Philosophy - Academic Activities

As the Department of Philosophy, we will hold a panel titled Philosophical Perspectives on Communion and Mortality with the participation of Dr. Antony Fredriksson and Dr. Ryan Manhire from Pardubice University on Tuesday, October 25th between 15:00-16:30 in the Socrates Hall of South E Block.  Below you can find the titles of the panelists' talks.We will be glad to have your participation.Panel Title: Philosophical Perspectives on Communion and MortalityDate: 25 October 2022, 15:00-16:30Venue: Üsküdar University, Güney Yerleşke, E-Blok Sokrates SalonuModerator: Assoc. Prof. Çiğdem Yazıcı (Üsküdar University, the Department of Philosophy)Panelist: Dr. Antony Fredriksson (University of Pardubice)Title: "Shared Attention as Communion"Abstract: The preceding presentation mainly discuss the phenomenology of attention in the context of a first-person perspective. It moves the focus toward an analysis of attention in relation to intersubjectivity. For us to explain how it is possible for two beings to attend to the same thing, in the same way, we need an articulation of a second person-, we-perspective. When I go for a walk with my dog and suddenly she reacts to a squirrel high up in a tree that is on our path, my attention is turned through her engagement. Earlier, my mind was occupied by reflections on unanswered emails, when suddenly my perception is brought into the present. Without my dog, I would have no chance of detecting the squirrel. This makes me realize that my sense of this world is not solely constructed by my own devices. Through the attention of the other, I may discover aspects of our common world that are partially hidden for me. Through this example, I will engage in a discussion with current cognitivist theories of mind and defend the account of shared attention against other mind’s skepticism. What I want to indicate here is that the representationalist framework for philosophy of perception fails to explain how we are able to attend to the same thing without any mindreading, shared life-form, shared language, or theorizing and simulation. What the squirrel example shows in the light of phenomenology and enactivist approaches to consciousness is that the action of guiding the other in seeing the same thing is not primarily about the representational content of the mind; rather, it is established through our common embodied orientation in the external perceivable world. In this understanding, perception is an action, an active engagement with the environment and other beings.Key words: Cognitivism - Content of mind - Enactivism - Intentionalism - Intersubjectivity - Joint attention - Non-human - Representation - Theory of mindBiography: Antony Fredriksson (PhD) is a researcher at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice. His areas of interest include aesthetics, attention, ethics, film and philosophy, intersubjectivity, Merleau-Ponty, phenomenology, philosophy of perception, and Wittgenstein.He has taught philosophy at Åbo Akademi University, University of Helsinki and the Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki. His most recent work focuses on existential questions concerning the faculty of attention, including the articles: (with Silvia Panizza) “Ethical Attention and the Self in Iris Murdoch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty", in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, 2020. “The Alien World, Attention and the Habitual”, Phänomenologische Forschungen, 2/2018 and “The Art of Attention in Documentary Film and Werner Herzog”, Film-Philosophy, 22.1/2018.Panelist: Dr. Ryan Manhire (University of Pardubice)Title:"A Shifting Awareness: Thinking about Mortality During the COVID-19 Pandemic"Abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic has made many of us more aware of our own mortality, and the mortality of our friends and family. Yet that “All human beings are mortal” is something we were aware of before the pandemic. In this talk, I explore the question: How can we make sense of something that we already know striking us during an event like a global pandemic as if for the first time? I will draw on G. E. Moore’s discussion of common sense, and several of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on certainty to sketch out a picture of the notion of death as part of the “background” of our everyday lives. I will then draw on Cora Diamond’s and Martin Gustafsson’s discussions of difficulties of reality, and the ideas of being “shouldered in” and “shouldered out” of life to conceptualise the shift in an awareness of death that many of us may have experienced over the past two years.Biography: Ryan Manhire is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Ethics as Study in Human Value, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic. He writes on the nature of morality and moral certainty, as well as Ludwig Wittgenstein’s remarks on ethics and meaning. His current research focuses on the role of the notion of death in our lives.Organization: Assoc. Prof. Çiğdem Yazıcı, cigdem.yazici@uskudar.edu.tr

Invited by the Philosophy Department as a speaker, Dr. Aiman Keldinova will hold a faculty seminar titled “Kazakh Philosophy: From History to Modernity” on Tuesday, November 9, 2021, at 18:00, in the classroom GEB-207, South Campus E Block.We will be glad to have your participation in the event.

Üsküdar UniversityFaculty of Humanities and Social SciencesDepartments of Psychology & PhilosophyInterdepartmental SeminarStudents and faculty from all departments are invited.Language of the seminar is in English.The seminar can be counted towards the University Culture course.Subject: Ecopsychology: Reinventing the Human-Nature Relationship and its meaning for Our Wellbeing In the observance of Wildlife Conservation and World Soil DaysProf. İbrahim ÖZDEMİRAssoc. Prof. Asil ÖZDOĞRUDate: 04 December 2020, at 15:00 Webinar Link:https://zoom.us/j/4788899664Meeting ID: 478 889 9664