The Peter Sowerby Chair leads the Philosophy & Medicine Project, launched in 2015 with the generous support of the Peter Sowerby Foundation. The Project is a joint venture between King’s Department of Philosophy, the Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine, and The Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery.
The Project seeks to foster interdisciplinary links between philosophy and medicine, by teaching philosophy as part of the medical curriculum, and by hosting a range of public lectures, events and activities.
The Project’s 2020 Annual Lecture, ‘What Does it Mean to Be Healthy?’, will be delivered by Robyn Bluhm (MSU), online, on December 16. For more information and to register, click here.
Professor Elselijn Kingma is the newly-appointed Peter Sowerby Chair in Philosophy and Medicine
The Peter Sowerby Chair leads the Philosophy & Medicine Project at King’s, launched in 2015 with the generous support of the Peter Sowerby Foundation. The Project is a joint venture between King’s Department of Philosophy, the Faculty of Life Sciences and Medicine, and The Florence Nightingale Faculty of Nursing and Midwifery.
The Project works to foster interdisciplinary links between philosophy and medicine, by teaching philosophy as part of the curriculum that trains clinicians, and by hosting a range of public lectures, events and activities, aiming to encourage dialogue and collaborative research across these fields.
Professor Kingma’s main research focuses on:
The philosophy of medicine: especially concepts of health and disease; the epistemology of evidence-based medicine; and the role of values in medical evidence and clinical decision-making.
The philosophy of pregnancy, birth and early motherhood: especially the rights and obligations of pregnant and birthing women, as well as those of their health care providers; the nature of pregnancy; and applications such as artificial gestation and contract pregnancy.
She said about her new appointment: “I look forward to consolidating the Project’s international profile as a centre of excellence in teaching and research in Philosophy and Medicine, and to advancing and disseminating Peter Sowerby’s vision for embedding philosophy in clinical teaching and training”.
Professor Kingma was previously Associate Professor in Philosophy at the University of Southampton. Between 2011 and 2019 she was Socrates Professor in Philosophy & Technology in the Humanist Tradition at the Technical University of Eindhoven, the Netherlands.
Elselijn Kingma obtained undergraduate degrees in Medicine (2004) and Psychology (2004) at Leiden University, and MPhil (2005) and PhD (2008) in History & Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. She received post-doctoral training in the Department for Clinical Bioethics, National Institutes of Health (USA). Before working in Southampton she taught at King’s College London and the University of Cambridge.
Professor Kingma is lead-investigator on a five-year, 1.2 million Euro ERC Research Grant ‘Better Understanding the Metaphysics of Pregnancy (BUMP): a project at the intersection of philosophy of biology and metaphysics that investigates the metaphysical relationship between the fetus and the maternal organism. In November 2019, Kingma was awarded a Philip Leverhulme Prize to examine the metaphysical, ethical, epistemological and existential puzzles birth and pregnancy present.
The Project’s 2020 Annual Lecture will be held online on December 16. For more information and to register, click here
Panellists: Sacha Golob (Reader KCL; Director CPVA); Caterina Albano (curator and a Reader at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London); William Badenhorst (psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society and Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at Imperial College London). Chaired by: Alla Rubitel, psychoanalyst with the British Psychoanalytical Society, Honorary Senior Clinical Lecturer at Imperial College London.
Coming up in 2021:
Spring 2021: “/Origin\Forward/Slash\ – In Response to Heidegger”. An exhibition hosted by the Flat Time House Gallery in collaboration with the CPVA.
Summer 2021: “Francis Bacon and Philosophy”. A two-day conference organised by the CPVA with King’s College London and the Estate of Francis Bacon.
Summer 2021: “Sound Pictures”. A mix of performances and academic papers on multi-modal appreciation, organised by the CPVA and King’s College London. Sponsored by the British Society of Aesthetics (BSA), King’s College London and the CPVA.
Website update:
The website for the Centre for Philosophy and Visual Art at King’s College London has recently been updated. It continues to bring together academics, artists and curators to explore the connections between philosophy, theory and the visual arts, but now there are also several new films, interviews and art reviews. For example, Colette Olive (PhD candidate) has just published a review of the most recent live event “A Philosophy of sin and art” which was chaired by Sacha Golob and organised in partnership with The National Gallery .
Amrou Al-Kadhi, Panellist ‘SIN’, CPVA & National Gallery, London
To find out more about future events, and in particular, our event FEAR which will run 11th December, check out our events page.
In addition, we have launched a new series of video-interviews about practitioners who combine professional philosophical research and the making of award-winning works of art. First up is Claire Anscomb.
This week Sacha Golob (CPVA) and the National Gallery are hosting a panel discussion on Sin and Art.
Speakers include writer, drag performer and filmmaker Amrou Al-Kadhi; philosopher Deborah Casewell; art historian and Chaplain at King’s College, Cambridge, Ayla Lepine; and Director of the Centre for Philosophy and Visual Art Sacha Golob.
In May 2020, the Arts & Humanities Research Institute (AHRI) worked in collaboration with the charity Migrateful on the project Breaking Bread, providing King’s staff with the opportunity to participate in online cookery classes that were led by refugees, asylum seeker and migrants. Kneading Knowledge builds on the success and positive feedback from this project, and registration is now open for King’s student and staff to take part in eight online cookery classes running across October to November 2020
To find out more about Migrateful, a charity supporting asylum seekers, refugees and vulnerable migrants on their journey to employment, independence and integration into the community, click here.
One of the key academics involved in this project is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy Dr. Sarah Fine.
To register for one of the delicious remaining classes, maximum 10 per class, please use the links below.
KCL Minorities and Philosophy Society are pleased to be hosting Dr Adam Eliott-Cooper’s talk on ‘Postcolonial British Policing: Racism, State Power and the Legacies of the British Empire’ followed by a Q&A.
The event is free to attend and will take place on Microsoft Teams on Tuesday the 13th of October from 7-8pm.
Click here to join the MS Team call or click ‘interested’ on the Facebook event for a reminder nearer the time.
Adam is currently a research associate at the University of Greenwich. He received his PhD from the School of Geography and the Environment, University of Oxford, in 2016. He has previously worked as a researcher in the Department of Philosophy at UCL, as a teaching fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and as a research associate in the Department of Geography at King’s College London.
Adam’s scholarly interests include postcolonialism, urban theory and social movements. His current research focuses on anti-racism and British policing, both on the British mainland and in Britain’s colonies.
Find out more from KCL Minority and Philosophy Society: like them on Facebook or follow them on Instagram.
The charity, Philosophy in Prison, has collaborated with The View Magazine to curate a series of blog posts on women, philosophy, and prison, with contributions from King’s philosophers MM McCabe, Jessica Leech, Sarah Fine, and Mike Coxhead. The series also includes a piece by a participant from one of the charity’s courses at HMP Downview.
Philosophy in Prison, founded by MM McCabe, Bill Brewer, and Tom Harrison, promotes and delivers philosophical education in prisons. The View Magazine is a publication by and for women in prison, with paid content by women prisoners, women on license, and those affected by the incarceration of women.
You can read the posts, dated 5th-10th July 2020, here.
Prof Maria Rosa Antognazza will be presenting a paper this evening at the Aristotelian Society on The Distinction of Kind between Knowledge and Belief. The presentation, which will be hosted on Zoom, will be available later as a podcast. Both a draft of the paper and a link to the podcast are available here.
The Distinction of Kind between Knowledge and Belief.
Abstract:
Drawing inspiration from a well-attested historical tradition, I propose an account of cognition according to which knowledge is not only conceptually and ontologically prior to belief; it is also, and crucially, not a kind of belief. In turn, believing is not some sort of botched knowing but a mental state fundamentally different from knowing, with its own distinctive and complementary role in our cognitive life. I conclude that the main battle-line in the history of epistemology is drawn between the affirmation of a natural mental state in which there is a contact between ‘mind’ and ‘reality’ (whatever the ontological nature of this ‘reality’), and the rejection of such a natural mental state. For the former position, there is a mental state which is different in kind from belief, and which is constituted by the presence of the object of cognition to the cognitive subject, with no gap between them. For the latter position, all our cognition is belief, and the question becomes how and when belief is permissible.
Epidemiological models have been frequently mentioned in the media lately. What are they? And how do they work? Professor Alexander Bird with the Sowerby/King’s Philosophy & Medicine project has helpfully produced this introduction to epidemiological modelling for the layperson.
The particular model he will be looking at is the SIR model developed by Kermack and McKendrick in 1927.
Here’s a link to the project. Professor Bird has also produced a paper to accompany the video which is available here.
