Anya Daly
Anya Daly's research is focused on the intersections of phenomenology with philosophy of mind, ethics, the philosophy of perception, aesthetics, the philosophy of psychiatry, embodied and social cognition, enactivism and Buddhist Philosophy.
She has taught in programs at undergraduate and graduate levels at the University of Melbourne, Sciences Po Paris, University Lyon 3, University College Dublin, Monash University - european philosophy, anglo-american philosophy, history of ideas, ethics, business ethics, management ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of science.
Anya spent five years researching and teaching in France (2005-2010), two years in Dublin at UCD under the mentorship of Professor Dermot Moran, on an Irish Research Council Fellowship (2016-2018). In the years 2010 - 2016, and 2018 - 2021 she was based in her home city of Melbourne at the University of Melbourne.
Anya is currently Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Tasmania.
Photo: Paris 2006, drivers licence
She has taught in programs at undergraduate and graduate levels at the University of Melbourne, Sciences Po Paris, University Lyon 3, University College Dublin, Monash University - european philosophy, anglo-american philosophy, history of ideas, ethics, business ethics, management ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy of science.
Anya spent five years researching and teaching in France (2005-2010), two years in Dublin at UCD under the mentorship of Professor Dermot Moran, on an Irish Research Council Fellowship (2016-2018). In the years 2010 - 2016, and 2018 - 2021 she was based in her home city of Melbourne at the University of Melbourne.
Anya is currently Senior Lecturer in Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Tasmania.
Photo: Paris 2006, drivers licence
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and intersubjective processes in the formation of the self-pattern. Indications in the literature already demonstrate the viability of the PTS for formulating an alternative methodology to better understand the lived experience of those suffering mental disorders and to guide mental health research more generally. This article develops a flexible methodological framework that front-loads the self-pattern into a minimally structured phenomenological interview. We call this framework ‘Examination of Self Patterns’ (ESP). The ESP is unconstrained by internalist or externalist assumptions about mind and is flexibly guided by person-specific interpretations rather than pre-determined diagnostic categories. We suggest this approach is advantageous for tackling the inherent complexity of mental health, the clinical protocols and the requirements of research.
https://revuecaptures.org/article-dune-publication/%E2%80%98strange-kinship%E2%80%99-interanimality
The full special issue Animaux et Figurations Animales, with abstracts;
https://revuecaptures.org/dossier/animaux-et-figurations-animales
This paper takes as its point of departure Merleau-Ponty's assertion not long before his untimely death in 1961 that "everything will have to begin again, in politics as well as in philosophy" (Merleau-Ponty in Person). It is well known that in pursuing his later work Merleau-Ponty signalled the need for a reconfiguration of his philosophical vision so that it was no longer caught in Cartesianism and the philosophy of consciousness. This required a turn towards ontology through which he consolidated two key ideas that were already implicit in the earlier work: firstly, a thoroughgoing interdependence articulated in his reversibility thesis and the ontology of 'flesh'; and secondly, a radical contingency at the heart of existence. And it is important to recognise that these ideas are delineating the same world; they are offering interdependent lenses through which to understand this world. This paper seeks to interrogate the implications for these ideas in the domain of politics in general and specifically with regard to the notions of humanism and human progress. Relatedly, I seek to address the question-how might a recognition of ontological interdependence and radical contingency support the viability of a flourishing democracy? Merleau-Ponty's early political work was concerned with the political issues of his day, notably, Nazism, Marxism and the status of humanism, and did not engage extensively with these emerging onto-political concerns. Nonetheless, there are indicative reflections in the writings and interviews; the political implications of his ontological interrogations become more thematic in the later works. There is thus no rupture as such between the earlier works and the later ones with regard to the direction of his philosophical vision, although he did later distance himself from Marxism with the revelations of the gulags under Stalin and the Korean War. The overarching claim of this paper is that we need to rethink politics from the ground up beginning with the acknowledgement that ontology is political and that the political is intrinsically ontologically informed; and furthermore, that getting the ontology 'right' is a matter of discovery, and not theory choice as some claim. Perhaps through these interrogations the very notion of 'human progress' might be salvaged despite recent events, despite the erosion of trust due to the escalation of violence, the destruction of the biosphere, widespread poverty, the corruption of leaders, institutions and media, and despite the challenges faced by democracy, arguably the most evolved of political systems.
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/whp/ev/pre-prints/content-whp_ev_3319
This paper explores the underlying ontological bases for ethical behavior and ethical failure in the context of the vexed relationships between human animals and non-human animals by drawing on resources in phenomenology, social cognition and Buddhist philosophy. In agreement with Singer and the utilitarian project, I argue that the basis for ethical behavior with regard to animals is most effectively justified and motivated by considerations of sentience. The definition of sentience has been refined since its traditional Benthamite formulation as the capacity to experience hedonic pleasure and pain as sensate creatures, with Mill’s more elaborated version and his distinction between lower and higher pleasures and more recently with Singer’s reformulation which adds the notion of interests. Nonetheless, the utilitarian account still misses crucial aspects of sentience. Buddhist ethics, unlike Western ethics, is from the beginning not focused solely on humans but encompasses all sentient beings. This inclusivity, in addition to the refined interrogations of the varieties of suffering, means that Buddhist philosophy is able to furnish a more nuanced understanding of sentience. Furthermore, from phenomenology, which has a number of significant commonalities with Buddhist philosophy, we learn that sentience tacitly includes the capacities for self-awareness and, I will argue, a plural self-awareness; not only does the ‘I’ belong to a ‘we’, but the ‘we’ is constitutive of the ‘I’. This ‘primordial we’ I propose provides the basis for rethinking the moral relations between human animals and non-human animals. While I appreciatively acknowledge the impact that Singer’s work has made in this domain, the utilitarian approach cannot philosophically achieve all that Singer sets out to achieve without an ontological account. Tellingly in more recent years Singer has advanced the notion of interests which goes beyond the strictly utilitarian brief in that ‘interests’ perforce belong to a subject and subjectivity perforce entails ontological considerations. My aims are thus threefold: firstly, to argue for not only a more extended understanding of suffering in the account of sentience but an account that also includes self-awareness – any sentient being is the subject of a life; secondly, I propose that self-awareness includes a tacit awareness of the primordial ‘we’, the fundamental kinship we have with all subjects including non-human animals. I contend finally that we thus have an ontological basis in ‘interanimality’ to explain why we most often do and should care about all sentient beings.
[In the gaze] …. 'the other person transforms me into an object and denies me, I transform him into an object and deny him, it is asserted. In fact, the other’s gaze transforms me into an object and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s'.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception.
Merleau-Ponty here responds to the pessimistic and reductive Sartrean account of the Gaze, highlighting that this objectifying gaze only becomes possible by withdrawing into our thinking nature. The capacity to detach and compartmentalize our manner of engagement with others, becoming empathically unavailable, closing down affective responsiveness, can serve positive ends as with certain occupations such as bomb disposal and surgery. Outside circumstances such as these, however, empathic unavailability may facilitate violence, negligence and ethical failure. It remains contentious, nonetheless, whether empathic responsiveness is ontologically basic and whether it is essential for ethics. What is clear is that primary empathy drives psycho-social development and serves as an affective and ethical touchstone for the more cognitive modes of intersubjective engagement and for metadiscursive practices, ensuring that subjects are able to sustain positive connections with others and the shared world.
Merleau-Ponty’s inhuman gaze both ‘animalizes’ the ‘object’ of the gaze but paradoxically requires a ‘rational’ retreat, effectively ‘de-animalizing’ the gazing subject .......
Categorization-based diagnosis, which endeavors to be consistent with the third-person, objective measures of science, is not always adequate with respect to problems concerning diagnostic accuracy, demarcation problems when there are comorbidities, well-documented problems of symptom amplification, and complications of stigmatization and looping effects. While psychiatric categories have proved useful and convenient for clinicians in identifying a recognizable constellation of symptoms typical for a particular disorder for the purposes of communication and eligibility for treatment regimes, the reification of these categories has without doubt had negative consequences for the patient and also for the general understanding of psychiatric disorders. We argue that a complementary, integrated framework that focuses on descriptive symptom-based classifications (drawing on phenomenological interview methods and narrative) combined with a more comprehensive conception of the human subject (found in the pattern theory of self), can not only offer a solution to some of the vexed issues of psychiatric diagnosis but also support more efficacious therapeutic interventions.
Anya Daly
From The Philosopher, 2019, vol. 107, no. 1 ('Doing Philosophy').
Read more articles from The Philosopher, purchase this issue or become a subscriber.
What do we do when we do philosophy? And what should we do? What method in philosophy is likely to resolve puzzles and lead to reliable, insightful and potentially useful “truths”? As Stephen Mulhall has explained in his 2014 Grahame Lock Memorial Lecture, ‘in no subject other than philosophy is the basic nature of the subject (and so the core self-understanding of its practitioners) perennially not only open to question but actively in question.’ Mulhall also gives an analysis of the muddled and abysmal designations of “analytic philosophy” and “continental philosophy”, which have contributed significantly to the often vexed exchanges between philosophers who assert adherence to either of these camps; the upshot being that the designations themselves are somewhat bogus and confused oversimplifications. And so it is apposite that The Philosopher and its new editor, Anthony Morgan, set the theme for this first issue under his stewardship as doing philosophy. In what follows, I will give a brief account of the questions which are motivating my current research and how I go about addressing them.
Please click on the link below for full access to the article.
Daly, Anya. 2019. “Interrogating Lived Experience”. The Philosopher – Special Issue on ‘Doing Philosophy’ with Timothy Williamson. Winter 2019, Vol.107, Issue 1. ISSN 0967-6074
https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/daly
A 3-day multidisciplinary conference spanning philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, sociology and aesthetics, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, 6th – 9th June 2018; partly funded by Dr. Anya Daly’s IRC project [The Social Matrix: An investigation of the subjective bases of violence, destructiveness and ethical failure] and Dr. James Jardine’s IRC project [The Constitution of Personal Identity: Self-Consciousness, Agency and Mutual Recognition] and sponsored by the School of Philosophy and the School of Computer Science, University College Dublin.
https://theinhumangaze.com
and intersubjective processes in the formation of the self-pattern. Indications in the literature already demonstrate the viability of the PTS for formulating an alternative methodology to better understand the lived experience of those suffering mental disorders and to guide mental health research more generally. This article develops a flexible methodological framework that front-loads the self-pattern into a minimally structured phenomenological interview. We call this framework ‘Examination of Self Patterns’ (ESP). The ESP is unconstrained by internalist or externalist assumptions about mind and is flexibly guided by person-specific interpretations rather than pre-determined diagnostic categories. We suggest this approach is advantageous for tackling the inherent complexity of mental health, the clinical protocols and the requirements of research.
https://revuecaptures.org/article-dune-publication/%E2%80%98strange-kinship%E2%80%99-interanimality
The full special issue Animaux et Figurations Animales, with abstracts;
https://revuecaptures.org/dossier/animaux-et-figurations-animales
This paper takes as its point of departure Merleau-Ponty's assertion not long before his untimely death in 1961 that "everything will have to begin again, in politics as well as in philosophy" (Merleau-Ponty in Person). It is well known that in pursuing his later work Merleau-Ponty signalled the need for a reconfiguration of his philosophical vision so that it was no longer caught in Cartesianism and the philosophy of consciousness. This required a turn towards ontology through which he consolidated two key ideas that were already implicit in the earlier work: firstly, a thoroughgoing interdependence articulated in his reversibility thesis and the ontology of 'flesh'; and secondly, a radical contingency at the heart of existence. And it is important to recognise that these ideas are delineating the same world; they are offering interdependent lenses through which to understand this world. This paper seeks to interrogate the implications for these ideas in the domain of politics in general and specifically with regard to the notions of humanism and human progress. Relatedly, I seek to address the question-how might a recognition of ontological interdependence and radical contingency support the viability of a flourishing democracy? Merleau-Ponty's early political work was concerned with the political issues of his day, notably, Nazism, Marxism and the status of humanism, and did not engage extensively with these emerging onto-political concerns. Nonetheless, there are indicative reflections in the writings and interviews; the political implications of his ontological interrogations become more thematic in the later works. There is thus no rupture as such between the earlier works and the later ones with regard to the direction of his philosophical vision, although he did later distance himself from Marxism with the revelations of the gulags under Stalin and the Korean War. The overarching claim of this paper is that we need to rethink politics from the ground up beginning with the acknowledgement that ontology is political and that the political is intrinsically ontologically informed; and furthermore, that getting the ontology 'right' is a matter of discovery, and not theory choice as some claim. Perhaps through these interrogations the very notion of 'human progress' might be salvaged despite recent events, despite the erosion of trust due to the escalation of violence, the destruction of the biosphere, widespread poverty, the corruption of leaders, institutions and media, and despite the challenges faced by democracy, arguably the most evolved of political systems.
https://www.ingentaconnect.com/content/whp/ev/pre-prints/content-whp_ev_3319
This paper explores the underlying ontological bases for ethical behavior and ethical failure in the context of the vexed relationships between human animals and non-human animals by drawing on resources in phenomenology, social cognition and Buddhist philosophy. In agreement with Singer and the utilitarian project, I argue that the basis for ethical behavior with regard to animals is most effectively justified and motivated by considerations of sentience. The definition of sentience has been refined since its traditional Benthamite formulation as the capacity to experience hedonic pleasure and pain as sensate creatures, with Mill’s more elaborated version and his distinction between lower and higher pleasures and more recently with Singer’s reformulation which adds the notion of interests. Nonetheless, the utilitarian account still misses crucial aspects of sentience. Buddhist ethics, unlike Western ethics, is from the beginning not focused solely on humans but encompasses all sentient beings. This inclusivity, in addition to the refined interrogations of the varieties of suffering, means that Buddhist philosophy is able to furnish a more nuanced understanding of sentience. Furthermore, from phenomenology, which has a number of significant commonalities with Buddhist philosophy, we learn that sentience tacitly includes the capacities for self-awareness and, I will argue, a plural self-awareness; not only does the ‘I’ belong to a ‘we’, but the ‘we’ is constitutive of the ‘I’. This ‘primordial we’ I propose provides the basis for rethinking the moral relations between human animals and non-human animals. While I appreciatively acknowledge the impact that Singer’s work has made in this domain, the utilitarian approach cannot philosophically achieve all that Singer sets out to achieve without an ontological account. Tellingly in more recent years Singer has advanced the notion of interests which goes beyond the strictly utilitarian brief in that ‘interests’ perforce belong to a subject and subjectivity perforce entails ontological considerations. My aims are thus threefold: firstly, to argue for not only a more extended understanding of suffering in the account of sentience but an account that also includes self-awareness – any sentient being is the subject of a life; secondly, I propose that self-awareness includes a tacit awareness of the primordial ‘we’, the fundamental kinship we have with all subjects including non-human animals. I contend finally that we thus have an ontological basis in ‘interanimality’ to explain why we most often do and should care about all sentient beings.
[In the gaze] …. 'the other person transforms me into an object and denies me, I transform him into an object and deny him, it is asserted. In fact, the other’s gaze transforms me into an object and mine him, only if both of us withdraw into the core of our thinking nature, if we both make ourselves into an inhuman gaze, if each of us feels his actions to be not taken up and understood, but observed as if they were an insect’s'.
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, The Phenomenology of Perception.
Merleau-Ponty here responds to the pessimistic and reductive Sartrean account of the Gaze, highlighting that this objectifying gaze only becomes possible by withdrawing into our thinking nature. The capacity to detach and compartmentalize our manner of engagement with others, becoming empathically unavailable, closing down affective responsiveness, can serve positive ends as with certain occupations such as bomb disposal and surgery. Outside circumstances such as these, however, empathic unavailability may facilitate violence, negligence and ethical failure. It remains contentious, nonetheless, whether empathic responsiveness is ontologically basic and whether it is essential for ethics. What is clear is that primary empathy drives psycho-social development and serves as an affective and ethical touchstone for the more cognitive modes of intersubjective engagement and for metadiscursive practices, ensuring that subjects are able to sustain positive connections with others and the shared world.
Merleau-Ponty’s inhuman gaze both ‘animalizes’ the ‘object’ of the gaze but paradoxically requires a ‘rational’ retreat, effectively ‘de-animalizing’ the gazing subject .......
Categorization-based diagnosis, which endeavors to be consistent with the third-person, objective measures of science, is not always adequate with respect to problems concerning diagnostic accuracy, demarcation problems when there are comorbidities, well-documented problems of symptom amplification, and complications of stigmatization and looping effects. While psychiatric categories have proved useful and convenient for clinicians in identifying a recognizable constellation of symptoms typical for a particular disorder for the purposes of communication and eligibility for treatment regimes, the reification of these categories has without doubt had negative consequences for the patient and also for the general understanding of psychiatric disorders. We argue that a complementary, integrated framework that focuses on descriptive symptom-based classifications (drawing on phenomenological interview methods and narrative) combined with a more comprehensive conception of the human subject (found in the pattern theory of self), can not only offer a solution to some of the vexed issues of psychiatric diagnosis but also support more efficacious therapeutic interventions.
Anya Daly
From The Philosopher, 2019, vol. 107, no. 1 ('Doing Philosophy').
Read more articles from The Philosopher, purchase this issue or become a subscriber.
What do we do when we do philosophy? And what should we do? What method in philosophy is likely to resolve puzzles and lead to reliable, insightful and potentially useful “truths”? As Stephen Mulhall has explained in his 2014 Grahame Lock Memorial Lecture, ‘in no subject other than philosophy is the basic nature of the subject (and so the core self-understanding of its practitioners) perennially not only open to question but actively in question.’ Mulhall also gives an analysis of the muddled and abysmal designations of “analytic philosophy” and “continental philosophy”, which have contributed significantly to the often vexed exchanges between philosophers who assert adherence to either of these camps; the upshot being that the designations themselves are somewhat bogus and confused oversimplifications. And so it is apposite that The Philosopher and its new editor, Anthony Morgan, set the theme for this first issue under his stewardship as doing philosophy. In what follows, I will give a brief account of the questions which are motivating my current research and how I go about addressing them.
Please click on the link below for full access to the article.
Daly, Anya. 2019. “Interrogating Lived Experience”. The Philosopher – Special Issue on ‘Doing Philosophy’ with Timothy Williamson. Winter 2019, Vol.107, Issue 1. ISSN 0967-6074
https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/daly
A 3-day multidisciplinary conference spanning philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, psychiatry, psychology, sociology and aesthetics, Centre Culturel Irlandais, Paris, 6th – 9th June 2018; partly funded by Dr. Anya Daly’s IRC project [The Social Matrix: An investigation of the subjective bases of violence, destructiveness and ethical failure] and Dr. James Jardine’s IRC project [The Constitution of Personal Identity: Self-Consciousness, Agency and Mutual Recognition] and sponsored by the School of Philosophy and the School of Computer Science, University College Dublin.
https://theinhumangaze.com
Endorsements of Book: Merleau-Ponty and the Ethics of Intersubjectivity, 2016
1. “In this careful and perceptive work Daly draws out the ethical implications of Merleau-Ponty’s discussion of the relations between self and other. Clear and engaging, she puts her account in conversation with key aspects of contemporary thought. Highly recommended”.
Professor Kathleen Lennon, University of Hull
2. “Where better to find an embedded, embodied, enactive basis for ethics than in Merleau-Ponty! Not just the embodied mind, but the empathic mind and the embodied person, always in relation to Others and characterized from the beginning by reversibility. In regard to ethics, this is radically different from our standard (often individualistic) Western approaches, and Daly makes this clear through her insightful references to the Buddhist tradition. Her analysis, like Merleau-Ponty’s own, is enriched by references to psychological and neuroscientific studies, and likewise innovative in her deft ability for constructing an integrated analysis.”
Professor Shaun Gallagher, Philosophy, University of Memphis
3. “Anya Daly addresses for the first time a question as central as it is difficult: that of the place and significance of ethics in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. She approaches this not only from the work of Merleau-Ponty, of which she is perfectly acquainted, but also effectively drawing on major English-speaking philosophers, as well as recent developments in neurobiology. Written in a lively and measured style, this book indisputably sheds new light on Merleau-Ponty and contributes significantly to the question of the foundation of ethics.”
Professor Renaud Barbaras, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
4. “Daly has written an original, scholarly and provocative book, defending Merleau-Ponty’s unique emphasis on embodiment, perception and expression, and exploring critically his account of the mutual involvement between self, other and world, founded in empathic fellow-feeling, leading to a comprehensive philosophy of intersubjectivity. Daly’s synoptic account is a must read for all interested in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodied subjectivity.”
Professor Dermot Moran, University College Dublin
Here is the read online only link:
https://rdcu.be/buAe6
Professor Kathleen Lennon, University of Hull.
“Where better to find an embedded, embodied, enactive basis for ethics than in Merleau-Ponty! Not just the embodied mind, but the empathic mind and the embodied person, always in relation to Others and characterized from the beginning by reversibility. In regard to ethics, this is radically different from our standard (often individualistic) Western approaches, and Daly makes this clear through her insightful references to the Buddhist tradition. Her analysis, like Merleau-Ponty’s own, is enriched by references to psychological and neuroscientific studies, and likewise innovative in her deft ability for constructing an integrated analysis.”
Professor Shaun Gallagher, Philosophy, University of Memphis.
“Anya Daly addresses for the first time a question as central as it is difficult: that of the place and significance of ethics in the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty. She approaches this not only from the work of Merleau-Ponty, of which she is perfectly acquainted, but also effectively drawing on major English-speaking philosophers, as well as recent developments in neurobiology. Written in a lively and measured style, this book indisputably sheds new light on Merleau-Ponty and contributes significantly to the question of the foundation of ethics.”
Professor Renaud Barbaras, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne.
“Daly has written an original, scholarly and provocative book, defending Merleau-Ponty’s unique emphasis on embodiment, perception and expression, and exploring critically his account of the mutual involvement between self, other and world, founded in empathic fellow-feeling, leading to a comprehensive philosophy of intersubjectivity. Daly’s synoptic account is a must read for all interested in Merleau-Ponty’s philosophy of embodied subjectivity.”
Professor Dermot Moran, University College Dublin.