Durham University

Tutor, Department of Philosophy

St. John's College

Thesis Title: 'Relatedness and Alienation: An Interdisciplinary Account of Interpersonal Understanding'

About

Amanda Taylor Aiken is a tutor at the Department of Philosophy, Durham University. She has particular expertise is in applied phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and has a strong interdisciplinary interest in intersubjectivity. She completed her doctoral thesis entitled ‘Relatedness and Alienation: An interdisciplinary account of interpersonal understanding’ in 2011 (examined by Shaun Gallagher (University of Memphis) and Simon James (Durham University)). Her thesis aimed to provide a primarily phenomenological exploration of relatedness and alienation in interpersonal understanding.

Elucidating and supporting recent interdisciplinary critiques of orthodox accounts of 
interpersonal understanding, it seeks to identify and analyse phenomena (reciprocal embodiment, space, interpersonal affects) that underpin an ability to relate to and interact with 
others. In particular, it focuses how these phenomena mutually support each other to scaffold a sense of relatedness, which further shapes the course and development of interaction. In this way, interaction and senses of relatedness are dynamic, fluid processes that are mutually informing. Further, her PhD seeks to examine cases in which a sense of relatedness and interaction breakdown, in schizophrenia and depression, to explore alienation often at the core of both disorders. Doing so sheds light on the ‘everyday’ nature of interpersonal understanding.

Amanda was also awarded a first class bachelors degree (2003–2006) and her Masters’ (with distinction) in 2007 by the University of Durham. She was an AHRC Doctoral Award holder and was invited to become a RIP Jacobsen Fellow in 2008. She is an active participant and collaborator in the phenomenology subgroup of the VW European Platform funded project ‘Pain: Why Others Matter/Psychological, Philosophical and Neuroscientific Perspectives’ and the 
AHRC/DFG-funded project ‘Emotional Experience in Depression: A Philosophical Study’ (Principal Investigators: Prof Matthew Ratcliffe, Durham, UK, and Prof Achim Stephan, Osnabrück). She is committed to research which brings the methodology of phenomenology to bear on understanding selfhood, otherness, and intersubjectivity, across disciplines, in the context of both healthy and pathological experience and has broad interests within phenomenology, 
philosophy of mind and psychiatry, and developmental psychology. 


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