Book Discussion: The Porosity of the Self: Husserl's Philosophy of Self and Personhood (2024)

Season 7 continues with the second of four recordings of book panels from our Annual Conference held at University College Dublin. These book discussion panels allowed recent monograph authors to present their work in conversation with a respondent. In this episode, Laura Jane Nanni presents her recent monograph The Porosity of the Self: Husserl's Philosophy of Self and Personhood (2024) in conversation with Associate Professor Timothy Mooney of University College Dublin

Abstract: The Porosity of the Self delivers an original interpretation of the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology and one of the most important philosophers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. This recently published book challenges one-dimensional accounts of self and personhood that fail to capture the intricate double-sidedness of how we experience ourselves, others, and the world. The book demonstrates how Husserl's philosophy offers an important alternative account of the self as porous - a notion that emerges through a thematic reconstruction of Husserl's conceptions of embodiment, habituality, temporality, relationality, personhood, intersubjectivity, and sociality. Here, the case is made that the self should be understood as multidimensional, dynamic, and complex by highlighting its fundamentally permeable nature. The main argument of the book is that no one element of the self is experienceable in isolation, and that Husserl's understanding can equally accommodate the uniqueness of subjective experience as well as social, cultural, and historical inflections, without yielding constitutive priority to one dimension over the other. The book offers a renewed way of engaging with Husserl's philosophy and demonstrates how it can provide a rich supplementary perspective for fields such as critical phenomenology and feminist philosophy, as well as theories of self and personhood. Biography:

Dr Laura Jane Nanni holds a PhD in philosophy from UCD where she currently works with the Centre for Ethics in Public Life. She is an APPA certified philosophical counsellor, a philosophical facilitator on "Thinking Changes" project (funded by the Irish Government Department of Foreign Affairs), and a member of the "no bump no care" non-profit network. Her area of expertise is in the field of classical, critical and applied phenomenology, and her current research focuses on the embodied lived experience of childbirth and infant-maternal relations within the obstetric led, and midwife managed medical model of maternity care in Ireland. About this event: https://sites.google.com/view/licdublin2025 About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/