​​In this talk, Havi Carel argues that recent restrictions aimed at preventing the transmission of covid-19 have had a profound impact on our personal and social worlds. Using key phenomenological ideas, such as being-in-the-world, being-with, the intelligibility of our shared world, and the centrality of touch and embodiment in our experience, Carel suggests that our everyday experience has been deeply disrupted by social distancing, causing significant changes to the ways in which we inhabit our social and physical world. She closes by characterising these changes as a global uncertainty: the loss of a once pre-reflective trust or confidence that envelops one's experience of the world as a whole.


Havi Carel is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Bristol, where she teaches both philosophy students and medical students. Her book Illness was shortlisted for the 2009 Wellcome Book Prize and is now published in its third edition.

She is also the author of Phenomenology of Illness (2016) and Life and Death in Freud and Heidegger (2006), and co-editor of Health, Illness and Disease (2012), New Takes in Film-Philosophy (2010), and What Philosophy Is (2004). She has been a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator, a British Academy Mid-Career Fellow, and a Leverhulme Fellow.

This lecture will be given online and will be followed by audience questions. The link to the event will appear here on the day.

This event is produced by Cardiff University and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.

Royal Institute of Philosophy Cardiff Annual Lecture 2019


HARD CHOICES

Professor Ruth Chang
Chair of Jurisprudence
University of Oxford


Thursday 16th May at 7pm 

Wallace Lecture Theatre
Cardiff University Main Building

Park Place, Cathays, Cardiff CF10 3AT

Free! No need to book. Doors open at 6.30.

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HARD CHOICES
Professor Ruth Chang (Oxford)


We all face hard choices. What career should I pursue? Should I marry? Have children? How much should I give to charity? Should I give up my car and go vegan in order to help alleviate global warming? In this talk I explain what hard choices are, and what, in particular, makes them hard. It turns out that how we relate to the world in the decisions we make is fundamentally askew. By thinking about our place in the world differently, we uncover a distinctive way of thinking about our hard choices and what to do in the face of them. 

Ruth Chang is Chair of Jurisprudence at the University of Oxford and a Professorial Fellow at University College Oxford, having previously been Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey and a law associate working on a (pro bono) death penalty case and several (non pro bono) product liability and medical malpractice cases.

Professor Chang's current academic work concerns the nature of values and reasons, decision-making and reasoning, love and commitment, and the nature of the self. Her research has appeared in the media as far afield as Taiwan and Brazil, as well as across Europe and the English-speaking world. She has worked with a variety of industries, including video gaming, pharmaceuticals, head-hunting, banking and finance, and a variety of institutions, including the U.S. Navy, the CIA, National Geographic, and the World Bank.
​

Professor Loredana Polezzi
of Cardiff University

interviews 

Professor Christopher Bertram
of the University of Bristol

on his new book

Do States Have the Right to Exclude Immigrants?

at Waterstones in The Hayes, Cardiff
which is the biggest bookshop in Wales

​on Tuesday 7th May at 6.30pm

Tickets are £ 3. The book will be available at the event with a £ 3 discount.

Places are limited. So it is advisable to book in advance.
Tickets are available online or in the shop or by phone: 029 2066 5606

​This is a Royal Institute of Philosophy event. Everyone is welcome!

Now available! Resource for AS-level and A-level Philosophy on the AQA syllabus.

Experience and Knowledge contains six short original articles with questions and exercises designed to help students develop their own thought on key syllabus topics.

The booklet is free to download and share unchanged for non-commercial purposes under the Creative Commons 3.0 Unported (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0) license.

Full information and the booklet itself can be found on our A-level page.

Tickets are still available for Machines, our afternoon festival of philosophy of technology on Tuesday 15th May.

The festival includes a keynote lecture, five smaller talks, and eight roundtable discussions, all for the bargain price of £4, or just £1 for students.

Full information about the festival.

Ticket sales.

This website is maintained by the Cardiff branch of the Royal Institute of Philosophy. We hold philosophy events that are open to the public. Our events are announced on this news feed and listed on the Calendar page.