About the lectures
A broadly embodied, situated, and distributed approach to cognition and emotion suggests that feeling, remembering, and so on may be ecological or environmental processes, partly constituted by material resources outside the biological body. Our interactions with places – landscapes, built environments, neighbourhoods – thus become a key focus for interdisciplinary cognitive theory. Sometimes embodied familiarity generates rhythms of seamless action and subtly attuned deep place knowledge. But in other cases, we negotiate difficult places: troubling cultural, shared, or individual histories are burdened with or knotted into sites, when contested heritage is a psychological as well as a political challenge.
John Sutton – Creative engagements with difficult places: remembering, imagining, reenacting
In the first lecture, John Sutton will ask what cognitive theory can contribute to our understanding of possible modes of engagement with difficult places and historically burdened heritage. He will examine some specific artistic interventions which highlight tangled modes of remembering and feeling the past, including Lola Arias’s collaborative performance piece Minefield/ Campo Minado, in which Argentine and British veterans of the Malvinas/ Falklands war of 1982 enact extraordinarily powerful reimagined scenes, and recent projects by RAAAF, Rietveld Architecture-Art-Affordances, an Amsterdam-based studio integrating philosophy and architecture.
Michael Wheeler – Authenticity and place
In the second lecture, Michael Wheeler will explore how places figure in the phenomenon of authenticity (where authenticity might provisionally be understood in terms of, as the philosopher Bernard Williams once put it, ‘the idea that some things are in some sense really you, or express what you are, and others aren’t’). Adopting an account of thinking as essentially a kind of ongoing improvisation, and a notion of authenticity as a process in which a thinker creatively appropriates elements from its cultural heritage as models for its own actions, he will show how memory and the past are constitutively intertwined with the psychology of authenticity, and how both seamlessly familiar places and difficult places contribute in different ways to that psychology. This will involve a mixture of friendly conversations and critical skirmishes with Jack Kerouac’s road novels, Meindert Peters’ recent analysis of certain German modernist literary texts, Heideggerian phenomenology, and enactive cognitive science.
About the lecturers
- John Sutton is Emeritus Professor of Philosophy and Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia and Fellow at Paris Institute for Advanced Study.
- Michael Wheeler is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Stirling.
Connected events
This Double-feature lecture is linked to the event LCE Salon — Chekhov and Ginzburg.