4 pm
Ted Daigle Auditorium
Edmund Casey Hall

The Department of Philosophy invites you to join Dr. Marie-Eve Morin, University of Alberta,  as she delivers the Annual Aquinas Lecture on “Phenomenology and the ‘Absolute Outside’".

Most of us tend to believe it is possible to obtain knowledge of the way the world really is, in itself. But philosophers have long scrutinized this belief.

Professor Marie-Eve Morin will critically assess the way two contemporary philosophical approaches, phenomenology and speculative realism, have taken up and complicated the question: does the way things appear to us really match how these things actually are in themselves?

The lecture will take place Monday, March 10 at 4 pm in the Ted Daigle Auditorium, Edmund Casey Hall. All are welcome.

“The context for my most recent work is defined by the challenge addressed by the speculative realist movement to post-Kantian Continental thought in general, and phenomenology in particular. For the speculative realist movement, phenomenology is a form of correlationism, a mode of philosophizing that is concerned with the way things appear to us rather than the way they are in themselves. In the words of Meillassoux, phenomenology cannot reach the “great outdoors” or the “absolute outside”,” said Dr. Morin.

“In this talk, I will use the speculative realist challenge to show the strengths (and also the limits) of the phenomenological method with a particular focus on Merleau-Ponty’s early work.”

Dr. Morin holds a Bachelor of Arts from McGill and a Doctorate from the University of Freiburg. Her primary area of research is 20th-century continental philosophy, specifically post-structuralism and post-phenomenology (Derrida, Levinas, Nancy) and existentialism and phenomenology (Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, Sartre). She regularly teaches courses in Political Philosophy, Existentialism, Feminist Philosophy, and Philosophy and Literature.