(NEW) Antonio Sandu (Romania)

24/06/2020

Presentation Language: English

Antonio Sandu (Romania) - Prof., PhD, Faculty of Law and Administrative Sciences, "Stefan cel Mare" University (Suceava); LUMEN Research Center in Social and Humanistic (Iasi). His main areas of interest include ethics, bioethics, sociology, social work and social philosophy, public administration. He analyses the social construction of reality by developing his very own version of social constructionism operating at the crossroad between the social-constructionist paradigm and the theory of communicative action. He studied the interpretative adrift of ethical concepts such as ethical acceptability and ethical values. He also conducted research in autonomy and informed consent in medical ethics and public health ethics. He is also interested in transhuman and posthuman changes in human condition due to the virtualisation of social space.

Philosophical Practice in Times of Pandemic (Lecture) 

The medicalization of society practically represents the effect of the society of risk, of the fact that the society is more easily aware of the various risks that individuals feel threatened about. A pandemic causes the whole society to be restricted, social activity to be shrinked. This is possible in the context of a medicalized society, which brings with it a lifestyle based on a sometimes exaggerated care for the health condition, healthy lifestyles, bio lifestyles and so on, which are imposing precisely on our fear of losing our comfort and health, in the context in which we are more aware of the risk to which we are exposed by various elements of daily life. Many of these efforts prove to be superficial, and to be aware of the ways in which these daily risks to health actually impact our life, can be achieved through ethical counseling and philosophical counseling. This changes the approach to philosophy and creates a relative incompatibility of fundamental themes of contemporary philosophy with the everyday intellectual concerns of the potential readers of philosophy. 

Experiential Approach and Non-Dualistic Meditation in Philosophical Practice (Lecture)

The theoretical foundation of experiential psychotherapy originates in philosophy, more precisely in that of phenomenological and existentialist orientation. The mentioned philosophical perspectives were operationalized from a psychotherapeutic point of view by psychologists who belong to the current of humanistic psychology. The experiential perspective includes meditative experiences, including those corelated to the experience of trance states or altered consciousness experience. In philosophical practice, this approach aims at experiencing existential phobias and anxieties and the specific limitations of the human condition. In this lecture we will emphasize the use in philosophical practice of meditative techniques originated in the non-dualistic practices of Kashmiri Shivaism recovered from the existential perspective, as an experience of pure subjectivity.