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”). (shrink)

Micro-phenomenology is a successful research tool with major environmental implications. However, there is much to be gained by also approaching it as a philosophical method in its own right. As ….

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. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Nietzsche-Studien Jahrgang: 46 Heft: 1 Seiten: 153-166.

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. (shrink)

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.

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. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie Jahrgang: 66 Heft: 2 Seiten: 183-201.

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. (shrink)

The Politics of Paradigms shows that America’s most famous and influential book about science, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions of 1962, was inspired and shaped by Thomas Kuhn’s political interests, his relationship with the influential cold warrior James Bryant Conant, and America’s McCarthy-era struggle to resist and defeat totalitarian ideology. Through detailed archival research, Reisch shows how Kuhn’s well-known theories of paradigms, crises, and scientific revolutions emerged from within urgent political worries—on campus and in the public sphere—about the invisible, (...) unconscious powers of ideology, language, and history to shape the human mind and its experience of the world. (shrink)

In the realm of Philosophical Practice, there remains a lack of clarity surrounding the essential characteristics that define a practice as “philosophical”. This paper aims to establish seven minimal criteria that must be met by a philosophical consultancy in order to be considered genuinely “philosophical”. Additionally, it explores the question of how one can assess the quality of such a philosophical consultancy. I provide a (non-exhaustive) answer from an Aristotelian point of view, according to which goodness is a matter of (...) balance. In the context of philosophical consultancy, the consultant should find this balance in two respects: first, between their concern for the topic and their concern for the individual seeking counsel, and, secondly, between a hermeneutical and a critical attitude in dialogue. Finally, I present a visual representation of my findings that can serve as a tool for evaluating whether a consultancy is philosophical and whether it is balanced. __ En el ámbito de la práctica filosófica, sigue habiendo una falta de claridad en torno a las características esenciales que definen una práctica como "filosófica". Este artículo pretende establecer siete criterios mínimos que debe cumplir una consultoría filosófica para ser considerada genuinamente "filosófica". Además, explora la cuestión de cómo se puede evaluar la calidad de dicha consultoría filosófica. Aporto una respuesta (no exhaustiva) desde un punto de vista aristotélico, según el cual la bondad es una cuestión de equilibrio. En el contexto de la consultoría filosófica, el consultor debe encontrar este equilibrio en dos aspectos: en primer lugar, entre su preocupación por el tema y su preocupación por el individuo que busca consejo, y, en segundo lugar, entre una actitud hermenéutica y una actitud crítica en el diálogo. Por último, presento una representación visual de mis conclusiones que puede servir de herramienta para evaluar si una consultoría es filosófica y si está equilibrada. (shrink)

This intriguing and ground-breaking book is the first in-depth study of the development of philosophy of science in the United States during the Cold War. It documents the political vitality of logical empiricism and Otto Neurath's Unity of Science Movement when these projects emigrated to the US in the 1930s and follows their de-politicization by a convergence of intellectual, cultural and political forces in the 1950s. Students of logical empiricism and the Vienna Circle treat these as strictly intellectual non-political projects. (...) In fact, the refugee philosophers of science were highly active politically and debated questions about values inside and outside science, as a result of which their philosophy of science was scrutinized politically both from within and without the profession, by such institutions as J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. It will prove absorbing reading to philosophers and historians of science, intellectual historians, and scholars of Cold War studies. (shrink)

This article is intended as a contribution to the current debates about the relationship between politics and the philosophy of science in the Vienna Circle. I reconsider this issue by shifting the focus from philosophy of science as theory to philosophy of science as practice. From this perspective I take as a starting point the Vienna Circle’s scientific world-conception and emphasize its practical nature: I reinterpret its tenets as a set of recommendations that express the particular epistemological attitude in which (...) both the Vienna Circle’s (doing) philosophy of science and its political engagement were rooted. -/- Regarding politics, and referring to new primary sources, I reconstruct how the scientific world-conception placed the Vienna Circle within a neoliberal-socialist political network that pursued concrete political aims. In light of my reconstruction I shall argue that neither the Vienna Circle’s alleged ethical noncognitivism nor its alleged adhesion to the Weberian ideal of a value-free science rules out the possibility of ascribing to the Vienna Circle a politically engaged philosophy of science: the case of the Vienna Circle shows how philosophy of science, as a public activity, can itself become a form of political engagement, even without necessarily entailing a theory of objective values. (shrink)

This article is about Otto Neurath’s infamous proposal to combat metaphysics by creating and publishing an index of prohibited words. The logic of this proposal is explicated in the frameworks of Neurath’s philosophy of science and his International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. I reconstruct two arguments within Neurath’s project to defend the proposal against criticisms from Neurath’s colleagues and against the charge that philosophers ought not be censors.

In the spring of 1937, the University of Chicago Press mailed hundreds of subscription forms for its latest enterprise – a projected series of twenty short monographs by various philosophers and scientists. Together the monographs were to form the first section of the International Encyclopedia of Unified Science. Included in each mailing was an introductory prospectus which began:Recent years have witnessed a striking growth of interest in the scientific enterprise as a whole and especially in the unity of science. The (...) concern throughout the world for the logic of science, the history of science, and the sociology of science reveals a comprehensive international movement interested in considering science as a whole in terms of the scientific temper itself. A science of science is appearing. The extreme specialization within science demands as its corrective an interest in the scientific edifice in its entirety. This is especially necessary if science is to satisfy its inherent urge for the systematization of its results and methods and if science is to perform adequately its educational role in the modern world. Science is gradually rousing itself for the performance of its total task. (shrink)

Menschen schreiben sich ein Selbst zu. Die Wissenschaften haben Mühe zu sagen, was das ist und wie es zustande kommt. Sie sind sich aber sicher, dass wir es haben und brauchen. Für Forscher ist es jedoch kaum greifbar und deshalb ein verflixtes Problem. Daran wird die Entwicklung einer starken KI scheitern, Menschen bleiben etwas anderes. Der Inhalt Die Stunde Null; Vorteile der Sterblichkeit Die Erfindung des Selbst; ohne Selbsttäuschung geht es nicht Nagelprobe Moral; warum der Liberalismus einen Neustart braucht Über (...) den Autor Dr. Heiko Reisch ist Philosoph und arbeitet als Kommunikationsberater und Journalist. Er ist Autor der,,Kleinen Geschichte der Philosophie" bei Springer VS. (shrink)

This paper examines selected writings of the American science writer Waldemar Kaempffert, Science Editor for the New York Times, in public support of Otto Neurath, his Isotype projects, and his Unity of Science Movement. Attention is focused first on Kaempffert’s writings in the 1930s, when some intellectuals, the American public, and their elected leaders were relatively sympathetic with Neurath’s quest to unify the sciences in ways that would advance and direct scientific research toward practical goals. Attention then turns to the (...) 1940s to examine the debate over the nature, scope, and limits of wartime research and Vannevar Bush’s call for a national institution to support research. Against Bush, James Bryant Conant, and others, Kaempffert argued vigorously for a foundation that would adopt values and methods of the Unity of Science Movement, but he lost that argument as the National Science Foundation finally took shape. To suggest that this public debate influenced not only the decline of Neurath’s Unity of Science Movement but the scholarly development of history and philosophy of science after the war, the paper considers early writings and events in the life of Conant’s protégé Thomas Kuhn, whose Structure of Scientific Revolutions helped shape that development. (shrink)

Mining education was one of the areas of technical savoir transformed during the eighteenth century. Mining academies arose and spread through Europe in the second half of that century. This happened first in the German states and the Austrian dominions, due to the cameralistic system, and soon developed elsewhere through a transfer of the German model to France as well as to other francophone and Spanish-speaking areas . The mining academies may rightly be considered among the prototypes of technical high (...) schools established during the nineteenth century. In the course of exploring some of the details of this development, the present paper aims at suggesting outlines to be followed in pursuing a comparative analysis of special schools for the training of technicians and mining officers . A second aim is to examine more closely the Italian case as a typical example of adaptation, although on a smaller scale, of French and German experiences. This can provide a framework within which to place further microanalyses and case-studies. (shrink)

Its author was a Carthusian monk. Offered here is a translation, with annotation and an important introduction, of the four books on natural philosophy, the predecessor of modern science.

Aesthetic chills occur in artistic, scientific and religious context. We introduce a theoretical framework relating them to humans’ vital need for cognition. We discuss the implications of such a framework and the plausibility of our hypothesis. Numerous references to chills are introduced.

E' un'antologia di scritti ideati in un contesto di complessità, non solo teorica, ma anche veramente vissuta nella pratica della formazione e della ricerca, in cui i formatori, educatori, consulenti, persone d'azienda ritroveranno le loro esigenze e i loro riferimenti culturali e operativi.

Historian Richard Hofstadter’s observations about American cold-war politics are used to contextualize Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and argue that substantive claims about the nature of scientific knowledge and scientific change found in Structure were adopted from this cold-war political culture.

In the light of two unpublished letters from Carnap to Kuhn, this essay examines the relationship between Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and Carnap's philosophical views. Contrary to the common wisdom that Kuhn's book refuted logical empiricism, it argues that Carnap's views of revolutionary scientific change are rather similar to those detailed by Kuhn. This serves both to explain Carnap's appreciation of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and to suggest that logical empiricism, insofar as that program rested on Carnap's (...) shoulders, was not substantially upstaged by Kuhn's book. (shrink)

This essay examines the relationship between Philipp Frank and James Bryant Conant in light of two issues that engaged leading American intellectuals in the mid-twentieth century: the place of metaphysics in higher education and the responsibilities of intellectuals as educators to defend democracy against the rise of totalitarianism. It suggests that Frank’s relationship to pragmatism was nourished by his professional and intellectual relationships to Conant and that each of their contributions to our understanding of science is inseparable from their efforts (...) to engage their fellow intellectuals as well as the public about these pressing issues of their day. (shrink)