The London Lecture Series

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"

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"

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"

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"

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 listening” asks how it might be possible to hear these experiences on their own terms and what are the challenges that we encounter when trying to do so. She argues that doing justice to trauma requires a profound philosophical questioning of the conditions that allow us to listen to testimony, and a true reckoning of the responsibility that we bear as listeners.  María del Rosario Acosta López is a professor at the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of California Riverside where she is also a co-operating faculty member of the philosophy department. Her teaching and research is in areas around romanticism and German idealism, aesthetics, contemporary political European philosophy and more recently questions of decolonial and Latin American studies with an emphasis on questions of memory and trauma in the Americas. 

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 worlds. He published very little, but left behind a famous trunk containing a treasure-trove of scraps, on which were written some of the greatest literary works of the 20th century, mainly in Portuguese but also substantially in English and French. He is now acknowledged as one of the greatest poets of the 20th century, and he has emerged over the last decade as a forgotten voice in 20th century modernism, taking his rightful place alongside C. P. Cavafy, Franz Kafka, T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, and Jorge Luis Borges. Pessoa was also a serious student of philosophy and himself a very creative philosopher, yet his genius as a philosopher has hardly been recognized. In this episode, Jonardon Ganeri sets out to put that right.Jonardon Ganeri holds the Bimal Matilal Distinguished Professorship in Philosophy at the University of Toronto. His work draws on a variety of philosophical traditions to construct new positions in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and theory of knowledge. He's a great advocate for an expanded role for cross-cultural methodologies and his research subjects include consciousness, self, attention, the idea of philosophy as a practice and its relationship to literature. His books include "Attention Not Self"; "Inwardness: An Outsider's Guide" and most recently "Fugitive Selves: Fernando Pessoa and His Philosophy".

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, and gives us a world of boundless “becomings:” not “things” that are, but “events” that are happening, a contrast between an ontological conception of human “beings” and a process conception of what Ames calls human “becomings.” Roger Ames is the Humanities Chair Professor at Peking University in Beijing and also Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa. He's the author and co-author of many books including his study of ancient Chinese political thought, "The Art of Rulership" and "Confucian Role Ethics: A Vocabulary".

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 thought, post-colonial thought and on the work of thinkers like W.E.B. Du Bois and Franz Fanon. His most recent books are "Freedom, Justice, and Decolonization" and "Fear of Black Consciousness".

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 Shelby have criticised the position that Du Bois expresses in that essay as a problematic form of racial essentialism. Chike Jeffers explores how Du Bois' 1924 book "The Gift of Black Folk" escapes or fails to escape that criticism. He argues that recognising the cultivation of historical memory as a form of cultural activity is key to understanding the concept's unity. Chike Jeffers is associate professor in the Department of Philosophy at Dalhousie university. He is the co-presenter of the Africana philosophy editions of the "History of Philosophy without Any Gaps" podcast and two forthcoming books based on it. He is also the co-author of "What is Race? Four Philosophical Views", and editor of "Listening to Ourselves: A Multilingual Anthology of African Philosophy".