CfP: Phenomenology and Mindfulness

We invite papers that explore the relationship between phenomenology and mindfulness, which will be published in a volume co-edited by Susi Ferrarello (California State University, East Bay) and Christos Hadjioannou (University of Cyprus). The aim of the volume is to create a fruitful dialogue between these two traditions, to bring about possible overlaps and incongruities, exploring historical as well as systematic connections.

Phenomenology is a movement that began with Edmund Husserl in 1900, as a new way of doing philosophy that reconnects philosophy with concrete living experience. It was stimulated by Franz Brentano’s descriptive psychology and his studies of the acts and contents of consciousness. Husserl redefined phenomenology as a method of describing things and the world, and structures of consciousness. After Husserl, phenomenology became a historical movement represented by a set of people in Germany, France, Poland, Italy, such as Martin Heidegger, Edith Stein, Eugen Fink, Ludwig Landgrebe, Roman Ingarden, Enzo Paci, Max Scheler, Jan Patocka and Karl Jaspers, Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Henry, and even Jacques Derrida.

Despite a few articles that have appeared in recent scholarship that look at phenomenology and mindfulness in their togetherness, not much has been written on this very promising topic. For example, more could be said about the Husserlian epochē, or late Heidegger’s notion of Gelassenheit, and Besinnung.

Since the 1970s, clinical psychologists have developed a number of therapeutic applications based on mindfulness, which is a form of meditation that derives from the Buddhist tradition, and which involves techniques that focus attention on temporal presence. Mindfulness modifies the subject’s relation to their surroundings and the self in a way that helps alleviate stressful emotions as well as better manage physical pain. It is defined as an attitudinal modification that sometimes involves abstaining from judgment, acceptance, letting go, gratitude, non-striving, etc.

But the volume is not dedicated only to Buddhist strands of mindfulness – it is interested in exploring other strands of mindfulness broadly understood, for example deriving from the Stoic tradition. Some academic philosophers have taken advantage of this resurgence of interest in ‘mindfulness’ and have used it to promote Stoic philosophy. An example is the Stoicism Today project at Exeter University (UK), and the associated formal organisation Modern Stoicism, a charitable incorporated international organisation based in the UK. Stoic philosophy proposes something similar to Buddhist mindfulness, for example with respect to emotions: emotions are seen as psychological disturbances, and mental suffering arise from cognitive appraisals: they are ‘errors of judgment’ and proposes Stoic mindfulness as a form of therapy based on this theory of emotions. A dialogue between phenomenology and Stoic mindfulness is something that has a lot to offer.

Please, submit an abstract of 500 words (max) by February 1st, 2022 to phenomenologyandmindfulness@gmail.com

Accepted contributors will be given the opportunity to present their work at a conference at the University of Cyprus in June 2022.

Should you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact us at said email.
Applicants will get an answer by February 20th, 2022.


Possible topics include, but are not limited to:

-Phenomenology and mindfulness as methods
-Theories of emotion
-Issues in embodiment: the habitual body; body awareness; mind/body relation; touch
-Therapeutic applications of phenomenology
-Philosophy of time
-Temporality and historicity
-Nature
-Theories of subjectivity
-Philosophy of action
-Imagination
-Judgment
-Trauma
-Happiness
-Anxiety
-Attention
-Meaning