Human Flourishing and the challenge of interdependence

 Event 

Human flourishing and the challenge of interdependence

Reflecting on Eri Mountbatten-O’Malley’s seminar “Taking the ‘human’ in conceptions of human flourishing seriously”, Agnieszka Bates invites another exploration of human flourishing, from a phenomenological perspective developed by the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Much of Merleau-Ponty's work focuses on the layer of living experience where ‘other people and things are first given to us’ (2002: 66), advancing our understanding of the integrity of the world and ourselves not as separate entities but as entangled in relationships of interdependence.

Taking Merleau-Ponty's theses of interdependence, embodiment and ambivalence as our points of departure, we will consider how human flourishing emerges in everyday interpersonal relations and how human suffering arises when relationships of interdependence have been severed.

About the speaker

Agnieszka Bates is Head of Taught Provision in the School of Education, BSU. She began her career in education as a primary school teacher in London before going on to teach in three university Schools of Education, in a variety of internal and external facing roles. She has a wide range of interests in the design, delivery and programme leadership of Undergraduate, Master’s and Doctoral programmes as well as extensive experience of supervising students at all levels.

Agnieszka’s most recent book, entitled: ‘Moral emotions and human interdependence in character education: beyond the one-dimensional self’, was published by Routledge in 2021.