BookTalk: The Ethics of Immediacy: Dangerous Experience in Freud, Woolf, and Merleau-Ponty

Name: BookTalk: The Ethics of Immediacy: Dangerous Experience in Freud, Woolf, and Merleau-Ponty
Start: 2025-05-01T17:00:00-04:00
Location: 616 N. Highland Avenue , Pittsburgh, PA, United States, Pennsylvania 15206

Schedule

Thu, 01 May, 2025 at 05:00 pm

UTC-04:00

Location

616 N. Highland Avenue , Pittsburgh, PA, United States, Pennsylvania 15206 | Pittsburgh, PA

Join us in person or online.
Dr. Jeffrey McCurry examines how Freud’s psychoanalytic theory, Woolf’s modernist criticism and fiction, and Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, psychology, literature, and philosophy in turns embraced the risks and dangers of putting immediate experience as the center of humanity, of respecting, understanding, appreciating, and following the lead of immediate, spontaneous, pre-reflective, pre-evaluative, concrete experience in human life. This book launches an ethical depth-charge to its reader: without any ideal, normative prescription, or even expectation, what responsibility, if any, does one have to interrogate immediate experience in one’s own life and times?
Dr. Jeffrey McCurry is director of the Simon Silverman Phenomenology Center and affiliated faculty in the Department of Philosophy at Duquesne University. Educated at Johns Hopkins University, Duke University, and the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center, his research centers on the intersection of philosophy, literature, and psychoanalysis, and he has published on Augustine, Freud, Merleau-Ponty, Lacan, and Derrida. He is also a member of faculty in the Pittsburgh Psychoanalytic Center.