Cognitive scientist and phenomenologist who designed the course's induce-notice-describe method after years of frustration with description that never touched the thing it described
- Role
- Convenor
- Contact
Wren Okafor trained in cognitive science before turning to phenomenology out of frustration: papers on emotion, memory and perception kept describing experiences from the outside, in terms a subject would barely recognise as their own. The practicum method taught in this course grew out of a stubborn question from that period — if a description is any good, shouldn’t reading it get you at least a little closer to the thing itself?
Wren teaches the weekly lecture, pairing each week’s induced experience with the concept from philosophy of mind or cognitive science that frames it — without pretending the frame closes the gap it’s trying to describe.