CANCELLED: SPAH Seminar Series Week 8: Professor Mahon O'Brien

Part of the SPAH Seminar Series, Mahon O'Brien gives a talk on 'Being Mindful About Nothing'

Heidegger characterises mindfulness as the reflective and questioning attitude of a thinking (meditative thinking) which has not already conflated being with actuality, and thereby distinguished it from absence understood as its negation. Instead, it would be a thinking that understands the enormity of the implications of grasping properly the ontological difference, understanding that being is not itself a being and that the being of something (it’s emergence as meaningfully present) typically involves an interplay of presence and absence. We shall consider and assess the implications of Heidegger’s attempts to rehabilitate the role that absence plays in our experience and understanding.

About the speaker:
Mahon O’Brien is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Sussex. His work is largely concerned with issues in phenomenology, in particular, the work of Martin Heidegger. He has published three books on Heidegger: Heidegger and Authenticity: From Resoluteness to Releasement (2011), Heidegger, History and the Holocaust (2015) and Heidegger’s Life and Thought: A Tarnished Legacy (2020). He is also interested in the history of philosophy more broadly and has published papers on topics in ancient philosophy and feminist philosophy. In 2019 O’Brien co-edited a volume of essays with Luce Irigaray and Christos Hadjioannou – Towards a New Human Being. In 2022, O’Brien was one of the four contributors to a book edited by Irigaray – Challenging a Fictitious Neutrality: Heidegger in Question.

If you cannot attend in person, please email spahpg@essex.ac.uk for the Zoom link.

Unfortunately this seminar has been cancelled due to strike action - we are hoping to postpone for later on in the year.