Swansea University’s Philosophy Research Group (PRG) is delighted to announce a small event designed to bring together philosophers in the South of Wales and Southwest of England to celebrate the diversity and quality of the philosophy research taking place in this region. Please find details below. All are welcome.

Speakers:

Dr Daisy Dixon (Cardiff University)

Dr Dan Degerman (Bristol University)

Dr Anna Bortolan (Swansea University)

Dr Rob Fraser (Swansea University)

Organiser: Rob Fraser (Swansea University)

Contact: [email protected]

Registration: https://philevents.org/event/show/134074

Zoom link: https://swanseauniversity.zoom.us/j/96008321621?pwd=Z7RqJ1zzFr3QloU7rocwc1Sn0u6KGi.1

Programme:

1:00pm—1:15pm Arrival and refreshments

1:15pm—2:15pm: Rob Fraser – “Conceptual and Logical Explanation: A Defence of Backing Realism”

In this talk, I sketch my preferred theory of explanation, according to which to explain is to provide information about objective relations of dependence, and I defend it against the charge that it cannot accommodate cases of conceptual and logical explanation. I agree that conceptual and logical relations bind their relata too tightly to do the work of dependence. However, such relations nevertheless facilitate the provision of a very general kind of information about dependence. By showing that two phenomena stand in a certain intimate conceptual or logical relation, we can show that they depend on the very same things. This is useful for explanatory purposes when it is easier to see what one of the related phenomena depends on. I close by exploring work that my analysis can do in the philosophy of time travel and the metaphysics of truth.

2:15pm—3:15pm: Dan Degerman – “The medicalisation of silence”

This talk explores and problematises the medicalisation of silence. Scholars working within the growing, interdisciplinary field of silence studies warn that silence has been pathologised in Western culture. By this, they mean that silence is being reduced to a social, political, and ethical dysfunction resulting from resulting from injustice, rather than that it is being understood literally as an illness. In this talk, I want to suggest that the latter is occurring as well: silence is often understood as an illness subject to medical expertise and intervention. Using depression as a case study, I begin by showing that silence is treated both as a symptom and a cause of depression in mental healthcare. I then demonstrate that it is not just in healthcare that silence is being medicalised, but also in business management. A growing number of management researchers argue that employee silence may be both a risk factor for and a result of depression. Finally, I consider the potential implications of this. It is vital to recognise that the medicalisation of silence is not inherently problematic. However, in the blunt forms it tends to take, I will argue that it threatens to obscure the diverse and sometimes positive role of silence in human life.

3:15pm—3:30pm: Comfort break

3:30pm—4:30pm: Anna Bortolan – “Pretending to Be Myself: On Concealing and Selfhood in the Experience of Anxiety”

Drawing on the notion of “camouflaging” and its characterisation within research on autism (e.g. Petrolini et al. 2023), this paper explores the role that attempts to conceal one’s experiences may have in the phenomenology of anxiety. I start by suggesting that actions associated with both the “masking” and “compensating” dimension of camouflaging may be present in different forms of anxiety. I then proceed to argue that these actions may foster the person’s perceived ability to sustain their identity when some of its core aspects are seen as being threatened by anxious feelings, thoughts, and behaviours. I do so by drawing on an account of selfhood to which both affective and narrative processes are central, suggesting that, in some cases, actions associated with camouflaging can facilitate the experience of affects and the upholding of narratives that are self-constitutive.

4:30pm—5:30pm Daisy Dixon – “Aesthetic Slurs”

I present a novel account of what I call the ‘aesthetic slur’. Inspired by Patricia Hill Collins’s notion of ‘controlling images’, I will delineate images which behave in much the same way as slurs, analysing particularly their feature of ‘effluence’; how their harmful content can leak out and not be insulated by intention or context. I will then use this analysis to explain what went wrong with Makode Linde's controversial artwork Painful Cake (2012). Content warnings: showings of racist & antisemitic imagery.