Dr Alessandro Salice - Realist Phenomenology: A Plaidoyer

Season 8 continues with a recording from our 2021 annual conference, The Future as a Present Concern. This episode features a keynote presentation from Dr Alessandro Salice Abstract: A spectre is haunting the phenomenological community—the spectre of phenomenological realism. All the powers of old phenomenology have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre: Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger and Sartre, post-structuralist radicals and analytic spies. But what is phenomenological realism? The talk aims at answering this question in three steps. In the first part, I give a brief historical overview of the Munich and Göttingen circles of phenomenology, while highlighting some methodological considerations on how to approach the study of this complex tradition of philosophy. In the second part, I focus on phenomenological realism as a metaphysical position consistently embraced by the members of the two circles. I argue that phenomenological realism is characterized by (a specific form of) correlationism and by essentialism and I show how these two principles have informed some specific positions in phenomenological psychology and social phenomenology. Finally, the last part rejects various attempts to assess realist phenomenology in relation to its convergence or divergence with the Husserlian project. Realist phenomenology, so the claim goes, deserves to be assessed in its own right because it is a unique, fertile, and autonomous form of phenomenology. Doing that—i.e., philosophically engaging with early phenomenologists, while historically uncovering their insights—promises to impact different strands of the current philosophical debate and to substantially enrich the received picture of the phenomenological movement. Biography: Alessandro Salice is Lecturer at the Department of Philosophy of University College Cork and a Research Associate at the Center for Subjectivity Research (CFS) in Copenhagen. Previously, Alessandro held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Graz, Basel, Vienna, and at the CFS. He mainly works at the intersection of phenomenology, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, and moral psychology, by paying particular attention to the social capacities of the mind. Alessandro has edited The Phenomenological Approach to Social Reality. History, Concepts, Problems (2016), together with Hans Bernhard Schmid. He is co-editor of Journal of Social Ontology and his papers have been published in several journals including: Emotion Review, European Journal of Philosophy, Frontiers in Psychology, Frontiers in Psychiatry, Journal of Consciousness Studies, Review of Philosophy and Psychology, Phenomenology and Cognitive Sciences, Philosophical Psychology, and Synthese. 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/