The London Lecture Series

We all have treasured memories, but what, exactly, is it that makes them so valuable to us? In this talk, Marya Schechtman explores this question, proposing that one source of value is the role such memories can play in constituting and maintaining both personal identity and intimate social relationships. But what are the implications of this, ethical or otherwise, for our practices of remembering...

How does memory help some people grow after trauma? Post-traumatic growth (PTG) is a term which has been extensively studied by psychologists for the past 30 years, but also represents a new version of an ancient idea present in theology, philosophy, and cultural narratives – namely, that great good can come from adversity and suffering. In his talk, James Dawes explores the role of memory in PTG....

Welcome to the London Lecture Series  2024-25! This year our talks focus on questions surrounding the theme of " Remembering and Forgetting ." In this first talk of our latest series, Rima Bisu explores the important role forgetting plays in facilitating and protecting moral goods, such as forgiveness and privacy.  Forgetting plays an indispensable role in our lives. Sometimes we want as...

Louis Sass examines the enigmatic nature of human subjectivity and its history from the European Renaissance, the status of psychology and related fields in conceptualising human existence, and whether we as humans have lost the ability to see ourselves in great works of art. Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Mary Boyle & Lucy Johnstone examine the downfalls of the traditional methods of psychiatric diagnosis, and discuss the implications of their proposed Power Threat Meaning Framework as an alternative to psychiatric diagnosis. Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Can assisted dying for persons with mental disorders be permitted on ethical grounds? What should the criteria be for allowing a person to make the choice to end their own life?  Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Richard Gipps discusses the question of who gets to call whom mad, and with what right, and confronts the idea that  the world of the 'mad' person is any less valid than that of the 'sane'. Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Somogy Varga and Andrew J. Latham report results from a series of experimental philosophy studies which aimed to examine how people understand and deploy  concepts of health and disease, and the factors that influence their health-related judgments. Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Claire Hogg discusses the theoretical basis for the defence of legal “insanity”.  She explorse a number of competing analyses by which the relevance of a defendant’s mental disorder to their criminal culpability may be understood, including counterfactual analyses and capacity models. Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Rose Mcabe, Lisa Bortolotti, and Michele Lim examine video-recorded encounters between young people and mental healthcare practitioners in emergency services, and describe communication that adopts an agential stance towards the young person. Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

At present, psychiatry and psychology research in mental healthcare is focused on interventions. In contrast, social science and humanities research pursues its own, sometimes rather theoretically-driven agenda. In this lecture, Dr Armstrong and Dr Byrom, bring together these disparate fields of research with the aim of promoting more productive interdisciplinary interaction.  Part of the London L...

Many people suffer from psychiatric disorders and mental distress. But how are we to understand these problems, and how are we to treat them? Sanneke de Haan argues that we need to look at their developmental history, the social and cultural practices they take part in, and their existential (self)understanding.  Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

Over six decades of research confirm there are ethnic inequalities in the experiences and outcomes of severe mental illness.  The reasons for these differences have been debated, some arguing they meet treatment needs, others say they are manifestations of structural racism.  Kim Bhui shares his views on conceptual confusions, causes, and remedies by drawing on recent Lived Experience Data on comp...

Is mad life possible? Constrained by everyday mentalism, and controlled by various forms of psychiatrization of our biographies, we ask – can we live the lives we dream rather than dreaming that we live?  Jasna Russo looks at the processes of knowledge making on what is considered madness and our ability to address each other in the second person, as you and me. Erick Fabris revisits a life of act...

Since the 1970s, psychiatry has been in the grip of a paradigm I call ‘madness-as-dysfunction’. In this view, mental disorders happen when something inside the person isn’t working as it should, or is ‘broken.’  In his previous work, Justin Garson has identified an alternate paradigm, which he calls ‘madness-as-strategy,’ which sees mental illness in terms of purpose, adaptation and function. In t...

Why is it so tempting to understand spirituality / religion as counter to our conception of mental health, both in terms of its causality and its therapeutic restoration?  Camilia Kong seeks to provide a philosophical diagnosis of the problem through Taylor’s discussion of the ‘immanent frame’ in Western modernity, and in so doing, provide the conceptual space for enriching understanding of diverg...

Is it right to assume that speaking our minds is good and keeping silent may be a sign of oppression? Havi Carel and Dan Degerman present this lecture. Part of the London Lecture Series 2023-24 | “Madness and Mental Health"

What would it mean to do justice to testimonies of traumatic experience? That is, how can experiences which do not fit the customary scripts of sense-making be heard? Whereas processes of official memorialization or legal redress often demand that victims and survivors convey their experiences through familiar modes of narration, María del Rosario Acosta López's project on “grammars of listen...

Fernando Pessoa (1888–1935) lived what was in many ways an astonishingly modern, transcultural and translingual life. He was born in Lisbon and grew up in Anglophone Durban, acquiring a life-long love for English poetry and language. Returning to Lisbon, from where he would never again leave, he set himself the goal to travel throughout an infinitude of inner landscapes, to be an explorer of inner...

The classical Greeks give us a concept of substance that guarantees a permanent and unchanging subject as the substratum for the human experience. Roger Ames argues that in the Yijing or "Book of Changes" we find a stark alternative to this ontology which reflects a holistic, organic, and ecological worldview. This cosmology begins from “living” itself as the motive force behind change,...

Lewis Gordon examines what it means for philosophy to be ‘colonised’ and the challenges involved in ‘decolonising’ it in philosophical and political terms.  Lewis Gordon is professor of philosophy and head of the department of philosophy at the University of Connecticut. He works in a number of areas of philosophy including Africana philosophy, existentialism, phenomenology, social and political t...

In his famous 1897 essay, “The Conservation of Races”, Du Bois advocated that African Americans hold on to their distinctiveness as members of the black race because this enables them to participate in a cosmopolitan process of cultural exchange in which different races collectively advance human civilization by means of different contributions. Philosophers like Kwame Anthony Appiah and Tommie Sh...

Some of our emotions are bad – unpleasant to experience, reflective of dissatisfactions or even heartbreak – but nonetheless quite important to express and, more basically, to feel. Grief is like this, for example. So, too, is disappointment. Amy Olberding explores how our current social practices may fail to support expressions of disappointment and thus suppress our ability to feel it well. She...

While Heidegger and Derrida both contributed groundbreaking reflections on hospitality (and “hostipitality”), they failed to recognize that the host-guest relationship can only succeed if it is correlated with the notion of mutual guardianship. The lecture will describe historic guardian civilizations and then turn to Ricoeur’s linguistic hospitality as a possible blueprint for future cultural hos...

We live in an age of anger and shameless disregard for what is true and good. What can we learn from other cultures about better ways to do anger and shame? How can we develop better norms for being angry at the right things, in the right way, at the right times? How can we inculcate norms for proper shame at callous disregard for what is true and good? Flanagan argues that attention to how other...