the Immix ensemble, multimedia music and dance with Sarah Black and Gemma Breed, structured improvisation as part of a.P.A.t.T., and arrangement for Liverpool’s New Romantic pop-rock group, China Crisis.

This paper takes a closer look at contrasting examples of my practice, in which possibilities are proliferated, accepted and rejected, to propose/expose the interrelatedness of different forms of agency, that ultimately impact the experienced meaning of the music made.  The findings are framed by a series of broad themes that unify the research, namely ‘person’, ‘project’, ‘people’, ‘place’, ‘tools’, and ‘process’, which enable the application of Gibson’s theory of affordance in a range of time-scales and contexts, for the purposes of comparison.

Part of the ambition of this research is that it benefit others, including creative practitioners, so the feedback of the Society will be of great interest.

Chloë Mullett is a Senior Lecturer in Popular Music at The University of Gloucestershire; her PhD research has been generously supported by Manchester Metropolitan University.

Wednesday 10^th October

James Woodard (University of Gloucestershire) will talk on Rebooting the Human Race: Philosophy of Religion and Extra-Terrestrial Human Society

At 2018, the time of writing, there is every reason to know with certainty that the colonisation by humans of a planetary body is both a technological feasibility and a human objective. Although for lack of resources and engineering time this project is out of our present reach by some decades, theoretical and practical advances in rocketry and very many other sciences are in place for what can viewed as the next ‘great leap forward’ for Homo Sapiens. The object of the evening’s discussion is to examine the religious, philosophical and ethical implications and impositions upon the people of a future extra-terrestrial colonised earthling society. These people will be obliged to function under the new set of societal demands of hostile environment, small gene pool, lack of resources and the profound ecological considerations of an artificial biosphere. This human progression may be viewed as a fresh start or a ‘re-boot’.

James Woodard was previously theatre Master Carpenter, Lighting Designer, Production Manager and a tutor at the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School. His interest in philosophy was sparked by Russell, R.D. Laing and Eratosthenes. James is presently an undergraduate Religion, Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Gloucestershire.

Wednesday 24^th October

Dr Charlotte Alderwick (University of the West of England) will talk on Why Value Nature?

Unfortunately this talk as had to be cancelled due to the illness of the speaker.

It’s clear that as humans we have a variety of impacts on the world around us – some positive, some negative – and that we have the ability to radically change and even destroy some parts of our environment.  And we generally think that some of the things that we do, or could do, to the natural world are bad; for example if a species is made extinct because of our activities.  But why is this?  Is it bad for us to treat nature in certain ways because it means that the world is a worse place for humans?  Or is there something about nature that means it is valuable in its own right?  In this talk I discuss two different philosophical views of the value of nature, and explore the implications of these views for the ways that we should live and interact with the world around us.

Charlotte Alderwick is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of the West of England, Bristol.  Her research applies work in the history of philosophy to contemporary debates, and she is especially interested in human freedom and agency, the concept of nature, and our relationship to the natural world.

Wednesday 7^th November

Dr Stephen Law (Royal Institute of Philosophy) will talk on Four Wittgensteinian Defences of Religious Belief and Why They All Fail

Religious belief is criticised from various directions. Many – like Richard Dawkins – believe that much of what the religious believe can be shown to be unjustified or false. In response, some religious believers go ‘Wittgensteinian’ – insisting that the critics have an unsophisticated grasp of and have misunderstood what religious people mean when they say ‘God exists’, ‘Jesus rose from the dead’, and so on. The critics’ criticisms consequently miss their target. I tease out various versions of this style of immunising strategy, looking at examples from Karen Armstrong, John Cottingham, Denys Turner, Giles Fraser, and others. I conclude that none of the versions examined succeed. All fail either because they are implausible as accounts of what the religious believe, and/or because they fail to deliver the required immunity.

Stephen Law is an English philosopher and was reader in philosophy at worked at Heythrop College, University of London until its closure in June 2018. He also edits the philosophical journal Think, which is sponsored by the Royal Institute of Philosophy and published by the Cambridge University Press. He is a Fellow of The Royal Society of Arts and Commerce, and in 2008 became the provost of the Centre for Inquiry UK.

Wednesday 21st November

Professor Constantine Sandis (University of Hertfordshire) will talk on Understanding Oneself and Others

How can we come to better understand someone? I argue against the popular conception of understanding as a matter of accessing information that is in some sense stored within the mind of the person or other creature in question. In so doing, I reject both empathetic and rationalistic models of how such knowledge is obtained and subsequently applied to explain behaviour. Instead of beginning with such a general theory of ‘mind-reading’, I consider a range of cases pertaining to other species, distant and/or past cultures, one’s own loved ones and, indeed, oneself. I conclude that these collectively demonstrate that while one cannot specify necessary and sufficient conditions for understanding across all such scenarios, the degree to which we gain understanding is positively correlated with that to which we share practices and related behaviour.

Constantine Sandis is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Hertfordshire, Secretary of the British Wittgenstein Society, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. He is the author of The Things We Do and Why We Do Them (2012) and Character and Causation: Hume’s Philosophy of Action (2018), and editor or co-editor of numerous books including Hegel on Action (2010), Human Nature (2012), and Cultural Heritage Ethics (2015). He is currently writing a book on the topic of this talk for Yale University Press.

Wednesday 5^th December

Professor Nathan Widder (Royal Holloway, University of London) will talk on The Time-Politics Assemblage

Recent political philosophy, and particularly those strands that have been influenced and inspired by French post-structuralist thought, has increasingly explored ontological questions about time and temporality as a way to understand complex processes of political and social change.  This has built upon a previous focus by scholars on questions of difference in relation to identity that often brought with it a deconstruction and seemingly a complete dissolution of the human subject, but through this turn to time many have found a way to build new positive conceptions of what the human self or subject can be.  My paper will explore these issues of time and difference in relation to a politics and a micropolitics of the self.  It will look particularly at the temporality and the sense of an event, and how the self relates to the clash of forceful differences that an event entails.

Nathan Widder is a Professor of Political Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London.  He is author of three books, Genealogies of Difference (2002), Reflections on Time and Politics (2008), and Political Theory after Deleuze (2012), as well as numerous articles exploring thinkers and issues in ancient, medieval, and contemporary philosophy.  He is currently working on an extensive study of the role played by the concept of sense in the work of 20^th Century French philosopher Gilles Deleuze.

All sessions will be held at the Francis Close Campus of the University of Gloucestershire, Swindon Road, Cheltenham, at 7 p.m in room HC203.  £2 students/unwaged £3 waged.

WEDNESDAY 11 APRIL

Dr Richard Elliott (Newcastle University) will talk on From Sound Objects to Song Objects: Rethinking Sonic Materiality and Metaphor?

Recent years have witnessed an intense interest in the roles played by objects in the world, with many approaches recognising the vital interdependence of human and non-human actors. My current research aims to establish the importance of music (and sound more broadly) in this new terrain of scholarship by analysing how songs represent objects, how songs themselves become meaningful objects and how songs rely on a wide range of ever-changing objects to assure their survival. Using the connecting thread of materiality, I propose an approach to musical analysis that both connects with recent object-centred scholarship and overcomes existing musicological distinctions between music as thing and music as process.

This paper presents an analysis of the ‘song object’, a concept crucial to my research and which has connections to earlier theories of lyric substance as well as to Pierre Schaeffer’s objet sonore (sound object). What constitutes the song object? What kind of object is it? How do songs themselves comment on their construction, their parts, their physicality? I argue that songs are a particular kind of technology for ordering information and that they deploy particular technologies of object orientation in ways distinct from, but comparable to, those of paintings, sculptures, poems and books. Part of my analysis therefore consists of exploring material descriptors and metaphors connected to song, incorporating the artificial (hooks, bridges, etc.) and the natural (cells, viruses, weather systems). I’m interested in what these terms – and their application to song objects – can tell us about the materiality of sound.

Dr Richard Elliott is Senior Lecturer in Music at Newcastle University (UK). His current research focuses on issues of time, age and space in popular music as well as the relationship between music and materiality. He is the author of the books Fado and the Place of Longing (2010), Nina Simone (2013), The Late Voice (2015) and The Sound of Nonsense (2018), as well as articles exploring consciousness, memory, nostalgia, place and space, affect, technology and the relationship between popular music and literature.

WEDNESDAY 25 APRIL

Jessica Munns and Penny Richards will talk on Staging History: William Shakespeare, John Banks and Henry VIII: Sex, Gender and Spectacle.

This paper will discuss two plays, roughly sixty years apart, that dramatise the marriage of  Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn in very different ways. We shall suggest that what can be seen in the different ways the “story” is staged is an epistemological shift with regard to the idea of what constitutes history, as well as a reconfiguration of gender that in itself rewrites history in what is, of course, an endless process of revision and erasure in the work of memory and forgetting.

Jessica Munns and Penny Richards have written and edited many books together, as well as currently editing the journal Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Theatre Research. They have both given papers to the Gloucestershire Philosophical Society before.

 

WEDNESDAY 9 MAY

Dr Martin Wood (University of Gloucestershire) will talk on Jalaram Kathā: Exceeding the Capacity of Modern Historiography

Over a period of three evenings in January this year some fifteen hundred devotees of the Gujarati Hindu saint Jalaram Bapa gathered in a community function hall in north west London to partake in a katha or re-telling of the narrative of the life of saint and his wife Virbai Ma.

The key episodes in the narrative that underpin the traditions ethical and philosophical position such as the saint’s his previous lives and the miracles that he performed were narrated by the community’s priest and re-enacted throughout by a number of devotees. Furthermore, whilst the event focused solely upon the above themes at the same time a highly venerated and ritually installed copy of the Ramayana was placed in the centre of the stage which had to all intents and purposes been transformed in to a shrine.

This paper hopes to unpack the role of the katha in the community and the importance of the telling and retelling of the Jalaram narrative and consider the role of the Ramayana in its material form during the katha ritual. I also hope to illustrate how the performance of Katha opens the way for a much deeper religious experience as allows for the reality of transcendent presence and exceeds what we in the west might consider the capacity of modern historiography.

 

WEDNESDAY 23 MAY

Dr Erin Peters (University of Gloucestershire) will talk on Trauma and the English Civil War

‘The Great Civil War of 1642-46 was arguably the most traumatic experience that the English, Welsh and Cornish people had ever had…In many ways the nation never recovered from it’ (Ronald Hutton, 2004). While the actual scars left by this momentous conflict in British history have been subject to intensive scholarly investigation, my talk will investigate the public expressions of the traumatic effect of the Wars and will explore how the trauma caused by the violence and rupture of the Civil Wars eventually found expression in popular print sources. What my analysis of these sources will demonstrate is that commentators on the mid-seventeenth century conflict did acknowledged the presence of war trauma and that they showed an awareness of the therapeutic results of attempting to narrate cultural and individual trauma. I will demonstrate that alongside the official and authorised interpretation of disability as a physical impairment, a popular understanding of the disabling and disfiguring nature of psychological damage developed.

Erin Peters is a Lecturer in Early Modern History at the University of Gloucestershire, with specialist interests in seventeenth-century Britain. Combining historical research with an interdisciplinary background in Memory Studies, Erin studies early modern print culture, the history of trauma and nostalgia, and early modern forms of memory and post-conflict cultures_. Recently, she is the author of Commemoration and Oblivion in Restoration Print Culture, 1658-1667 (Palgrave, 2017), and ‘“The deep staines these Wars will leave behind”: psychological wounds and curative methods in the English Civil War’ (Manchester UP, 2018).  Currently, Erin is co-editing a collection of essays entitled Early Modern Trauma (forthcoming, Nebraska UP, 2019).

WEDNESDAY 6 June

John Ricketts (Gloucestershire Humanists) will talk on Stephen Pinker’s Enlightenment Now

In what might be thought of as an extension of his “The Better Angels of Our Nature” he goes on from the question  “Are we less violent than we were?” to the broader “Is the world a better place than it was?”

For both questions the answer is “YES”

The strength of Pinker’s argument is that he backs up generalisations with facts (lots of them).

John will aim to present a random, maybe eccentric, selection from Pinker’s studies.

John Ricketts started his professional career (teaching biology in state secondary schools) in the early 1960s. This was also a time when he moved away from his C of E roots, and began to explore what a godless life might be like. For the past couple of decades he has been actively involved with Gloucestershire Humanists.

All sessions will be held at the Francis Close Campus of the University of Gloucestershire, Swindon Road, Cheltenham, at 7 p.m in room HC202AandB.