Within NeuroEpigenEthics we value qualitative research. One of our team members, Leni Van Goidsenhoven, is especially interested in those qualitative research methods that are going against the prevailing tendency to take qualitative data as ‘face value’, as ‘self-evident truths’, as data that can be ‘objectified’ by different forms of coding. Inspired by the work of, among others, Bronwyn Davies, Carolyn Ellis, Maggie MacLure, Norman Denzin, who are emphasizing that the truth found in qualitative data is relative and situated and sometimes even contains fictional elements, Leni is drawn towards innovate data collection tactics, creative-relational inquiry and ‘methods’ as, for instance, collaborative writing.

That’s why she went off to Malta, where the 4^th European Conference for Qualitative Inquiry took place. There, Leni had the chance to immerse herself in an impressive amount of lectures and workshops, focusing on issues as ‘the potential of multi-sensory research data’, ‘problematizing interviews’, participatory visual inquire’, ‘slow inquiry’, ‘action research practices’, to name but a few.

She also presented her own research, Listening Beyond Words: Swinging Together, in which she investigates how posthuman and new materialist theories disrupt the production of the ‘non-verbal child’.

Context:

We started our journey towards Karen Barad’s “Meeting the Universe Halfway” by reading Bergson’s “Time and Free Will” (see report here). We then saw Bergson’s initial challenge to psychophysics morphing into the Einstein-Bergson debate about the primacy of physics over philosophy (see report here). From a contemporary, modern Western, point of view it was Einstein’s point of view that prevailed, so entrenching the classical-corpuscular view of mechanistic physics as the ideal science (and therefore philosophy) should strive for. Such a view was however not only contested by Bergson but in his own way by A. N. Whitehead who thereby inspired contemporary thinkers such as Donna Haraway. We were fortunate enough to get introduced to Whitehead by Ronny Desmet (author of the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on him). Although Whitehead is almost erased from the history of analytic philosophy, his approach was of a thoroughly mathematical and physicist nature and at the same time embraced elements of Eastern philosophy. As shown in the picture of a letter by Whitehead, he directly interacted with Einstein and, whilst in Harvard, was mentor of many leading analytic philosophers like Quine. Therefore he may well be pivotal in controversies between the current philosophical traditions. In the following we provide a short reflection on this session. After this we’ll have one session on the interpretation of quantum physics by Whitehead and Bohr. This makes us well prepared for our final goal of an informed discussion of Karen Barad’s Meeting the Universe Halfway.

NeuroEpigenEthics on ECQI 2020

From Bergson over Bohr to Barad Session 3: Whitehead’s relational alternative

Context: