Monday 16th September 2024
Lorna Mitchell, Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, Plant Humanities
University of Bristol, Arts Complex, Woodland Rd, Room G33
Lorna Mitchell, Head of Library Services at the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh, is visiting Bristol as one of the supervisors of a Collaborative Doctoral Award project on female artists, medical education and botanical illustration. We are taking the opportunity to convene an informal workshop for staff and students to meet with Lorna and hear about RBGE’s new Plant Humanities research strand and the related resources of RBGE library and archives. This workshop will be of interest to colleagues working in the Medical Humanities, Environmental Humanities, Visual Cultures, the History of Science, and those seeking collaborative opportunities with RBGE.
Wednesday 25th September 2024
CHHS, EPIC & ‘Beyond Voice’ Research Seminar: ‘Mania and the capacity for silence’ (Dr Dan Degerman)
University of Bristol, G2 Cotham House.
Zoom: https://bristol-ac-uk.zoom.us/j/93725442803?pwd=6vcIymd2HtladOJPPHhaAbfGFrAQp3.1
Title: Mania and the capacity for silence
This talk will articulate the capacity for silence and explore its breakdown in the context of mania. Silence is ubiquitous.
We are surrounded by the silences of objects, spaces, other people, and our own bodies. Generally, these silences go unnoticed, forming a background against which we skillfully engage with people and the world through speech and sound. For example, we can pre-reflectively grasp the silence punctuating an interlocutor’s utterance as a solicitation to break our own silence by speaking, just as we can pre-reflectively grasp their waning attention as a solicitation for us to become silent again, enabling them to speak and us to listen. I will propose that we can usefully understand this as involving the sense of silence.
I will define and explore this sense of silence through a case in which that sense has apparently broken down, namely, mania. Symptoms of mania include an unmanageable flood of thoughts and an urge to speak. First-person accounts of those symptoms indicate that they may bring a profound disruption in the individual’s relationship to silence. In some, silence is described as a newfound source of agony, in others, as an elusive goal. Individuals appear reflectively aware of social norms and personal habits that ordinarily govern silence but their affective hold has loosened. Some people invent painful, physical methods to try to replace that hold. This suggests that the sense of silence is an embodied capacity constituted through the sedimentation of norms and habits.
The paper, thus, offers two benefits: firstly, a better understanding of how our relationship to silence enables us in our everyday lives and, secondly, insight about of how its disruption may disable us in mania.
Thursday 26th September 2024
‘On Concrete Human Problems’: Georges Canguilhem on Medicine and the Human Sciences
University of Bristol, Room TBC
Event description:
Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (2004) once described Georges Canguilhem as a “totemic emblem”, embodying a “heretical” model of intellectual rigour and seriousness for all those who, from the 1960s, sought to break with dominant existentialist trends in French philosophy and produce new ways of thinking. Indeed, philosophers such as Louis Althusser and Alain Badiou saw in Canguilhem a key figure in the French philosophical field, who opened different theoretical possibilities. Michel Foucault (1984) emphatically stated that if one ignores Canguilhem’s importance “in the whole debate of ideas that preceded and followed the movement of 1968”, one would “no longer understand very much about a whole series of discussions that took place among French Marxists”, “sociologists” and “psychoanalysts”.
Nonetheless, and despite the wide range of themes Canguilhem considered in his published works and unpublished manuscripts, he remains mostly know in Anglophone academia as one of the founders, together with Alexandre Koyré and Gaston Bachelard, of a particular approach in the history (and philosophy) of science widely known as ‘historical epistemology’. In view of complexifying this narrative, this workshop focuses on two paths along which Canguilhem engaged with what he called in The Normal and the Pathological “concrete human problems”: the reflection on medicine and the experience of disease, on the one hand, and the discourses and theories of the human sciences, on the other.
The papers will explore the creative and inspiring ways in which Canguilhem reflected on medicine, psychology, sociology, geography, history, and anthropology, bringing philosophy to bear on issues that engage human life, and which are themselves reflected in medical knowledge, the experience of disease as well as in the concepts, methods, and empirical efforts of the human sciences. Lastly, we will also draw on Canguilhem’s work to explore the notions of normal and pathological from contemporary philosophical perspective of embodiment.
Speakers: Annagiulia Canesso (Università degli Studi di Padova), Stuart Elden (University of Warwick), Monica Greco (University of Bath), Pierre-Olivier Méthot (Université Laval), Caio Souto (Universidade Federal do Amazonas), Giulia Gandolfi (Karlsruhe/Ca’ Foscari), Federico Testa (University of Bristol).
Please direct any questions to the Centre administrator, Kathryn Body: kathryn.body@bristol.ac.uk