Welcome

Dear colleagues,

This conference aims at exploring and discussing the intertwinement of temporality, embodiment and intersubjectivity from phenomenological and psychopathological approaches.

Explorations of the phenomenology of time have most often been accomplished from the first-person perspective of consciousness (Husserl) or existential philosophy (Heidegger). There exists, however, significant work on bodily subjectivity, intercorporeality and their temporal dimension as, for instance, by Maurice-Merleau-Ponty or Michel Henry. Nevertheless, a fundamental investigation into the constitutive interrelationship of bodily existence, its temporal dynamics and its interpersonal embeddedness is still a desideratum. It is the target of the conference to explore these dimensions by means of phenomenological and psychopathological methods.

On this background, the conference will pursue the following questions:

• How can we explicate the constitution of temporality, the lived body and its intercorporeal embeddedness with phenomenological and psychopathological approaches and research tools?
• What can phenomenological and psychopathological explorations reveal about the essential structure of human consciousness, its embodied characteristics and the co-constitution of the human-world relationship?
• Which insights do we gain for the understanding of psychiatric disorders by investigating the intertwinement of time, the body and intersubjectivity?

The conference is organized by the research group of the Marsilius-Kolleg „Embodiment as a Paradigm for an Evolutionary Cultural Anthropology“, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für phänomenologische Anthropologie, Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie (German Society of Phenomenological Anthropology, Psychiatry and Psychotherapy (DGAP) and the Forschungsstätte der evangelischen Studiengemeinschaft (FEST)).

We would be glad to welcome you at Heidelberg University and hope you will enjoy the multidisciplinary approach to the topic as well as the beautiful atmosphere of autumn in Heidelberg.

Warm welcome to all of you,