Kristien Hens

PhD Jo Bervoets: “Letting Tourette’s be?”

Jo Bervoets (UAntwerp) did research into Tourette’s from a theoretical and an ethical perspective.


“Letting Tourette’s be?”

Tourette’s is getting more and more in the news headlines, for instance when famous people like Billy Eilish open up about their diagnosis. “Tourette’s might be the new autism or ADHD,” says Jo Bervoets. “With the recognition that it is more common than initially assumed, its stereotypical portrayal can also be adjusted.” Bervoets’ doctoral research shows that acceptance of Tourette’s must replace mere focus on its suppression.
Tourette’s is named after the French neurologist Gilles de la Tourette who made the first diagnosis at the end of the 19th century. People with the ‘Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome’ (as it is officially called) have multiple tics. These are involuntary movements, such as blinking the eyes, as well as movements that cause noises, such as blowing raspberries. Jo Bervoets (Centre for Ethics, University of Antwerp) looked at current theories about Tourette’s and checked whether these were compatible with the experiences of people with Tourette’s.


Stereotypes and stigmatisation

Tourette is often and incorrectly identified with cursing. “A small percentage of people with Tourette’s do curse or act in other ways that are considered socially inappropriate or disturbing,” says Bervoets. “Whilst this is not something to sweep under the rug given it is a part of the experiences of people with Tourette’s, we should not narrow Tourette’s to this aspect only. If we do so, it quickly becomes a caricature that is too often exploited to get an easy laugh. In conversation with Touretters, as they often refer to themselves, it becomes clear that the stereotypical and stigmatising view is the main risk factor for their mental health.”

In the last decades, Tourette’s has been seen as an individual neurological problem. “This view is an advance over the moralizing ideas about tics when the diagnosis was still unknown. However, my research makes clear that reducing Tourette’s to ‘a brain condition’ does injustice to the experiences of Touretters. In these experiences the expectations of others as to what constitutes ‘normal behaviour’ take a central place. Not only do these expectations lead to social isolation, but they also increase the frequency and intensity of tics.”


Beyond the Catch-22 of Tourette’s

One of the Touretters interviewed by Bervoets strikingly catches this complexity: “Exams put me in front of an impossible choice: either to disturb others with my tics or to hinder myself by inhibiting them.”
To avoid such dilemmas, Bervoets proposes to look at Tourette’s through the lens of neurodiversity. “I am autistic myself and, thanks to the neurodiversity movement, a scientific revolution in autism research is already taking place,” says Bervoets. “Instead of focussing on what we are according to stereotypes unable or unwilling to do (like social interaction), autism is seen as a different, an atypical, way of dealing with our environment. Based on this research I propose that spontaneity, vitality, and an urge to get things ‘just-right’ (for instance: organising them in specific ways) are the basic characteristics of Tourette’s.” Does this mean that Tourette’s suddenly becomes a superpower? “No, tics are often painful and disturbing, even without an audience. But recognising that the environment plays a role in how Tourette’s comes to the surface allows us to gain a broader view on it. For instance, it helps in bringing the attention to how Tourette’s manifests differently in women or what connection it has with OCD and ADHD. And most importantly: when onlookers can let Touretters just be, then they actively contribute to their mental wellbeing.” This ‘letting be’ obviously does not mean that there is less need of diagnoses or support. On the contrary, it is only in recognizing Tourette’s in all its nuances that we can empower Touretters.

Name and contact details: Jo Bervoets, jo.bervoets@uantwerpen.be, +32476471298

NeuroEpigenEthics interdisciplinary lecture ‘Against Ideal Agency’ by dr. August Gorman

Practical: Friday 28th May 15:00-17:00 online, register via mailto: jo.bervoets@uantwerpen.be, the Zoom details will be sent a couple of days ahead of the lecture

Abstract: An implicit assumption in many current debates in the moral responsibility literature is that there is a value-neutral way of identifying a group of agents upon which we can base our assumptions about responsible agency. In reality, the methodology that philosophers often use to identify the capacities possessed by responsible agents is to infer from an intuitive verdict that a neurodivergent person should not be blamed in a particular circumstance that they lack a crucial capacity of agency that responsible agents must have. In this talk I attempt to debunk this way of thinking by showing how it has arisen from decontextualized sympathy towards mental difference in lieu of genuine understanding. I identify several shortfalls of this paradigm of exemption as the explanation for why we ought to sometimes mitigate our blame towards someone when their wrongdoing has come about due to their neurodivergence. I suggest instead that we sometimes ought to alter or mitigate our blame because of the undue burdens of navigating the interpersonal world with a brain that functions outside the paradigm of the currently conventional norms.

Bio: August Gorman is a Values and Public Policy Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University co-appointed in the Center for Human Values and the Center for Health and Wellbeing. Their work focuses on how traditional debates about agency, moral responsibility, well-being, and consent intersect with neurodivergent experiences and the lived realities of psychological disability. 

Agenda: 

– lecture dr. August Gorman: approx. 45′

– responses Prof. Katrien Schaubroeck, Emma Moormann, Jo Bervoets: approximativ. 45′

– open Q&A: approx 30′

Organized by: NeuroEpigenEthics ERC project, check out other interdisciplinary lecture recordings on the NeuroEpigenEthics Youtube channel

Call for Abstracts: Conference Responsibility, Psychopathology & Stigma

Organized online by the University of Antwerp’s Department of Philosophy, the KU Leuven’s Institute of Philosophy and the ERC Starting Grant Project NeuroEpigenEthics.

Dates: 9thand 10thof September 2021

Keynotes:

Victoria McGeer (Princeton University)

Hanna Pickard (Johns Hopkins University)

Nick Haslam (University of Melbourne)

Maureen Sie (Tilburg University)

The main aim of this conference is to cross-fertilize research in what are up to now two separate fields. On the one hand there is the blooming field where philosophy of responsibility meets theories of psychopathology, specifically in addressing the question to what extent and in what way people diagnosed with a mental illness are to be excused for certain behaviours. On the other hand, there is an interesting line of psychological research on the link between stigma and neurological explanations of psychopathology. Going back to Peter Strawson’s articulation of the problem in terms of reactive and objective attitudes, many philosophers have thought of mental illness as a reason for exculpation. However, this objectifying treatment of people has important downsides, such as denying agency, and stirring up stigmatisation and other forms of social exclusion. Empirical research has shown that these effects are reinforced by a neurological approach to psychopathology. Exculpation of agents diagnosed with a mental illness thus seems to be a double-edged sword. Can we find a way in which we improve our understanding of psychopathology without at the same time stigmatising those diagnosed with mental illness? Should we create and adopt new forms of semi-reactive attitudes? Would it make a difference if we thought of neurological conditions in a more dynamic or interactive way? By confronting different strands of research from philosophy and psychology, we hope to find inspiration for a more balanced view of psychopathology that optimizes inclusion and acceptance of those diagnosed. 

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS:

Given the conference goal of cross-fertilization, we invite contributions from the fields of ethics, moral psychology, philosophy (of mind) or (social) psychology, preferably combining 2 of the 3 themes as per the conference title. We strive for diversity of views and presenters. 

Abstracts of 500 words should be sent to jo.bervoets@uantwerpen.be before May 15th 2021. They need to be attached as .pdf and need to be anonymized for reviewing. Please put all your contact information in the body of the email.

Notification of acceptance will be communicated before July 1st 2021. 

We plan on organizing a physical follow-up workshop with key contributors in Antwerp, somewhere in 2022.

Organizing Committee: Prof. K. Schaubroeck (UA), Prof. P. Adriaens (KUL), Jo Bervoets (NeuroEpigenEthics), Prof. K. Hens (NeuroEpigenEthics)

Call for Papers — Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies/Journal of Gender Studies – Dis/abling Gender

Special Issue Guest Editors: Evelien Geerts, Josephine Hoegaerts, Kristien Hens, Daniel Blackie

The recent, and ongoing, COVID-19 pandemic has made explicit what many of us already knew: good health and able-bodiedness are fluid and uncertain states. We can only ever hold them precariously (Butler 2004; Scully 2014), as their value and definition are intrinsically unstable and intersectionally linked to situated intelligibility systems that attribute meaning to gender, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, class, and many other lived identity categories and labels (Parker 2015). What it means to be dis/able(d) has changed radically over time—and is still changing—under the policing influence of normalcy-dictating medical-psychiatric discourses and neoliberal bio-/necropolitical regimes (Tremain 2006; Chen 2012), while simultaneously being positively impacted by grassroots intersectional disability justice activism (Mingus 2011; Piepzna-Samarasinha 2018), critical disability studies, and critical pedagogical frameworks.

The COVID-19 crisis has had a brutal impact on the world and its population, and specifically on those whose bodies were already constructed to matter less through the intertwined, negatively constructed binaries that uphold the exclusivist notion of the ‘pure’, ‘neutral’  and healthy human subject. At the same time, the crisis also has demonstrated the porosity of these oppositional boundaries, such as the boundaries drawn between the human, non-human, more-than-human, and the perpetually dehumanised, the personal/political, and the able/disabledbodied: The SARS-CoV-2 virus and the patchwork of crises it has created (and reinforced) does not only point at human identity and subjectivity being more in flux and in conjunction with (more-than-human) others than the Cartesian self tells us, but also demonstrates that the condition of vulnerability is an existentially shared one and therefore cannot be subsumed under one linear temporal framework. Long COVID, for instance, demonstrates how vulnerable we all are, in the end, and how the linear temporal framework backing up the (dis)abledness narrative needs to be urgently queered, and also placed in the context of longer histories of crisis, in which experiences of ill health, mutilation, and various dis/abilities have played an important role (Bourke 1996; Nair 2020). Another aspect that the pandemic crisis has underlined sharply, is the fact that both the experience of—and the care for—able and disabled bodies is an intrinsically gendered affair (Forestell 2006). These experiences are furthermore deeply bound up with equally gendered notions of labour, authority, and autonomy (Rose 2017); a topic that has been central to the discipline of gender studies from the outset.

Taking the foregoing into account, this special issue of Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies (Journal of Gender Studies), wishes to explore the intersections between complex lived experiences of dis/ability and gender through an explicit engagement with the links and tensions between the scholarly and activist fields of gender studies and critical disability studies (see e.g., Meekosha & Shuttleworth 2009) while taking stock of important present-day turns and debates in and at the intersections of both fields.

More concretely: What happens, this issue wonders, if we take the call—contested by scholars such as Bone (2017) but at the same time emphasised by Kafer (2013)—for ‘cripping’ scholarship, policy, and practice seriously in gender studies and feminism? What happens if we think beyond transdisciplinary exchange, and purposefully stretch towards a theoretical framework and grounded practice of dis/abling gender studies? How can the insights and methods of critical disability studies, with its radical turn toward vulnerability, diversity, and resilience push gender studies toward new understandings of identity, corporeal praxis, labour, and care? How can gender studies, and specifically, novel approaches within contemporary feminist theory, assist critical disability studies with the intersectional conceptualisation of specific lived experiences, surveillance and (in)visibility regimes, and a more affirmative understanding of identities-in-flux and (reappropriated) labels? In short, can we not only ‘gender’ disability (Smith & Hutchinson, 2004), but also dis/able gender?

We particularly welcome submissions that address the following questions and issues:

  1. The challenges and rewards of interdisciplinary dialogue between gender studies and critical disability studies;
  2. Intersections of gender, dis/ability, and ethnicity/race from a theoretical and/or experiential perspective (e.g., Samuels 2011).
  3. How to study dis/abilities on both an experiential and representational level;
  4. Changes in philosophical, historical (Stiker 1999), and sociological (e.g., Thomas 2007) models of dis/ability;
  5. New materialist, posthumanist, and affective theoretical approaches (e.g., Goodley et al. 2014; Feely 2016);
  6. Changes in terminology within gender studies and critical disability studies (e.g., ‘crip’ as a reappropriated term);
  7. ‘Bodies that are made to (not) matter’, for example in the context of health crises;
  8. The potential of historical studies to generate new theoretical insights on dis/ability and gender (e.g., Rembis 2019);
  9. (Neoliberal) academic spaces, ablebodiedness, normativity and critical pedagogical approaches (including neurodiversity & neurotypicality)
  10.  Dis/ability and the questions of labour and care (i.e., who is supposed to request accommodations; provide care; …)
  11.  Links and tensions between the women’s and disability rights movements, and the role of activism in practices of dis/abling gender (‘everyday activism’)

References used:

  • Bone, K. (2017). Trapped Behind the Glass: Crip theory and Disability Identity. Disability & Society 32(9).
  • Bourke, J. (1996). Dismembering the Male: Men’s Bodies, Britain and the Great War. The University of Chicago Press.
  • Butler, J. (2004). Precarious life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. Verso.
  • Chen, M. Y. (2012). Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect. Durham University Press.
  • Goodley, D., R. Lawthom, and K. Runswick Cole (2014). Posthuman Disability Studies. Subjectivity 7 (4).
  • Feely, M. (2016). Disability Studies After the Ontological Turn: A Return to the Material World and Material Bodies Without a Return to Essentialism. Disability & Society 31(7).
  • Forestell, Nancy M. (2006). ‘And I Feel Like I’m Dying from Mining for Gold’: Disability, Gender, and the Mining Community, 1920-1950. Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 3(3).
  • Kafer, A. (2013). Feminist, Queer, Crip. Indiana University Press.
  • Mingus, M. (2011, February 12). Changing the Framework: Disability Justice: How Our Communities Can Move Beyond Access To Wholeness. Leaving Evidence. https://leavingevidence.wordpress.com/2011/02/12/changing-the-framework-disability-justice/.
  • Nair, A. (2020). ‘These Curly-Bearded, Olive-Skinned Warriors’: Medicine, Prosthetics, Rehabilitation and the Disabled Sepoy in the First World War, 1914-1920. Social History of Medicine 33 (3).
  • Parker, A. M. (2015). Intersecting Histories of Gender, Race, and Disability. Journal of Women’s History 27 (1).
  • Piepzna-Samarasinha, L. L. (2018). Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice. Arsenal Pulp Press.
  • Meekosha, H., and R. Shuttleworth (2009). What’s so ‘Critical’ about Critical Disability Studies?  Australian Journal of Human Rights 15 (1).
  • Rembis, M. (2019). Challenging the Impairment/Disability Divide: Disability History and the Social Model of Disability. In: N. Watson and S. Vehmas (eds). The Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, 2nd Edition. Routledge.
  • Rose, S. F. (2017). No Right to be Idle: The Invention of Disability, 1840s-1930s. The University of North Carolina Press.
  • Scully, J. L. (2014). Disability and Vulnerability: On Bodies, Dependence, and Power. In: C. Mackenzie, W. Rogers, and S. Dodds (eds.). Vulnerability: New Essays in Ethics and Feminist Philosophy. Oxford University Press.
  • Samuels, E. (2011). Examining Millie and Christine McKoy: Where Enslavement and Enfreakment Meet. Signs 37 (1).
  • Smith, B. and B. Hutchinson (eds) (2004). Gendering Disability. Rutgers University Press.
  • Stiker, H. J. (1999). A History of Disability. University of Michigan Press.
  • Thomas, C. (2007). Sociologies of Disability and Illness: Contested Ideas in Disability Studies and Medical Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan
  • Tremain, S. (ed.). (2006). Foucault and the Government of Disability. The University of Michigan Press.

About the Journal:

Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies (Journal of Gender Studies) is a Dutch and English language forum for the scientific problematisation of gender in relation to ethnicity, sexuality, class, and age. The journal aims to contribute to debates about gender and diversity in the Netherlands and Flanders. The journal is an interdisciplinary medium operating at the intersection of society, culture, the humanities, health, and science.

Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies (The Journal of Gender Studies) is published by Amsterdam University Press: Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies | Amsterdam University Press (aup.nl)

Guest editors:

Evelien Geerts, University of Birmingham, e.m.l.geerts@bham.ac.uk

Josephine Hoegaerts, University of Helsinki, josephine.hoegaerts@helsinki.fi

Kristien Hens, University of Antwerp, kristien.hens@uantwerpen.be

Daniel Blackie, University of Helsinki, daniel.blackie@helsinki.fi

Preparing your submission:

We invite potential contributors to submit an abstract of 500 words by the 1st of May 2021. The final paper should be 6000 words maximum. Abstracts for traditional scholarly articles should outline the theoretical/praxis-related contribution, method of analysis, and a selection of references (the latter do not have to be included in the word count). Suggestions for non-traditional, critically, and scholarly informed contributions are welcome as well. Please include the contact details of all of the contributors on the abstract document. Abstracts (and manuscripts) can be written in English or Dutch. Please note that the initial acceptance of an abstract does not guarantee publication and that the manuscripts will undergo a double-blind review process. We strive toward diversity among our contributors in terms of career-stage, disciplines, self-identification, and scholarly or activist affiliation. We are happy to accommodate different accessibility needs or diverse styles of communication. Please get in touch with (one of) the editors for any of these issues.

The author(s) should email their abstract proposal as a Word file to all of the guest editors: e.m.l.geerts@bham.ac.uk, josephine.hoegaerts@helsinki.fi, kristien.hens@uantwerpen.be , daniel.blackie@helsinki.fi. For specific questions or more information, contact the guest editors.

Submission timeline:

May, 1, 2021: Abstract submission deadline.

May, 14, 2021: Notification of acceptance/rejection and feedback from the guest editors for accepted abstracts.

August, 14, 2021: Manuscript submission deadline.

August, 14, 2021 – September 14, 2021: Double-blind review process plus feedback from the guest editors.

October, 14, 2021: Full and finalized manuscript submission deadline.

NeuroEpigenEthics on ECQI 2020

Swinging_together

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 4th 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’.

>>> !!! Because of covid-19 this event is postponed to APRIL 2021 !!! <<<

Differing Bodyminds: Crip Theory in the Arts and Humanities. Doctoral Seminar

Antwerp University, KU Leuven and Gent University kindly invite you for the first event devoted to crip theory in Flanders. We organize a two-day doctoral seminar focusing on crip theory, both from a theoretical and methodological perspective combined with a one-day symposium to approach the same topic from a practical and artistic point of view.

Venue: STUK, House of House of Dance, Image and Sound, Naamsestraat 67, 3000 Leuven

Invited speakers:

Professor Robert McRuer

Professor Jane Gallop

Professor Carrie Sandahl

Performance artist Sonja Jokiniemi

Registration for the doctoral seminar is free but mandatory until March 20: leni.vangoidsenhoven@uantwerpen.be

Programme and registration for the symposium can be done here: https://www.stuk.be/en/program/symposium-differing-bodyminds-choreographing-new-pathways

Read more>>> !!! Because of covid-19 this event is postponed to APRIL 2021 !!! <<<

From Bergson over Bohr to Barad Session 2: Relativity and Contextuality

Context:

We started our journey towards Karen Barad’s “Meeting the Universe Halfway” in reading Bergson’s “Time and Free Will” (see report here). Where Bergson initially demarcated his idea of the lived experience of ‘durée’ against psychophysics, history moved it quickly to a debate between physics and philosophy. We read a report on this historical debate arguing that there was more nuance to it than the often reported ‘victory’ of Einstein over Bergson (Canales 2005). Jan Potters delved somewhat deeper in the history of this debate (see the board scheme). This brought us seamlessly to the discussion of the primacy of intuition vs. that of measurement, a theme prominent in the philosophy of Alfred N. Whitehead. Ronny Desmet introduced us to his independent reflections on this debate. This also led us to an initial comparison with Bohr’s interpretation of quantum mechanics and a reflection on the philosophical influences of Bohr (which took us back to contemporaneous discussions in a still emerging field of psychology). We will unpack this briefly below and look forward to the next session that is dedicated to Whitehead after which we head back to Bohr and Barad.

The Bergson-Einstein debate:

The below scheme by Jan Potters traces the genesis of this debate. Initially, left column of the scheme, Einstein sought to make sense of time and simultaneity for distant events that could not be experienced directly together. His solution, relativity of time and simultaneity, was taken by French physicists as a challenge to Bergson’s notion of the factual anchor of ‘durée’ (see middle column). At this point Bergson engaged the central ‘twin paradox’ case in this challenge to reaffirm in the face of the advance in physics his position that authority with respect to reality remained with lived experience instead of yielding to a mathematical relativization of experience (see rightmost column). We highlight the main positions based on the discussion of the ‘twin paradox’ mentioned higher.

After Einstein’s basic derivation of relativity in 1905, it was Langevin in 1911 who applied it to relativity of experience. Where Einstein’s derivation relied on the synchronicity of clocks, as paradigm example of periodic processes allowing to compare time between two inertial frames moving with respect to each other at near-lightspeed, Langevin concretized it into a thought experiment involving biological beings. After all, he argued, biological – and hence also psychological – processes were also periodic. In that case we can imagine a twin, let’s call them Pierre and Paul, where the first stays on earth and the second is launched at 0,8 light speed with a rocket. If Paul would return after 10 years (on Pierre’s clock) then Paul’s clock would have only advanced 6 years. Einstein concurred in 1912 explicitly stating that physics clearly proves that any psychological conceptions of time are off the mark at high velocities. Following that Becquerel (1922) argued that physics shows Pierre and Paul can equally claim their time is real and therefore that all experience of time is relative.

It is at this point Bergson engaged the discussion with Einstein, see (Canales 2005), as his central contention of “Time and Free Will” was challenged. Bergson also had used a Pierre and Paul thought experiment precisely to show that no mathematical-physical description of reality could challenge the basic intuition of time and simultaneity as anchored in a lived experience of durée. Here he invited the reader to imagine Pierre gathering all knowledge on Paul in order to predict Paul’s move. Bergson argued that it is clear that for Pierre to be able to do that precisely he had to become identical to Paul, in which case we could not be calling what Pierre did predicting but merely living the move Paul makes. Bergson used in the twin paradox a similar argument based on the principle of reciprocity: in order for Paul and Pierre to compare times they had to come together in the same frame of reference i.e. either one of them had to speed up or the other had to slow down. Anyway, one had finally to choose one frame as the final frame of reference from which the situation was observed by someone. 

The debate then was not so much about the physics as such (Bergson never disputed the insights of Einstein as such) but about a question of final authority. Was it that, as Bergson argued, of the lived experience meaning philosophy had authority separate from physics? Or was it a question of quantitative measurement in a physico-mathematical framework, as Einstein had it, meaning physics had the ultimate authority in these questions? Or is it the same to measure the half-life of muons in two reference frames or have an actual twin that comes back together after space travel?

Enter Whitehead and Bohr:

As mentioned above Whitehead had already independently thought about the last matter. He tried to find a common ground between scientific measurement and intuitions based on experience. Part of his solution was to recognize that, even if intuition was fallible, there is in any measurement also an intuitive part: if we judge that two things are ‘as long’ then this requires us to share some experience of ‘as long’. He therefore would not agree that time is merely ‘psychologically’ relative but try to argue for a conception of time that combined a psychological and physico-mathematical aspect (a combination, see our previous section, that Bergson seems to resist). A concrete point of engagement for Whitehead is his ‘fallacy of simple location’ or of ‘misplaced concreteness’ that creates fictions of ‘isolated particles’, instead of taking relationality as basic notion.
We will delve into this in detail in our next session. Meanwhile, it is important to note that in the background of all this there were discussion in both physics and psychology critical of atomistic views. In physics Maxwell created field theories which accounted for phenomena outside the reach of mechanistic physics. In psychology, James (inspired by and inspiring Bergson) criticized associationism linking external givens to psychological states. Both will have inspired Bohr who a.o. attended lessons of Höffding taking a close look at James. So here physics and psychology come together again to inspire Bohr to take a view that kept complementarity between mechanistic and vitalist views in his, contextualist, interpretation of quantum mechanics. But now we get ahead of ourselves and will first turn to Whitehead who, in siding with relationality as basic, clearly demarcates himself from Einsteinian views regarding substances as basic.

Jo Bervoets

References:

Canales, Jimena. 2005. “Einstein, Bergson, and the Experiment That Failed: Intellectual Cooperation at the League of Nations.” MLN. https://doi.org/10.1353/mln.2006.0005.

From Bergson over Bohr to Barad 1: Bergson’s Time and Free Will

In “Meeting the Universe Halfway” Karen Barad connects quantum mechanics to the ideas in continental and feminist traditions. She so creates a reference work in new materialism, specifically referencing Bohr’s views on the interpretation of quantum mechanics. What we (with philosophical, ethical, cognitive science and history of physics backgrounds) wonder is whether this affords to bridge the gap that people with an ‘exact-scientific’ worldview, or with an ‘analytic mindset’, often experience with respect to work in continental philosophy. A gap that has less to do with the conclusions on diversity and the importance of reports of lived experience as with the way it is phrased in this tradition. The way we approach this is to try to read chronologically on the debates between quantitative science and experience, or qualitative, data. As a starting point, Rob Sips proposed reading of Bergson’s “Time and Free Will” essay. As an endpoint we fix on reading of Karen Barad’s “Meeting the Universe Halfway”. In between we will see plot a course over the Einstein-Bergson debate and over the various interpretations of quantum mechanics of Bohr and Whitehead. 

Below is the read-out of the first session discussing Bergson’s “Time and Free Will”.

Read moreFrom Bergson over Bohr to Barad 1: Bergson’s Time and Free Will