Agora Speaker Series
Agora Talk by Professor Dominic Murphy
Speaker: Professor Dominic Murphy
Date: Thursday, 22 May, 2025
Abstract: In this talk I will try to show why it looks plausible that the dominant model of mental disorder is neglectful of the sociocultural, but also suggest that there are ways of understanding the medical model and ways of understanding social causes of mental illness that can work together. I will distinguish between social construction, social causation and social meaning, suggesting that these are often run together in the literature, and argue that they have different implications for psychiatry. In particular, we should be sensitive to the fact that social constructionist accounts often take their psychology off the shelf, and cannot assume neurotypical psychology without begging the question.
Agora Talk by Dr P. Kishore Saval
Speaker: Dr P. Kishore Saval
Date: Thursday, 10 April, 2025
Abstract: Ophelia calls Hamlet “Th’observed of all observers” (3. 1. 156). Ophelia’s line may mean that Hamlet is the most observed of all those who observe. Or it may mean that all observers observe him. But this remark interests me because of a phenomenological problem: that all observers are observed, even when they are alone. In fact, it is more precise to say that there is no such thing as observation at all, if by “observation” we mean a neutral, disinterested form of attention that does not partly constitute, and is not partly affected by, that upon which it attends. This simultaneous capacity to affect and be affected is actually a kind of divergence that opens the observer in two. In Hamlet, observers are divided from themselves because they are tangible from where they touch, visible from where they see, and hearable from where they speak. Although these reversible dimensions of our experience necessarily envelop one another, they can never coincide with one another. In this regard, Hamlet has an unexpected affinity with the thinking of Merleau-Ponty, whose entire later philosophy is dedicated to exploring “the coiling over of the visible upon the seeing body, of the tangible upon the touching body, which is attested when the body sees itself, touches itself seeing and touching the things, such that, simultaneously, as tangible it descends among them, as touching it dominates them all and draws this relationship and even this double relationship from itself, by dehiscence or fission of its own mass.” In my talk, Merleau-Ponty reads Hamlet, and reversibly, Hamlet reads Merleau-Ponty, in order to explore what it means to make seeing visible.
Agora Talk by Associate Professor Dinesh Wadiwel and Dr Tristan Bradshaw
Speakers: Associate Professor Dinesh Wadiwel and Dr Tristan Bradshaw
Date: Thursday, 27 March, 2025
Abstract: In this dialogue, Dinesh Wadiwel (University of Sydney) and Tristan Bradshaw (University of Wollongong) will discuss the philosophy of the commodity form as described by Karl Marx is Capital Vol.1, and its implications for animals as raw materials within animal agriculture and as eventual consumption products. Dinesh and Tristan will reflect on the philosophical problem of how an object or relation becomes 'commodified' and consider what this means for understanding contemporary human animal relations. This dialogue will mark the occasion of the soft cover release of Dinesh's book, Animals and Capital (Edinburgh UP 2023).
Agora Talk by Dr Bryan Mukandi
Speaker: Dr Bryan Mukandi
Date: Thursday, 8 May, 2025
Abstract: For Ghanian philosopher, Kwasi Wiredu, it is the shared fact of our embodiment which paves the way for intercultural understanding. The Zimbabwe writer, Dambudzo Marechera, grounds his conception of universality elsewhere. He reads in Fyodor Dostoevsky and Wole Soyinka the same anguish at play in the face of different, though similarly brutal, social and political conditions. It is that susceptibility to anguish, the fact of being sensible or prone to one’s environment, or our vulnerability to being ground into ‘the raw person’, that Marechera takes to mark our shared humanity. In making his case, he refers to Notes from the Underground, The Brothers Karamazov, A Dance in the Forest and The Interpreters among other works. This chapter follows suit with the aim of excavating the relationship between self and society in two different contexts. The results, it is hoped, will be useful for the articulation of a critical phenomenology of anguish.
