Thinking With Feeling Workshop One: Thinking and Feeling

The first workshop in the "Thinking with Feeling" series took place on November 8th, from 11.00 to 18.00. The theme for this workshop was Thinking and Feeling/Affect and the Embodied Mind.

Programme

11.00 Welcome Charles Fernyhough (IAS Fellow, Durham University)
11.15-12.15 Thinking with Feeling Mark Turner (IAS Fellow, Case Western University)
12.15-1.00 Thinking about Thinking Charles Fernyhough (IAS Fellow, Durham University)
2.00-2.45 Thinking and Feeling in Depression Matthew Ratcliffe (Durham University)
2.45-3.30 Cognitivism, Feelings and Moral Philosophy Benedict Smith (Durham University)
3.30-4.00 Refreshments
4.00-4.45 Talking Feelings Giovanna Colombetti (University of Exeter)
4.45-5.45 Once more with Feeling: Literature, Performance and Affect Derek Attridge (University of York)

Speaker Biographies

Derek Attridge

Derek Attridge came to York from Rutgers University in the USA in 1998 as Leverhulme Research Professor, and in 2003 became Professor of English. He has published many articles and books on aspects of literary theory, many of them reflecting his long association with the philosopher Jacques Derrida. His most recent theoretical study, The Singularity of Literature, raises the question of the distinctiveness of literature as a linguistic and social practice, and argues that a crucial element is the response to otherness that characterises both the writing of an inventive literary work and the reading of it as literature. Professor Attridge was born in South Africa, where he first attended university, and some of his recent work is concerned with South African literature, including an anthology of critical essays co-edited with Rosemary Jolly and a study of the novels of J. M. Coetzee (a study which also reflects his interest in questions of ethics and responsibility as they apply to literature). He is also well-known as a Joyce scholar: his publications on Joyce include two books (Joyce Effects and How to Read Joyce), half of another book (Peculiar Language), and four edited or co-edited volumes on Joyce. Poetic form is a major interest and he has published several books on questions of rhythm in poetry. One current project is a history of poetry in performance, starting with the oral performances of Ancient Greece.

Giovanna Colombetti

Giovanna Colombetti is Lecturer in the Sociology and Philosophy Department, University of Exeter. Her research interests are philosophy of cognitive science, embodiment and emotion. She has published articles in Philosophical Psychology, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences and has co-edited, with Evan Thompson, a special triple issue of the Journal of Consciousness Studies, entitled "Emotion Experience".

Charles Fernyhough

Dr Charles Fernyhough is a developmental psychologist in the Department of Psychology at Durham. His undergraduate and postgraduate degrees are from Cambridge, and he has also been a lecturer at Staffordshire University and a visiting researcher at Macquarie University. His primary research interests are in children's private speech (the non-communicative speech regarded by some to be the developmental precursor of verbal thought) and the development of young children's social understanding. In recent years he has applied ideas from developmental psychology to the study of experiences associated with psychiatric disorders, particularly the phenomena of delusions and auditory verbal hallucinations. He has edited a four-volume collection of critical assessments of the work of the Soviet psychologist, Vygotsky (Routledge, 1999), and his co-edited volume on private speech will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. He serves on the editorial board of the journal Infant and Child Development, and currently has active research collaborations with colleagues in Australia, Canada, the US and Austria.

Outside his part-time employment at Durham, Dr Fernyhough is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, and also works as a literary journalist and creative writing tutor. He is the author of a novel, The Auctioneer (Fourth Estate, 1999), which was critically acclaimed in the UK, Australia, Germany and elsewhere. His fiction has twice been selected for inclusion in the prestigious New Writing anthology of writing from the UK and Commonwealth, and has been supported by a number of awards. His non-fiction book about young children's mental development, The Baby in the Mirror, will be published by Granta in 2008. He has taught creative writing in a variety of academic and non-academic contexts, including online mentoring for writers in Africa and the UK. He has contributed to the books pages of several newspapers, and regularly reviews fiction for the Sunday Telegraph. He has appeared at literary festivals in Barcelona, Sydney, Sheffield, Durham and Newcastle, and he is a member of the board of New Writing North, the literary development agency for the North-East of England.

Dr Fernyhough is involved in a number of interdisciplinary projects, such as the ‘Memory Maps' project (Victoria and Albert Museum/Essex University) which brings together creative responses to landscape and place from both professional and non-professional writers and artists. He has been an invited lecturer at the Wimbledon School of Art, where he led a discussion on the role of language in the visual arts. He has written on the interface between psychology and literature for the Guardian and the Psychologist, and teaches a short course on the topic for the MA in Creative Writing at Newcastle University. His research on children's imaginary friends has attracted considerable media interest, and he has acted as a consultant on this topic for the V&A's Museum of Childhood.

During his IAS fellowship Dr Fernyhough will be working on a popular non-fiction book on the phenomenology of thinking. This will allow him to integrate his psychological research on the relation between thought and language with his interests in literary depictions of consciousness.

For more information about Dr Fernyhough, please visit www.charlesfernyhough.com

Matthew Ratcliffe

Matthew Ratcliffe is Reader in Philosophy at Durham University. Most of his recent work addresses issues in phenomenology, philosophy of psychology and philosophy of psychiatry. He is author of Rethinking Commonsense Psychology: A Critique of Folk Psychology, Theory of Mind and Simulation (Palgrave, 2007) and Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (Oxford University Press, 2008).

Benedict Smith

Benedict Smith is lecturer in philosophy at Durham University. His research interests include moral theory and aspects of phenomenology. He has written articles in theoretical and applied ethics, and is currently writing a book entitled Particularism and the Space of Moral Reasons.

Mark Turner

Professor Mark Turner is Institute Professor and Chair of Cognitive Science at Case Western Reserve University. He studies the nature and emergence of higher-order cognitive operations that distinguish human beings from other species and appear in the record of our descent during the Upper Paleolithic. With Gilles Fauconnier, he originated the theory of conceptual integration, otherwise known as "blending," in 1993. Recently, he has focused on the way in which conceptual integration provides mental powers for compressing and decompressing conceptual structure to provide a basis for situated thought and action. He has published studies of language, grammar, reason, choice, analogy, counterfactuals, creativity, invention, conceptual and linguistic systems, the origin of language, material anchors for thought, distributed cognition, figure and narrative in thought and language, evolutionary theory of meaning, poetics, style, and the literary mind. His B.A. and M.A. in mathematics are from Berkeley, as are his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. in English language and literature.

Professor Turner's most recent book publication is an edited volume, The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity, from Oxford University Press. His other books include Cognitive Dimensions of Social Science: The Way We Think about Politics, Economics, Law, and Society (Oxford), The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (Oxford), Reading Minds: The Study of English in the Age of Cognitive Science (Princeton), and Death is the Mother of Beauty (Chicago). His jointly-authored books include The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities (Basic), Figurative Language and Thought (Oxford), Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classic Prose (Princeton), and More than Cool Reason: a Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor (Chicago).

Professor Turner has been a fellow of the Institute for Advanced Study, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, the National Humanities Center, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is Extraordinary Member of the Humanwissenschaftliches Zentrum der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, External Research Professor at the Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study in Cognitive Neuroscience, and Distinguished Fellow at the New England Institute for Cognitive Science and Evolutionary Psychology. In 1996, the Académie française awarded him the Prix du Rayonnement de la langue et de la littérature françaises.

Professor Turner has delivered well over 150 invited presentations world-wide. Further details are available at http://turner.stanford.edu