Angelos Sofocleous

Thesis

Thesis

Interpersonal relationships in depression: the individual as a spectator

Supervisors: Professor Keith Allen and Professor Matthew Radcliffe

Biography

Biography

My name is Angelos Sofocleous and I come from Cyprus. I completed my BA in Philosophy & Psychology (2015 - 2018) and my MA in Philosophy (2018 - 2019) at Durham University, UK. I am currently a final-year PhD Researcher at the University of York working on phenomenological experiences of depression, funded by the Graduate Teaching Scholarship offered by the Department of Philosophy.

Research

Research

My research focuses on the phenomenology of mental illnesses, particularly on the notion of non-participant spectatorship in depression. I look at various accounts of first-person depression experiences and explore how depression can be understood through disturbances in one's interpersonal relationships. I examine how such disturbances occur in depression experiences, and argue that they can be understood as losses of reciprocity and interaffectivity, which further give rise to one being 'differently attuned' to the world. As a result, the depressed individual feels alienated, isolated, and cut off from the world.

Through exploring depression experiences intersubjectively, this thesis provides an account of what talk of being a spectator or describing the experience of depression in spectatorial terms is getting at.

Teaching

Teaching

As a Graduate Teaching Assistant, I have facilitated seminars in the following modules:

• Ancient Philosophy
• Early Modern Philosophy
• Ethics, and Reason & Argument.

I have also collaborated with the University of York’s Centre for Lifelong Learning in offering the following courses:

• Introduction to Philosophy
• Existentialism and the Philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre
• Stoicism.