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Scar De Courcier

Scar De Courcier

Research student

School of English, Communication and Philosophy

Overview

I am an AHRC-funded PhD student looking at how to apply a Heideggerian approach to phenomenologies of birth and pregnancy. My research interests include continental philosophy, phenomenology of disability and 20th-century existential philosophy. 

Publication

Research

Thesis

Being-Towards-Birth

My thesis takes Heidegger’s idea of humans as Being-towards-Death and questions whether birth is similarly crucial to an understanding of what it means to be a person. Being born and dying are the only things that all people who are alive have in common. So what might these concepts have in common, existentially speaking? 

Fundamentally, the central question of the PhD is ‘What does it mean to be a person?’ I am looking at questions of subjectivity in pregnancy with reference to live birth, stillbirth and miscarriage; asking whether Heidegger’s concept of ‘Dasein’ is the same as ‘consciousness’; and examining what it means when we say someone has ‘been born’ or ‘died.’

Funding sources

Funded by the AHRC (SWWDTP).

Supervisors

Jonathan Mitchell

Jonathan Mitchell

Senior Lecturer

Contact Details

Email DeCourcierS@cardiff.ac.uk

Research themes

Specialisms

  • Existentialism
  • Phenomenology
  • Death
  • Heidegger

External profiles