El jueves, 24 de abril, a las 12.30, en la Sala de Juntas de Filosofía, tendrá lugar otra sesión del seminario TeC-FiloLab. Nos acompañará Noga Arikha, de la Florence School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute (EUI) (Italia). Más abajo tenéis el título y un resumen de la charla, así como una breve nota sobre la trayectoria de Noga.
Title: «Collective feelings, politics and truth».
Abstract: The human animal is endowed with a sophisticated metacognition that gives us the capacity to be aware of our emotions, aware of our awareness, and aware of our mortality. It has also, historically, given us the concomitant delusion of mind-body dualism, in which we conceive our reason and emotion as separate functions. We know today from experimental psychology and neuroscience that cognitive and emotive processes are intermingled, and that the brain serves the body of which it is a part. The sense of a conscious self is an upshot of biologically complex, embodied processes that include the psychoanalytical unconscious. Our individual, feeling selves, however, are also political selves. The political is fundamentally emotional, and today we are increasingly affected by political emotions and the populist consequences of polarisation that confuse reality with ideology, and obfuscate our grasp of truth. Many attempts at democratic innovation integrate the notion of collective intelligence, but without the tools given by psychological research on embodied intersubjectivity. Drawing together insights from the embodied cognition framework, psychoanalysis and moral psychology, I show how the sense of self is embedded within cultural communities that condition our metacognitive grasp of emotional feelings, in an attempt to integrate the feeling, political animal into mainstream political science.
Bio: Noga Arikha is a philosopher and historian of ideas. She works as a science humanist, fostering dialogues between neuroscientists, psychologists, clinicians, social scientists, humanists and artists in order to bring to a general audience accessible accounts of our embodied, feeling and thinking selves. Always concerned with the relation between mind and body, she initially focused for her PhD on life sciences in seventeenth-century Europe, but her interests and writings encompass a broad range of periods, cultures and disciplines.
She is a Senior Expert at the Florence School of Transnational Governance at the European University Institute (EUI) in Florence, developing within the Transnational Democracy program there a project on “Emotions in Politics” within Horizon Europe grant ScaleDem, and with the Democratic Odyssey.
