Gry Ardal Christensen

Gry Ardal Christensen studied at the University of Copenhagen and Roskilde University in Denmark. She received her Master’s degree in philosophy and social science in 2006. Her ph.d. project, Trust and Ethical Selfhood, is in its beginning stages and will be completed in 2011 at the Center for Subjectivity Research, University of Copenhagen.

My project is about trust and ethical selfhood and pursues the phenomenology of trust particularly in relation to its role in our ability to orient ourselves normatively in the world. I will look at the specificities of the trusting relationship and how it differs from for instance feeling certain or reliant about each other, and from this starting point move on to investigate how trust helps us orient ourselves in the world and make ethically appropriate decisions. By taking Hannah Arendt’s reinterpretation of Kant’s notion of aesthetical judgment as a frame of reference I will focus on how the embodied and embedded self is affectively related to others and to the world, and how this non-cognitive relation can be understood in terms of trust and judgment. In order to understand this relation between self and world in terms of trust I will investigate how the experience of being isolated from the common world is described in the case of for instance torture victims and some forms of personality disorders.