The London Lecture Series

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 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"

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"

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"

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".