A podcast by Mind & Life Europe, emphasising the importance of exploratory dialogue, radical candour, intersubjectivity, and listening as an epistemology. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of our co-founder, the Chilean neurobiologist and philosopher Francisco Varela, these conversations are one more way of exploring what has been the lodestar for our work at Mind & Life Europe: the continuity between mind and life, or in Francisco’s own formulation, “living as sense-making.”
Mind & Life Europe is a home for unconventional interdisciplinary encounters, where researchers and practitioners enrich one another in their understanding of mind and life, through the rigour of scientific inquiry, the openness of philosophical investigation, the edginess of artistic exploration, and the depth of contemplative wisdom traditions. We believe that holding an open-hearted and interdisciplinary space of dialogue is in itself a radical, ethical mode of being-in-the-world, which generates new pathways of research and collective sense-making with transformative potential.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
A podcast by Mind & Life Europe, emphasising the importance of exploratory dialogue, radical candour, intersubjectivity, and listening as an epistemology. Inspired by the groundbreaking work of our co-founder, the Chilean neurobiologist and philosopher Francisco Varela, these conversations are one more way of exploring what has been the lodestar for our work at Mind & Life Europe: the continuity between mind and life, or in Francisco’s own formulation, “living as sense-making.”
Mind & Life Europe is a home for unconventional interdisciplinary encounters, where researchers and practitioners enrich one another in their understanding of mind and life, through the rigour of scientific inquiry, the openness of philosophical investigation, the edginess of artistic exploration, and the depth of contemplative wisdom traditions. We believe that holding an open-hearted and interdisciplinary space of dialogue is in itself a radical, ethical mode of being-in-the-world, which generates new pathways of research and collective sense-making with transformative potential.
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.
In no other conversation this season has the relationship between ontology and ethics felt more pressing and more pregnant. How we define a person, how we classify their suffering and needs, radically determines the different interventions we might choose, either opening up a space for healing or, inversely, creating further harm. This conversation about healing drew together three researcher-practitioners of different horizons - Amy Cohen Varela, Dr Rika Preiser, and Dr Sanneke De Haan - to reflect on the ways in which practices of healing imply so much more than normative claims toward ‘getting better,’ and are so much messier than the cognitivist, medical, and colonial modes of epistemology would imply. Spaces of healing are alive with the tension of breakdowns and transgressions, overdetermination and underdetermination, safety and risk, and require a unique form of epistemic humility from those involved. Participatory sense-making provided a powerful frame for this conversation, wherein suffering could be understood anew—as a mismatch between one’s sense-making and that of one’s environment, rather than an intrinsic burden of the individual.
A couple references mentioned in the conversation:
Royal Institute of Philosophy Lecture by Dr Sanneke De Haan: “The Person in Psychiatry: An Ecohumanist, Enactive Approach”
On ontological intimacy and various types of transgression, see: Kym Maclaren, “Intimacy as Transgression and the Problem of Freedom,” in Puncta: Journal of Critical Phenomenology Vol. 1 No. 1 (2018).
Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.