Professor Shaun Gallagher is Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Sciences, Senior Researcher  at the Institute of Simulation and Training, at The University of Central Florida, and Research Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at the University of Hertfordshire in England. He is Editor-in-chief of the international and interdisciplinary journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. His research interests include phenomenology and the philosophy of mind, embodiment, social cognition, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of time. He is the author of several books, including How the Body Shapes the Mind (Oxford, 2005), Brainstorming: Views and Interviews on the Mind (Imprint Academic, 2008) and with Dan Zahavi The Phenomenological Mind (Routledge, 2008).

 

Dr Maxine Sheets-Johnstone is an independent and interdisciplinary scholar affiliated with the Department of Philosophy, University of Oregon. She was awarded a Distinguished Fellowship in Spring 2007 at the Institute of Advanced Study at Durham University for research on xenophobia.Her most recent research interests include kinesthetic memory, an evolutionary semantics, death and human morality, as well as phenomenology and human psycho-pathology. Several books have been published in recent years: The Roots of Thinking (1990), Giving the Body Its Due (1992), The Roots of Power: Animate Form and Gendered Bodies (1994), The Primacy of Movement (1999), and The Roots of Morality (2008). Forthcoming is the book The Corporeal Turn: An Interdisciplinary Reader (Imprint Academic, 2009).

 

 

Keynote lectures

 

 

Shaun Gallagher: Social kinaesthesia

 

Kinaesthesia and proprioception are properly thought of as peripheral sensory signals generated from one's own movement and posture.  Phenomenologists like Husserl and Merleau-Ponty suggest that kinaesthesic signals may also be generated in correlation with our perceptual experience of objects and other people.  Based on contemporary research in neuroscience, I offer an interpretation of this claim that is consistent with an embodied and enactive social cognition that involves both perceiving the other and being perceived.

 

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone: Kinaesthetic Experience: Understanding Movement Inside and Out

 

Aristotles concluded from his keen observation that "Nature is a principle of motion and change" that "We must therefore see that we understand what motion is; for if it were unknown, nature too would be unknown." My keynote will attempt to follow through on his conclusion by setting forth fundamental aspects of kinaesthetic experience, by pointing out common misconceptions of movement that occlude its dynamic realities, and by underscoring the necessity of being conceptually and linguistically true to the truths of animate experience.

 

Invited speakers

Professor Helen Payne has been practicing authentic movement for over 20 years. She has developed a unique way of working with it in group psychotherapy. A Senior Registered dance movement therapist and Fellow with ADMT UK, accredited psychotherapist and group analyst, her background includes clinical practice with children and adolescents and more recently adults with medically unexplained symptoms in primary care. Author of numerous publications she is Editor in Chief for the International Journal for Body Movement and Dance in Psychotherapy, leader of the post graduate/post doctoral Research Group in Arts, Counselling and Psychotherapy at the University of Hertfordshire.

 

Susan Stuart is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Glasgow. She teaches in the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) and in the Department of Philosophy. Her research interests are in the philosophy of mind, Kantian metaphysics and epistemology, phenomenology and the role of the body and kinaesthetic imagination as underpinning for cognitive and creative imagination, questions of ontology, and idealism and technology. She has published on the application of Kant's transcendental psychology to contemporary issues in cognitive science, the feasibility of machine consciousness, deception, theories of mind and autism, the conditions for conscious agency, the ontology of digital objects, and on teaching philosophy in cyberspace.

 

 

Invited lectures

 

Helen Payne: Empathy and Kinaesthetic Awareness (an experiential session followed by discussion)

 

Participants will be invited to move with eyes closed for a short whilst another benignly regards them in stillness. Following this movement event, if they wish, they will speak of their experience and then, if desired, receive the other's kinaesthetic experience in the presence of their movement.

Body sensation and kinaesthetic experiences will be emphasised in promoting understanding of how we perceive others. A deep empathy between participants can be generated by this approach resulting in enhanced interpersonal communication.

 

Susan Stuart: Articulated Temporal-Kinaesthetic Consciousness

 

Husserl argues that conscious experience posesses an articulated temporal structure in terms of retention, immediate present and protention. In a similar vein I will argue that kinaesthetic experience has an articulated temporal structure. In developing the notions of kinaesthetic melody from the work of Merleau-Ponty and Luria, and kinaesthetic memory from Sheet-Johnstone's work, I will present a case for the energic character of the neuromuscular dynamics of engaged movement such that it enables enactive kinaesthetic imagination and the capacity for kinaesthetic anticipation/expectation.