Workshop ‘Stinking Philosophy’
Workshop information
Date: 3 december 2025, 13:00-17:00
Location: Leiden University (room TBA)
Sign up: workshopsPOEM@hum.leidenuniv.nl (deadline: Friday 14 November 2025)
Credits for OSL students: 1ECs. The assignment includes doing the required readings (2 articles + a book chapter), preparing two questions for the Q&A, and attending both the lecture and the workshop. More information will be provided by the organizers.
Description of the event
The masterclass consists of a lecture and a workshop on the philosophy of olfactory perception by philosopher Benjamin Young (University of Nevada, Reno) and is aimed at students of philosophy, history, and literature.
Smell has long been considered our weakest, and both philosophically and culturally least interesting sense. Over the past decades, however, there has been a strong interdisciplinary re-evaluation of this trope. In the fields of cognitive neuroscience and the philosophy of cognition, close study of how the brain processes olfactory information has challenged fundamental models of cognition that were based primarily on visual and auditive input. Scholars of history, literature and anthropology have investigated the surprisingly rich variety of practices and (c)osmologies surrounding smell throughout time and space. Finally, for many people the subconscious but important influence of smell on their daily lives became painfully clear during the recent covid-19 pandemic, as both temporary and permanent anosmia (loss of smell) was a common effect of the virus. Subjects reported that their condition impacted, amongst other things, their self-perception, their emotional states, their sense of security and their connection to the environment. All of these insights raise the question: what does it mean for us to be smelling beings? And how, given our apparently limited capacity to articulate our olfactory experiences, can we talk about smell?
In the first half of the masterclass, Benjamin Young will give a lecture titled The Molecular Structure Theory of Smell and our Self Scent. The lecture will cover the relevant arguments from Stinking Philosophy! and build on them to explore the role that conscious and unconscious olfactory processes play in allowing us to recognize our embodied composition and what we can perceive about others. The conclusion argued for is that our sense of self is partially constituted through unconscious olfactory processes that track our own smell, kinship relations, and the scent of the other.
The second half of the masterclass consists of a participatory workshop in which we will engage with the questions of how we recognize smells categorically, and how we communicate about them. Young will present his argument for the non-conceptual format of olfactory categories, arguing that this format is incompatible with that of our visual and linguistically mediated conceptual repertoire (which explains the discrepancy between our remarkable ability to discriminate between various odors, and our limited ability to identify smells by name). Afterwards, participants will engage in two experiments that involve sniffing, categorizing and discussing various odorants, and will reflect on how, in so doing, they create smell communities.
