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Lecture on Patočkian solution to the Mind-Body Problem

This Friday, Professor James Mensch will give a lecture at the FHS. Come to room 1.21 on Friday, April 5, to learn about the Patočkian solution to the Mind-Body Problem. We will start at 1 pm.

James Mensch is Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Charles University. His main areas of research are phenomenology and its contemporary social and political applications. A particular focus of his is the study of how our embodiment and consciousness affect each other. Here, his research is animated by such questions as: How does our embodiment influence our being in the world? What is its role in our social and political relations, in the ways in which we conceive public space? How does it affect our conceptions of the divine, including that of the Christian Incarnation? What is the role that the evolutionary development of our species plays in our cognitive awareness? Is it, for example, true, as Nietzsche says, that “the utility of preservation … stands as the motive behind the development of the organs of knowledge—they develop in such a way that their observation suffices for our preservation”? Or does such a statement undercut any possibility of our justifying it? How, in fact, can we admit the embodied nature of our cognition without relativizing its claims to our particular embodiment?

Mensch is the editor of the book series, Body and Consciousness, with Ibidem Press and is a member of the Central European Institute of Philosophy. He is the author of fifteen books, the most recent being Husserl’s Phenomenology, From Pure Logic to Embodiment (Springer, 2023). Previously, he published, Decisions and Transformations: The Phenomenology of Embodiment which was published by Ibidem Press in 2020 to initiate the series Body and Consciousness. Recent publications include Selfhood and Appearing, The Intertwining (Brill, 2018) and Patočka’s Asubjective Phenomenology: Toward a New Concept of Human Rights (Königshausen & Neumann 2016) and Levinas’ Existential Analytic, A Commentary on Totality and Infinity (Northwestern University Press, 2015). The Times Literary Supplement wrote of this last work, "Mensch does a brilliant job of explicating Levinas’s philosophical background,” while the Review of Metaphysics wrote, “James Mensch helps us read Levinas as Levinas himself preferred.” His other books have received similarly favorable reviews.

(Quoted from Academia.edu page of Professor James Mensch)

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