BSP Online Course - 'Illness as a Pathological Experience' - 4 Sessions over 4 weeks

Pablo Andreu (Atlantic Technological University)

Illness as a Pathological Experience: An Introduction to the Phenomenology and Hermeneutics of Illness

BSP Online Courses 2025

Course Leader: Pablo Andreu (Atlantic Technological University [ATU], Ireland)

Dates: 1st June, 8th June, 22nd June, 29th June 2025 (Sundays)

Time: 7.00-8.30pm [UK Time]

Location: Online (Zoom)

This course is structured around a question that emerged from two powerful statements: Havi Carel’s assertion that “disease progression is the most intense enactment of our finitude” (2016, p. 69), and the words of a close friend undergoing serious illness: “Surviving is not enough.” Both revolve around a central question: What does it mean to be ill?

This question, by its very nature, situates us within the realm of phenomenology. Illness is a profoundly personal and subjective experience, and its exploration calls for a hermeneutic approach—one that seeks meaning rather than mere description. We are not asking what it is like to be ill, a question often answered in relative or empirical terms. Instead, we ask: What does illness do to meaning itself?

Drawing from key thinkers in the phenomenology of illness—such as Fredrik Svenaeus, Havi Carel, and Hans-Georg Gadamer—and grounded in the hermeneutics of Martin Heidegger, this course develops a view of illness as a pathological experience. But what does this mean?

Phenomenology has already provided rich accounts of illness. Gadamer describes it as a loss of existential balance. Svenaeus speaks of it as an “unhomelike” experience—a fundamental alienation from the world. Carel introduces the notions of “bodily doubt” and “disability” as core disruptions to the lived experience. These diverse views are not contradictory but complementary. Together, they point toward a deeper disruption: an existential fracture in the structure of meaning that shapes our very being-in-the-world.

Our central thesis is that illness constitutes a meaningful (dys)articulation of the world (Welt)—a Heideggerian concept of the shared, structured context in which life unfolds. Illness, in this view, impedes our existential dialogue with the world. At the heart of this analysis is Luisa Paz Rodríguez Suárez’s take on Heideggerian Rede as “meaningful articulation”, explored in her 2005 work Sentido y ser en Heidegger.

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