Zipping up on the west coast line after an informal
meeting with few people at Bill Fulford's house in London to mull over
broadening the intellectual resources for philosophy and psychiatry, I am
thinking a bit about what might happen to academic conferences in a recessional
period. This year, there might have been a single INPP conference in Italy but
for understandable reasons (“It’s the conomy, Stupid!”) it didn't happen. In
the UK at least, we have benefitted from a travelling symposium (Durham, Kings
College London, Oxford) and I like to think that, although I didn't lift a
finger to help with the organisation, I had something to do with its conception
(over a coffee or two with Werdie van Staden, Grant Gillett, Derek Bolton and
Angela Woods at the INPP meeting at Otago, Dunedin last year).
I really enjoyed the Durham day on the future of
phenomenology. (My own paper attempted to address phenomenology and how bridges
might best be built between analytic philosophy and phenomenological accounts:
how 'we' might borrow 'their' results and the familiar worries that any such
accounts of psychopathology raise.) I got a chance to talk to Angela Woods
about the use of twitter but also Nev Jones (who put the first version of the
fifth, I think, part of her talk under erasure; if I had done that my irony
would have been ironic whilst hers, more powerfully, wasn't), author of the
consistently interesting Ruminations on Madness blog (note to self: I will list
the blogs I read which are, unlike my own, somehow serious and grown up. Three
spring to mind as quite brilliant.)
