Prof. Shaun Gallagher - The Future of Action

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern. This episode features a keynote presentation from Prof. Shaun Gallagher Abstract: How should we act to address climate change, racism, sexism …? These are large important problems that call for serious actions on both individual and collective scales. To think about actions on these scales one needs to think about future or distal intentions – that is intention formation that involves deliberation, action planning and decision, much of which can involve communication with others. My aim is not to address these large questions – so I won’t be offering any advice about how we should address climate change, etc. My aim is rather to dig down into the phenomenology of the possibility of taking action, and indeed the possibility of deliberating, planning, decision-making and communicating – all of which are themselves actions. My analysis will address a version of what has been called the ‘scaling up’ problem. I will argue that in regard to processes on the scale at which Husserl addresses time-consciousness – which I want to call intrinsic temporality, because it applies not just to consciousness, but to action and performance, and perhaps to life processes in general – the rule is not passivity, as a sort of waiting for the future to happen, but enaction. We enact the future on the most basic scale, and if this were not the case, we would not be able to take action, to deliberate, to decide, or to communicate, or solve any of the problems concerning climate, racism, or sexism. The latter processes involve a narrative scale. I’ll argue, however, that rather than ‘scaling up’ to narrative (understanding it as higher-order cognition), one should think of ‘scaling out’, and understanding narrative as a kind of performance. In this regard, although this kind of formal analysis does not give us any answers to these larger questions, it should tell us how it’s possible to act. Biography: Shaun Gallagher is the Lillian and Morrie Moss Professor of Excellence in Philosophy at the University of Memphis, and a Professorial Fellow at the School of Liberal Arts, University of Wollongong. He was a Humboldt Foundation Anneliese Maier Research Fellow (2012-18), and has held Honorary Professorships at Tromsø University (Norway); Durham (UK) and Copenhagen (DK), and visiting positions at Cambridge, Lyon, Paris, Berlin, Oxford and Rome. His areas of research include phenomenology, philosophy of mind, embodied cognition, social interaction, self/personal identity and hermeneutics. His publications include Action and Interaction (2020); Enactivist Interventions: Rethinking the Mind (2017); A Neurophenomenology of Awe and Wonder (2015); Phenomenology (2012; new edition 2021); The Phenomenological Mind (with Dan Zahavi, 3 rd edition 2021); How the Body Shapes the Mind (2005); editor: Oxford Handbook of the Self and Oxford Handbook of 4E Cognition. He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences. Further Information: This recording is taken from our Annual UK Conference 2021, co-organised with University of Galway and The Irish Philosophical Society. This conference was held online consisting of live webninars with keynote presents and pre-recorded presentations from panel speakers. Biographical information of speakers is taken from the programme of that event and therefore may not be up-to-date. The British Society for Phenomenology is a not-for-profit organisation set up with the intention of promoting research and awareness in the field of Phenomenology and other cognate arms of philosophical thought. Currently, the society accomplishes these aims through its journal, events, and podcast. About our events: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/events/ About the BSP: https://www.thebsp.org.uk/about/