Annual lectures, talks and conferences

Date

Seminar

13 March, 2025

Speaker: Espen Løkhammer

Title: An Assessment of Halvorson’s Objection to the Fine-Tuning Argument

Abstract:

This paper evaluates Hans Halvorson’s recent objection to the fine-tuning argument for the existence of God. Halvorson contends that the fine-tuning argument, given the assumptions of fine-tuning advocates, shoots itself in the foot and ends up disconfirming theism rather than confirming it. Halvorson’s argument consists of a preliminary claim and a main claim. The preliminary claim of Halvorson is that if physics provides probabilities, then the theist as well as the naturalist should adopt the probabilities provided by physics. Halvorson subsequently argues that, based on this claim, the fine-tuning argument undermines rather than supports theism. I will argue that Halvorson makes a mistake in his preliminary claim, and correcting this mistake reveals that his main claims are misguided. In conclusion, I will reflect on the conceptual insights gained from considering Halvorson’s objection.

1 April, 2025

Speaker: Lucien Finch

Title: Can the sufferer speak? A critique of phenomenological approaches towards anxiety

Abstract:
In recent years there has been a great deal of optimism surrounding the use phenomenological

insight and methodology in the treatment of psychiatric disorders. It is thought that through phenomenology, clinicians can go beyond the superficial treatment of symptoms and directly address the fundamental existential structures which they point towards. A foundational example of this approach is to be sought in Søren Kierkegaard and Martin Heidegger’s treatment of anxiety. For these thinkers, anxiety is not reducible to racing thoughts and sweaty palms or to be explained by recourse to traumatic events in early childhood or the repressive nature of one’s social world. Rather anxiety is a means of attuning us to certain universal aspects of the human condition such as nothingness, freedom and our inescapable impulsion towards self-fulfilment. In short, for Kierkegaard and Heidegger, anxiety is not a pathology but an indispensable means for human self-understanding.  In this presentation, I will firstly present Kierkegaard and Heidegger’s respective concepts of anxiety before moving onto two concerns I have with them. Firstly, contra Kierkegaard, I will argue that anxiety disorders often lead to the curtailment of freedom rather than its realisation. Secondly, I will argue that both perspectives of anxiety suffer from their presumed transcendental validity. Both Heidegger and Kierkegaard imply that they have special insight to the meaning of anxiety. This is even though neither have engaged with psychiatric patients nor refer to qualitative psychiatric research. While the theoretical originality of these thinkers could help psychotherapeutic practitioners go beyond superficial and unchallenged notions of anxiety (‘idle talk’), it could also lead to a form of psychotherapy which is divorced from the self-understanding and day-to-day experience of the patients. I will contend that within clinical settings, the insight of phenomenologists should be used to help patients develop, and not inform, an understanding of their anxiety. In turn, the informed testimony of patients can be used to develop a more robust and experientially accurate concept of anxiety.

15 April, 2025

Speaker: Narelle Robertson

Title: Arcane geopolitics: Martin Heidegger, Aleksandr Dugin, Julius Evola and the American Far-right

Abstract:
The far-right are making their presence felt around the world, from the success of fascist parties in Europe to the success of the current Trump administration in the United States. The similarities between America and their seeming close ties to Putin’s Russia makes it important to examine the eschatological thoughts that are mirrored in both regimes. Russian philosopher, Aleksandr Dugin’s thought holds centrally to a form of ‘arcane geopolitics.’ Basing his philosophy on the works of the likes of German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Nazi Jurist Carl Schmitt and Italian fascist Julius Evola, Dugin’s fascist, traditionalist philosophy speaks clearly to the grand mythological narrative of Russian exceptionalism. To this end I will explicate Dugin’s thought and its debt to the geopolitics of Heidegger’s thought. I will first present a brief background on Heidegger’s geo-politics and Russian exceptionalism before turning to Dugin himself and finally Julius Evola and his ‘spiritual racism’ with its links to the current American Far-right and the Trump administration.

6 May, 2025

Speaker: Lucy Myers

Title: Rendering Beings Manifest: Labour, estrangement and the (im)possibilities of Heideggerian Marxism.

Abstract:
In Heidegger's (in)famous 'Letter on Humanism', Heidegger makes a passing comment that Marx's conception of Entfremdung allows for a "superior" account of history but quickly leads into a dismissal of materialism by asserting Marx's conception of labour is fundamentally Hegelian. I want to read this comment with and against Heidegger's 'The Question Concerning Technology', where labour (Arbeit) appears as a preoccupation of Heidegger's throughout the text, ending with a call for labour in the form of poesis as the site of resistance against Gestell. In turn, Heidegger struggles to articulate the very notion of estrangement that he identifies in Marx, of how the human experiences the atomisation of the world. This paper then will be sketch of the constellation that emerges here: what the potentialities of labour are within, between and exterior to Marx and Heidegger.

20 May, 2025

Speaker: Melvin Craig

Title: Critical Phenomenology and Recognition Theory: An Alliance?

Abstract:
This paper seeks to develop in-roads between two often separated theoretical traditions in order to respond to the current state of modern global capitalism. The first is the program defined as “critical phenomenology” and which allows us to utilise the tools afforded to us by phenomenology in order to develop a critical social theory capable of grasping the experience of being subject to the unique forms of domination elicited by this contemporary order. The second of which is “recognition theory”, which, I argue, provides a robust normative basis for grounding the critical phenomenological project. In particular, I draw on Johanna Oksala’s critical defence of the methodology of classical Husserlian phenomenology, and Axel Honneth’s recognitional account of the Lukácsian concept of “reification” in order to develop the outlines for a critical phenomenology of capital grounded in a recognitive social ontology.