Exploring the hidden side of lived experience through Micro-phenomenology

Claire Petitmengin (École Normale Supérieure)

The School of Sanskrit, Philosophy and Indic Studies (SSPIS) at Goa University cordially invites you to the online guest lecture titled "Exploring the hidden side of lived experience through Micro-phenomenology" by Dr. Claire Petitmengin. Kindly join us on 21 April 2023 (Friday) from 7:30 to 9:30 PM IST at meet.google.com/sar-mdpw-dat. 

Abstract
What's happening when an idea comes to us? When we listen to a course, read or write an article? When we discover an artwork, listen to a piece of music, breathe a perfume, or enter a forest? As cognitive science has shown very convincingly, a large part of these phenomena, which constitute the very texture of our existence, escape awareness and verbal description, and have thus far been excluded from scientific investigation. However, these difficulties do not mean that our experience is out of reach. They mean that accessing it requires a particular expertise, which consists in carrying out specific acts. Micro-phenomenology is a new scientific discipline aiming at triggering such acts. It enables us to discover ordinary inaccessible dimensions of our lived experience and describe them very accurately and reliably. The development of this "psychological microscope" opens vast fields of investigation in the educational, technological, clinical and therapeutic, artistic, as well as ecological and contemplative domains. Notably, it enables us to explore a deeply-reflective, transmodal and gestural dimension of our experience that seems to play an essential role in the process of emergence of any meaning and understanding.

Speaker Bio
After studies in Buddhist philosophy and then ten years of consulting and research in information systems design, Dr. Claire Petitmengin completed a Ph.D. thesis under the direction of Francisco Varela at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris on the subject of the lived experience which accompanies the emergence of an intuition. She is currently Professor Emerita at the Institut Mines-Télécom and a member of the Archives Husserl (Ecole Normale Supérieure) in Paris. Her research focuses on the usually unrecognized micro-dynamics of lived experience and micro-phenomenological methods enabling us to become aware of it and describe it. She studies the epistemological conditions of these methods as well as their educational, therapeutic, artistic, contemplative, and ecological applications.