Radcliffe Humanities Building, Woodstock Road, Oxford, OX2 6GG - Colin Matthew Room
Speaker: Elizabeth Barry (University of Warwick)
The TORCH Oxford Phenomeonology Network are hosting a talk by Elizabeth Barry (University of Warwick) 'Towards a Neurophenomenology of Dementia'. This paper will consider the subject with dementia in relation to traditional phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty) and a newer strand of neurophenomenology (Depraz, Varela). It will argue that phenomenology and the philosophy of psychiatry can offer an enhanced understanding of the lived experience of the subject with dementia, their relationship to their body and their perception of time. There is, however, an apparent conceptual instability in current understandings of this subject, linked to divergent uses of such philosophy. Philosophical and sociological writing on dementia has used phenomenology to argue for radically divergent positions on the question of how long the dementia patient remains a meaningful and autonomous subject at all (see e.g. Davis 2004, Kontos 2005). This paper will reconsider what phenomenology might offer in relation to the dementia sufferer’s lived experience (experience of language, the body, memory and time) as well as thinking about how this bears on their construction as a subject. It will use well-known memoirs by John Bayley (about Irish Murdoch), and Linda Grant (about Grant's mother), as well as life-writing by those with dementia, as illustration (though not evidence) of some of these ideas.
