Masters’ School Seminar 16.11.2022 3 p.m.

The next Masters’ School Seminar will be held on November, 16, at  3 p.m.

Our guest is professor Dan Zahavi.

Dan Zahavi is Professor of Philosophy and director of the Center for Subjectivity Research at the University of Copenhagen. Zahavi’s primary research area is phenomenology and philosophy of mind, and their intersection with empirical disciplines such as psychiatry and psychology. In addition to a number of scholarly works on the phenomenology of Husserl, Zahavi has mainly written on the nature of selfhood, self-consciousness, intersubjectivity, empathy, and most recently on topics in social ontology. His most important publications include Self-awareness and Alterity (1999/2020), Husserl’s Phenomenology (2003), Subjectivity and Selfhood (2005), The Phenomenological Mind (together with Shaun Gallagher) (2008/2012/2021), Self and Other (2014), Husserl’s Legacy (2017), and Phenomenology: The Basics (2019). Since 2020, Zahavi has been the principal investigator on a 5-year research project entitled Who are We? which is supported by the European Research Council and the Carlsberg Foundation. Zahavi’s writings have been translated into more than 30 languages.

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Title and abstract:

“Philosophy, Phenomenology, Psychiatry.”

Psychiatry has since its very beginning had a troublesome relationship with philosophy. Some of the founding fathers of psychiatry believed philosophical knowledge to be indispensable for the clinical practice. Can such a verdict still be maintained, or would it improve the scientific credentials of psychiatry, if it resolutely turned its back to philosophy and became more like the other medical specialties? In my talk, I will suggest that the later move would be a grave mistake. I will show how our conception and description of a variety of different psychiatric conditions inevitable draw on various philosophical concepts and why a familiarity with those concepts and their theoretical foundations are important. I my talk, I will discuss some historical references, some clinical cases, and also exemplify how ideas from phenomenological philosophy have been used by a number of psychiatrists.