Antony Fredriksson, PhD

Doc. Antony Fredriksson, PhD

E-mail: Antony.Fredriksson@upce.cz

Location: 10 013, building G

Website: https://abo.academia.edu/AntonyFredriksson

Research Interests

Aesthetics, environmental ethics, embodied philosophy, existential philosophy, phenomenology, philosophy of perception, film and philosophy, attention, intersubjectivity, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Currently I am a team member in the project:

ECEGADMAT. Varieties of Feeling Bad about Climate and Other Things.

Principal investigator: doc. Ondřej Beran
Period:  1. 1. 2022 – 31. 12. 2024
Grant No. 22-15446S Czech Science Foundation Standard Grant.

In my research, I scrutinize the existential aspects of our emotional responses to the current climate crisis. Whereas anxiety and even trauma can be understood as coherent psychological responses to the prospect of degradation in nature, they are, in another sense obstructive, since anxiety and trauma have a detrimental impact on the agency of the subject. If we agree that the impending crisis requires swift and clear sighted actions, then subjective agency should be preserved at all cost. I intend to scrutinize this tension between agency and passivity brought on by our affectivity in the light of the climate crisis.

In my previous research project “The Art of Attention: Intersubjectivity in the Philosophy of Perception” (2016 –2018) I address existential questions concerning the faculty of attention. The research is related to current attempts to elaborate an intersubjective understanding of perception: how we see, not only as individual subjects, but also through the help of others and shared practices.

Education and degrees awarded

Docent of Philosophy (Associate Professor), Åbo Akademi University, 16.11.2022.

Doctor of Philosophy, Åbo Akademi University, 2015.

Master of Arts, Åbo Akademi University, 2001.

Previous positions

1.1.2016-31.12.2018

Postdoctoral researcher in the project “The Art of Attention: Intersubjectivity in the Philosophy of Perception”, Åbo Akademi University, funded by the Åbo Akademi University Foundation. Within this project I have completed a sojourn as a guest researcher at the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen, between January – July 2017, and at Centre for Studies in Practical Knowledge, Södertörn University Stockholm, between March – May 2018.

12/2008 – 2/2015

Doctoral researcher and part-time lecturer. During the period December 2008 to July 2014 my research was funded with grants.

Teacher/lecturer for the courses:

  • The Struggle for Attention in the Public Sphere: A Perspective of Critical Phenomenology. Summer School organized by Institute of Slavic Studies Department of Slavic Literatures and Cultures, University of Dresden, July 23-29 2023
  • Contemporary Ethics, Master program in Ethics and Political Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Pardubice, spring 2023.
  • Visual Studies: The Moving Image, at the Department of Arts History at Åbo Akademi University, 2009-2023.
  • History of Ethics, Master program in Ethics and Political Philosophy, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies, University of Pardubice, fall 2022.
  • Home: Moral Objectivity, Relativity and Moral Change. A course organized by the Centre for Ethics, University of Pardubice, for PhD and Master students, spring 2022
  • Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of the Body, Centre for Ethics, University of Pardubice, fall 2020.
  • Berättelsen som förståelse- och kommunikationsform (Narrative as communication and form of understanding), University of Helsinki, fall 2018.
  • Seminar-course Merleau-Ponty and the Phenomenology of the Body, Department of Culture, History and Philosophy, Åbo Akademi University, fall 2018.
  • The History of Virtual Reality at The Academy of Fine Arts, Helsinki, fall 2016.

Publications:

Scientific books (monographs)

Peer-reviewed scientific articles

  • “Non-human Images: Environment and Emotion in two films by Viera Čákanyová”, Visual Resources, Forthcoming 2023.
  • “Václav Havel, Simone Weil and our desire for totalitarianism”, in The Dissident: Six Readings of “The Power of the Powerless” by Václav Havel, edited by Niklas Forsberg and Ulrika Björk. Special Issue of Filosofický časopis 1/2022: 83-104. https://doi.org/10.46854/fc.2021.4s83
  • Antony Fredriksson and Silvia Panizza. “Ethical Attention and the Self in Iris Murdoch and Maurice Merleau-Ponty", in Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology, published online September 2020. In Print, issue 1-53, 2022: 24-39. https://doi.org/10.1080/00071773.2020.1836978
  • “Om att känna den andre och förlora sig själv i Clarice Lispectors Passionen enligt G. H” (To know the other and lose oneself in Clarice Lispector’s The Passion According to G. H.), Filosofisk Tidskrift, 2/2019.
  • “The Alien World, Attention and the Habitual”, Phänomenologische Forschungen, 2/2018.
  • “The Art of Attention in Documentary Film and Werner Herzog”, Film-Philosophy, 22.1/2018.
  • ”Environmental Aesthetics beyond the Dialectics of Interest and Disinterest: Deconstructing the Myth of Pristine Nature”, Nordic Journal of Aesthetics 40-41/2010-2011.
  • ”Documentary Film beyond Intention and Re-presentation: Trinh T. Minh-ha and the Aesthetics of Materiality”, Journal of Information Ethics, Fall 2010, vol. 19, no 2.
  • ”Dokumenttielokuva intention ja mielikuvan tuolla puolen: Trinh T. Minh-ha ja materiaalisuuden estetiikka” (Documentary Film Beyond Intention and Re-presentation: Trinh T. Minh-ha and the Aesthetics of Materiality), Lähikuva 3/2008.

Book chapters

  • “Drawing a Line or Blurring the Contour between Animate and Inanimate with Clarice Lispector and Jan Patočka” in Jan Patočka and the Phenomenology of Life after Death, Hugo Strandberg and Gustav Strandberg (eds.)  Springer 2024.
  • “Werner Herzog and the Documentary as a Revelatory Practice”, in The Philosophy of Werner Herzog, M. Blake Wilson (ed). Lexington  Books 2020.
  • “Intercultural competence and false projections: A Perspective on the critical tradition of intercultural documentary film” with professor Peter Nynäs, in Transforming Otherness, Peter Nynäs and Jason Finch (eds.). Transaction 2011.

Awards and Grants

Researcher of the year 2016, Harry Elvings legat

Åbo Akademi University Foundation

Kone Foundation

Oskar Öflund Foundation

Films

Director of the film They Roam Together (co-directed with Veronika Janatková), 16 min., Czech Republic 2020. The film was a part of the broadcast series Phenomenology of Perception Around the World, initiated by The International Merleau-Ponty Circle, and Chiasmi International, the trilingual journal of Merleau-Ponty scholarship. https://vimeo.com/482719550

They Roam Together from PhP Around the World on Vimeo.