Donata Schoeller

In this paper I reflect how basic embodied responses and feelings can be an inspiration to get past dominant patterns of thinking that separate the human from the rest of the world. To make my point, I build on the innovative work of Corinne Pelluchon and Eugene Gendlin. Both demonstrate how pre-reflective abilities of the human organism become powerful philosophical entry-points that have transformative ethical and political implications. Some examples will be presented. The first part of this paper is inspired by Pelluchon’s unfolding of the ethical implications of taste and the epistemological implications of compassion, or pity. The second part of the paper elaborates Gendlin’s experiential and co-generative body-environment concept that, among other things, allows to understand hunger as the red thread between body, mind and meaning. On the basis of these approaches, I strive to exemplify the experiencing body as a vital driving force to feel, think and mean beyond powerful cultural constructions inherent in the catastrophic crisis face today.

This book delves into the embodied ground of thinking, illuminating the transition from theorising about the embodied mind to actively practising embodied thinking in research, teaching, and learning. The authors speak from immersing themselves in novel methods that engage the felt, experiential dimensions of cognition in inquiry. The turn to embodiment has sparked the development of new methodologies within phenomenology, pragmatism, and cognitive science. Drawing on Eugene Gendlin’s philosophical work on felt understanding, and Francesco Varela’s enactivist approach, contributors explore innovative embodied thinking methods such as Focusing, Thinking at the Edge, micro-phenomenology, and mindfulness practices. They demonstrate the practical applications of these methods in research, teaching, and learning, highlighting their liberating and empowering potential for researchers and students. In an age marked by information overload and societal polarisation, methods of embodied thinking provide an innovative edge to critique, complementing more traditional approaches to critical thinking with listening skills and reflexive care. This book shows how heeding the essential, yet often overlooked, embodied grounds of critical and creative thinking can deepen and strengthen each of research, teaching, and learning. It will interest philosophers of education and educators in higher education in particular, as well as researchers and postgraduate students from philosophy, and the cognitive and social sciences, who are curious about how embodied thinking can enrich research, teaching, and learning.

The paper elaborates the classical pragmatist understanding of cognition as a transformational process. The pragmatists’ emphasis on the situatedness of cognition, on abductive moves and feeling will also be discussed in the light of the contemporary debate on conceptuality and givenism. Our inquiry on a classical pragmatist approach shifts today’s emphasis on knowledge qua justification of belief and suggests ways to transcend the dualism of conceptuality vs. non-conceptuality. Reconsidering the Peircean category of Firstness, Dewey’s quality of situations and Gendlin’s felt sense as subtle tacit moments in cognitive processes enhance a fine-grained and contextualized understanding of cognition in terms of a transformative process.

Wie kann der Prozess des Denkens erfasst werden, wenn doch unsere Reflexionen bereits das Resultat dessen sind, was erfasst werden soll? Die Tatigkeit des Denkens in Worte zu fassen, scheint dazu verurteilt zu sein, hinter dem Phanomen her zu hinken, das erfasst werden sollte. Das Denken zu untersuchen, ohne seine Prozesshaftigkeit auszuklammern, kann als radikale Reflexion bezeichnet werden. Sie behauptet nicht, ihren Gegenstand als unabhangig von der Art des Herangehens "gegeben" zu beschreiben, sondern stellt sich der Denkerfahrung und auch den Gefuhlsnuancen, die eine wichtige Rolle beim Denken und Artikulieren spielen. Sie manifestiert sich in originellen Ansatzen aus Philosophie, Psychotherapie, Anthropologie und Kognitionswissenschaften und bringt innovative Denkstile jenseits hergebrachter Dualismen hervor. Mit Beitragen von Vincent Colapietro, Terrence Deacon, Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch, Eugene Gendlin, Steven Hayes, Claire Petitmengin, Vera Saller, Donata Schoeller und Susan Stuart.

In asking what it means to be an empiricist, the present volume does not seek to provide a definitive or authoritative introduction to the foundation and establishment of empiricism. Instead, our objectives are to deconstruct some misleading preconceptions and to propose some new perspectives on this much used but still somehow ambiguous concept. It marks the beginning of a new reflection rather than a conclusion.Throughout this volume, we aim to present empiricism as the result of two parallel dialogues. First, it was born out of an exchange between several distinct observational and experimental traditions in Europe. We therefore advocate speaking in the plural about empirical methods, underlining the distinctions between local uses and grand, national standards, while also highlighting the complex discussion around the values and norms of empiricism.Secondly, it emerged as part of a dialog between several positions within the theory of knowledge which for too long have been reduced to a simple dualism. The most important lesson to be learned from the eighteenth century is that there wasn’t such a thing as a war between rationalism and empiricism, but rather a constant attempt to accommodate both. This forces us to conceive of a more complex and fruitful relationship, but also a much more interesting one.

This paper introduces the Thinking at the Edge (TAE) method, developed by Eugene Gendlin with Mary Hendricks and Kye Nelson. In the context of the international research project and training initiative Embodied Critical Thinking (ECT), TAE is understood as a political and critical practice. Our objective is to move beyond a criticism of reductionism, into a practice of thinking that can complement empirical, conceptual and logical implications with what is implied by the vibrant complexity of one’s lived experience in one’s place and time. The second person helps the first to explore, elaborate and clarify very carefully felt dimensions of thinking, which hold intricate structures, contexts, perplexities and intuitions that prove relevant for one’s research. The second person also supports the first to become sensitive to the effects of the language and concepts she uses. A non-imposing, tentative use of language that touches the intricate texture of lived experience is at the core of this method, allowing to widen one’s conceptual structure. In this paper, the cluster of TAE moves are characterized with examples of accounts of TAE processes. The description of the TAE phases includes concepts of Gendlin’s embodied theory of meaning that explain the efficacy of the moves (“direct reference,” “explication,” “crossing”).

Schoeller untersucht die sprachliche Herausforderung, die damit einhergeht, erlebte Hintergründe und Zusammenhänge zu formulieren. Wird eine situative Komplexität zur Sprache gebracht, so klärt sich häufig erst, „um was es geht", und zwar auf eine Weise, die einen weiterdenken und -fühlen lässt. Dabei entstehen bisweilen äusserst ungewöhnliche Aussagen. Untersucht wird in dieser Studie die Präzision einer tastenden Formulierung, die eine nicht vorhersehbare Entwicklung von Bedeutung zulässt. Eine solche Bedeutung ist sprachphilosophisch kaum mit den Modellen der Repräsentation oder der Konstruktion zu erfassen, auch durchbricht sie den Rahmen der Ordinary Language Philosophy. Unter Berücksichtigung der Ansätze des Embodiment entwirft Schoeller im Schnittfeld von Pragmatismus, Phänemenologie, Hermeneutik, Psychologie und Kognitionswissenschaften eine Bedeutungstheorie, in der situatives Erleben und Sprachgebrauch differenzierend und klärend interagieren. Ein gründlicheres Verstehen des Formulierungs-Prozesses kommt auch im Alltag einer nicht-reduktiven und subtilen Sprachpraxis im Umgang mit gewöhnlicher Erfahrung entgegen.

While the emphasis on embodiment and situatedness is strong in contemporary philosophy and cognitive sciences, its implications for the practice of critical thinking are just beginning to be taken seriously. The challenge is to think with the richness and the intricacy that come along with embodiment of situated knowers and on the basis of the experiential turn. Even though the embodied and experiential dimension is operative and continuously present all the time in thought and action, it is hardly acknowledged, cared for, or made transparent in academic philosophical training. In doing philosophy we are actually rather trained to detach ourselves from the experiential basis of our thinking. In this paper we claim that by doing so we cut ourselves off from important sources of what it means to think for oneself. We argue that the more embodied context one dares to include in critical thinking, the more critique becomes personally and politically transformative. This has major methodological implications: one needs to learn “reading” embodied, felt experience as carefully and closely as the texts. The methods of Embodied Critical Thinking presented here are based on the micro-phenomenological approach of Claire Petitmengin and the Thinking at the Edge method developed by Eugene Gendlin and Mary Hendricks.

Prior to A Process Model, Gendlin’s theoretical and practical work focused on the interfacing of bodily-felt meaningfulness and symbolization. In A Process Model, Gendlin does something much wider and more philosophically primary. The hermeneutic and pragmatist distinction between the concept of experience, on the one hand, and actual experiential process, on the other, becomes for Gendlin the methodological basis for a radical reconceptualization of the body. Wittgenstein’s formulation of “meaning” as “language-use in situations” is spelled out by Gendlin in embodied terms, yielding a profound new grasp of language, meaning, situation, language-use and culture as interactional body-process. Gendlin, in building his text, answers the pragmatist critique of a wrong progression of thinking where the results of an inquiry are read back to be its premises. With his central concept “eveving” Gendlin shows how the seeming determinacy of preceding structure is opened in the actual occurring. He thereby elaborates a new conception of continuity where the possibility for responsive novelty is emergent in the event itself. The conceptual development of the text itself instances this kind of emergent novelty. We will somewhat follow Gendlin’s own path in using language-in-situations as entry-point into his more fundamental process-thinking, thereby asking ourselves how to engage his new kind of model. In the last part, we introduce some of the philosophical roots of Gendlin’s A Process Model.

Eugene Gendlins Philosophie bringt Fragen in die Sprachphilosophie ein, die bislang kaum ins Blickfeld geraten sind. Wie wirkt sich ein Ausdruck auf unsere Erfahrung aus, wieso verändert sich etwas, wenn wir es verbalisieren, welche Funktion spielen Gefühle für die symbolische Bedeutung und umgekehrt? Ausgehend von therapeutischer und kreativer Praxis, entwickelt Gendlin ein Prozess-Modell, um eine interaktive, „empfindliche Ordnung” zu denken, die unter anderem Alternativen zu gängige Kategorien und Modalitäten expliziert