Theda Rehbock Philosophy Residency 2024 Scholarship Awards
We are thrilled to announce the recipients of the prestigious Theda Rehbock Philosophy Residency 2024/25 scholarships.
I Dr. Ruth Rebecca Tietjen
Assistant Professor, Department of Philosophy, Tilburg University
Project: Autotheoretical Explorations of the Politics of Loneliness
During my stay at Susimetsa, I am working on a project on the existential, social, and political foundations and implications of loneliness. First, I explore contemporary auto-theoretical accounts of loneliness to investigate the relationship between loneliness and social marginalization in connection with social categories such as class, age, and gender. This includes, for instance, Olivier David’s “Von der namenlosen Menge: ueber Klasse, Wut & Einsamkeit” (2023), Didier Eribon’s “Vie, vieillesse et mort d’une femme du people” (2023), and Nagata Kabi’s “My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness” (2016). Second, I compare and contrast these cases with cases in which members of privileged groups appeal to feelings of loneliness to justify their political demands. I am excited to work on this project in Susimetsa, hoping to find a solitary and inspiring place that allows me to fully delve into my project, thereby taking seriously the role of the material environment in understanding the experience of loneliness.
Residency Period: November 10th – November 24th 2024
Read about Ruth’s residency experience at Susimetsa HERE.
II Urte Laukaityte
PhD Candidate at UC Berkeley
Project: “Symptom Perception as Inference: The Scope of Functional Neurological Disorder and its Implications for Psychiatry”
Functional symptoms pose a complex challenge in clinical theorising and yet their existence underscores the plausibility of at least some form of mind-body medicine. Terms related to the phenomenon under consideration have included ‘hysterical’, psychosomatic, psychogenic, conversion, dissociative, somatoform, and so on. Although the relevant terminological terrain is vast and not without peril, ‘functional neurological disorder’ here refers to the state of distressing clinical symptoms that are not grounded in underlying physiological disease.
Several key findings are crucial to bear in mind. Firstly, such symptoms can be truly debilitating, and prognosis is often quite poor. Secondly, although functional symptoms are more straightforwardly diagnosable in neurology, any organ system or bodily function can be affected. Thirdly, functional neurological disorder is also prevalent with the lowest epidemiological estimates yielding 50/100,000 regarding seemingly neurological symptoms alone. Fourthly, it is not a diagnosis of exclusion, as there are commonly positive clinical signs associated with the condition – it is not simply a matter of no medical cause being found. Finally, and relatedly, functional neurological disorder is distinct from feigning or malingering, as well as other medical conditions, though it can co-exist with them.
Current medical practice often involves passing patients with functional neurological disorder on to the management of psychiatrists. This artificially reinforces the conceptual boundary between ‘physical’ ailments that are assumed to preserve their tight coupling with underlying disease and ‘mental’ complaints, if not. Accepting just how widespread functional symptoms are due to the inferential nature of symptom perception calls into question the feasibility of such an undertaking. I tease out the implications the inferential model has for the relationship between subjective patient experience and clinical practice rooted in objective signs and measures of underlying disease. Granting that symptom reports cannot function as automatically and fully reliable indicators of physiological disease to be targeted, I consider ways for medical care to reorient and meaningfully integrate the phenomenology of illness not just instrumentally but in its own right.
Residency Period: December 3rd-December 20th 2024
Read about Urte’s residency experience at Susimetsa HERE.
III Dr. Cristian Timmermann and Dr. Frank Ursin
Dr. Timmermann from Institute for Ethics and History of Health in Society, University of Augsburg, Germany &
Dr. Ursin from Institute for Ethics, History and Philosophy of Medicine, Hannover Medical School (MHH), Hannover, Germany
Project: Sustainability as a new principle of biomedical ethics
Climate change and environmental degradation are becoming the largest threats to health. As more health workers and bioethicists recognise the importance of reducing the environmental footprint of the health sector, there has been a renewed interest to reassess the classic principles of biomedical ethics – respect for autonomy, non-maleficence, beneficence and justice – and ask whether these principles are fit to address contemporary challenges. A straightforward response is to expand the classic set of principles by incorporating a new principle of “sustainability”. Yet this expansion leaves two questions open (a) how does this new principle interact with well-established physicians’ responsibilities towards individual patients? And (b) can environmental concerns be already addressed with the established biomedical principles, making a new principle redundant? Our aim during our research stay at Susimetsa is to develop answers to these questions.
Residency Period: 19th January – 2nd February 2025
IV Nikhil Mahant
Marie Skłodowska Curie Postdoctoral Fellow, Uppsala University
Webpage: https://nikhilmahant.com/
Project: Future Ready Philosophy
Technology has been a major cause of transformative social and political changes. The invention of the written script, printing press, steam engine, birth control pills, vaccines, and internet have played a substantial role in leading us to the ideals that we currently endorse, crafting the size and structure of our societies, and instituting the political structure that we have in place today. Vis-à-vis earlier technological advances, however, the effects of modern artificially intelligent (AI) technologies drill deeper: their effects go beyond the social and political realm and seep into the personal. They make us question our very sense of self: Are we distinctive or special qua humans? Can artificial systems possess the features and capacities which we thought were quintessentially human? Are we just a step in the evolutionary ladder? What is our place in the universe?
My project at Susimetsa is motivated by the conviction that Philosophy has a large part to play in addressing and answering these questions. But it is also driven by a further conviction: while questions concerning existence, identity, the nature and extension of concepts, normativity, and value have traditionally been addressed within Philosophy, meeting the challenge posed by AI requires philosophy to rethink and update its aims, methods, subject matter, academic organization, and disciplinary history. Philosophy needs to be ready for the future. The outcome of the residency will be an outline of a research project, which identifies some of the most pressing question that Philosophy must confront to stay relevant and productive in the future. While the project will cast a wide net and include methodological and historical inputs from both the ‘western’ and global philosophical traditions, it will connect most directly with the contemporary discussions on conceptual engineering, the nature of consciousness, the role of language, and the relation between mind and the world within the analytic tradition.
Residency Period: February 21st – March 2nd 2025
V Prof. Dr. Amber L. Griffioen
Duke Kunshan University
Project: Issues at the Intersection of Philosophy and Psychology
During my philosophical residency at the Susimetsa Philosophicum, I will be focusing on two projects. First, I will be working on a paper for a volume on epistemic injustice and religion that deals with issues at the intersection of philosophy and psychology as it concerns the research on post-traumatic growth (PTG). It is my intention to critically interrogate the notion of trauma in the contemporary PTG literature and to discuss the potential dangers posed by the implicitly normative aspects of the PTG discourse, especially as it relates to such understudied phenomena as pregnancy loss and childbirth trauma. I intend to argue that the PTG literature involves a kind of normed “implicit paternalism” regarding the benefits of trauma that has long been at play in childbirthing discourses (e.g., the “goods” arising out of pain and trauma during labor) but which is now making its way into discourses surrounding miscarriage and even stillbirth or neonatal loss (e.g., pregnancy loss as an “opportunity” for growth).
Simultaneously, as I prepare to leave academia and transition into a career in existential coaching, I am in the process of developing online courses and workbooks for my coaching clients (especially those struggling with infertility and/or pregnancy loss) that walk them through different philosophical approaches to various relevant topics and how they can be applied in the service of helping them “struggle better”. Topics include approaches to emotion more generally, to grief in particular, and to the existential and spiritual tensions (e.g., between freedom and necessity, providence and chance, etc.) that arise in the context of reproductive struggle. Combining Theda Rehbock’s approach to Personsein in Grenzsituationen with the relational approaches of Hilde Lindemann (especially the idea of “calling” and “holding” individuals in personhood), I will try to develop resources that may be helpful for people with wombs who are trying to conceptualize and understand their feelings (of, e.g., joy, grief, ambivalence, relief, etc.) about their pregnancies and/or losses, or who are struggling to reconcile, say, their views about abortion with their experience of pregnancy loss.
Residency Period: March 7th – March 15th 2025
VI Dr. Christos Kyriacou
Department of Classics and Philosophy, University of Cyprus
Project: Epistemic Rationality and Reference Magnetism
I explore how epistemic rationality may be an elite, referentially magnetic property. An elite, referentially magnetic property in the sense that the corresponding rationality predicate must minimally reliably refer to the rationality property (as if the property has magnetic qualities and attracts the predicate’s reference). As I understand eliteness, roughly, elite properties are metaphysically fundamental properties that are explanatorily indispensable for objective rational argument. They are properties that should exist if we are to make sense of reality in a truth-tracking manner.
Residency Period: April 15th – April 24th 2025
VII Dr. Ozan Altinok
Institute for Advanced Studies for the Ethics of the Sciences, Leibniz University of Hannover
Project: Epistemic agency in the making of health-related concepts
Health-related entities are “booming”. From nutrition to microbiome to imagined ancestry, we construct increasingly diverse health-related concepts, leading to wider health ontologies. Attempts to develop different entities in context have one main challenge, which is the explanatory and interventive potential as well as any pragmatics of the new concepts are “open” due to their lack of connection to other health-related concepts.
This project will a) question the health metaphysics from a pluralistic perspective and b) try to investigate that lacuna from perspectives of philosophy of science & hands-on ethics to address issues around questions of pragmatics and the ethics of the decision-making around the health-related concepts, trying to increase epistemic autonomy of the individuals in the making of health-related concepts as well as concepts of health and disease, answering not only where to use them but who should use them.
Residency Period: April 2nd – April 15th 2025
