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Zoom: https://umac.zoom.us/j/99459515373

Password: 978914

 

Abstract

This paper develops a phenomenological account of what it is to have and to lose an underlying sense of “certainty”. By drawing on themes in Wittgenstein’s later writings and also the phenomenological tradition, I conceive of having certainty in terms of the anticipatory structure of experience. It consists in a practical, non-localized, unwavering sense that things will work out, that one will be able to go on. This also involves the pre-reflective acceptance of a form of uncertainty. I conclude by suggesting that, by conceiving of certainty in this way and acknowledging its fragility, we can better understand various different disturbances to which human experience is susceptible.

Bio

Matthew Ratcliffe is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York, UK. He has also held positions at University College Cork, Durham University, and the University of Vienna. His work addresses issues in phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of psychiatry. He is author of the books Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality (Oxford University Press, 2008), Experiences of Depression: A Study in Phenomenology (Oxford University Press, 2015), Real Hallucinations: Psychiatric Illness, Intentionality, and the Interpersonal World (MIT Press, 2017), and Grief Worlds: A Study of Emotional Experience (MIT Press, 2022).