Phenomenology Symposium Presenter is Prominent Philosopher, Doctor, Psychiatrist

The upcoming Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center’s 36^th annual symposium will explore how the field of phenomenology is being practiced today in the areas of psychiatry and psychology.

Memory, Mind and Being Human: Phenomenology and Psychiatry Today will be held on Wednesday, March 14, and Thursday, March 15, at the Phenomenology Center in Gumberg Library.

Dr. Thomas Fuchs, the Karl Jaspers Professor of Philosophical Foundations of Psychiatry and Psychotherapy at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, will be the featured presenter at the two-day symposium.

“Dr. Fuchs is at the forefront of the dialogue among phenomenological psychology, philosophy and psychiatry,” said Dr. Jeffrey McCurry, director of the center. “As a psychiatrist and a philosopher, there might be no one better to lead us into a deeper knowledge of the most interesting work from a phenomenological perspective on the human mind and how it functions, not in a reductionistic way, but, as is phenomenologically proper, in a full human life.”

Fuchs is recognized as a prominent philosopher, medical doctor and psychiatrist whose work is at the forefront of the growing contemporary interdisciplinary dialogue between phenomenological philosophy, psychology and psychiatry.

“Some of the most interesting phenomenology being done today is in the fields of psychology and psychiatry,” explained McCurry. “Our symposium has always sought to promote some of the cutting-edge possibilities in contemporary phenomenology, and these days it is often phenomenology being done in psychology or psychiatry on issues of, for example, bodily experience, and unconscious experience.”

While the symposium is private, the event will feature Fuchs’ free, public lecture, Thinking Too Much: The Psychopathy of Hyperreflexivity, on March 15 from 2 to 4 p.m. in the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center.