Together with an inspirational and growing team of researchers and students, I have had the privilege to re-think and re-conceptualize critical thinking in the light of an embodied approach to meaning. Questions that drive us: how to connect logical thinking, conceptual sharpness, and the precision of experienced and felt meaning? How to foster the skill to dwell with ambiguity and complexity in order to understand more deeply what is at stake in research questions? What role does listening play in critical thinking and research? The core feature of our work is to engage with the "turn to embodiment" not just theoretically, but as a serious call for novel research-, teaching- and learning practices.
Freedom to Make Sense: Embodied, Experiential and Mindful Research
2024 - 2027
Rannis Excellence Grant
The research project The project makes a leap from ontologies and epistemologies of relationality and interaction to an embodied, situated, and interactional practice of research in the context of higher education. With this leap into practice, we systematically interconnect the theoretical and abstract approach to problems and issues with a dimension of practice that enables students and researchers to connect to a level of relevance that is experienced, lived, and felt. We explore how to generate spaces and conditions in which students, researchers, and professionals have the freedom to face and make sense of the felt meaning involved in their research. This felt and experienced dimension of thinking includes vexing questions that arise from the intricacy of their lifeworld, full of inspiring and disturbing paradoxes that grow from an experiential ground of thinking providing multiple perspectives on the same issue, contradictory values and standpoints, thick and multi-layered situations. In order to make sense of relevant issues in research, as well as of current developments and challenges, generous room and careful conditions are needed, especially for difficult (and "stuck") places that function importantly in research projects. MakeSense brings together internationally leading scholars and scientists who are researching, developing, as well as training methodologies that enact an experiential, mindful, and artistic approach to research, in particular to the process of thinking. During the granted period, the team will jointly practice different methods, to explore different entry points to lived experience, assess different approaches, and face the empirical as well as theoretical questions involved.
Training Embodied Critical Thinking (TECT) 2021 - 2023
Training Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding (TECTU) 2024 - 2026
An interdisciplinary European Erasmus + training program
Training in Embodied Critical Thinking (TECT) is an interdisciplinary European Erasmus+ cooperation of partners from five and now seven universities involving philosophers, computer scientists, cognitive scientists, anthropologists, sociologists, and environmental designers. The team has jointly developed a yearly training program fostering an embodied and experiential approach to critical thinking. TECT offers a fresh take and novel methodologies for students and researchers to think critically and creatively, contributing to the transformation and enrichment of the skill of critical thinking in the 21st century. The TECTU approach builds on the TECT approach by adding an emphasis on understanding. By "understanding" we mean in-depth understanding of what matters to oneself in a research context, as well as the intersubjective and interdisciplinary meaning of understanding. Understanding is not "overstanding". Understanding grows from being immersed in the complexity of contexts and lifeworlds. TECTU focuses on a) a careful, discerning use of language that makes a difference to the topic as well as the person engaged in thinking; b) an attentive and generous listening until one feels understood and has managed to make one's point; c) a skill to explore one's own inspirations and biases by becoming more aware of the experiential backgrounds partaking in one's approach.
Embodied Critical Thinking (ECT)
2018 - 2021
Reconsidering critical thinking in embodied terms
Embodied Critical Thinking is an international research project on an embodied approach to thinking. It has won the Rannis Grant of the Icelandic Research Fund, and is conducted in cooperation with the Philosophy Department of the University of Iceland, the Interacting Minds Centre of Aarhus University, the Micro-Phenomenology Laboratory, Paris, the Peace, Justice and Conflict Center, DePaul University cooperate.
Close Talking
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“Tentative Speech Acts – Close Talking”
The focus of my Habilitation has been an explicative process I call Close Talking. While developing thoughts or ideas, or a clearer understanding of an experience or a situation, there is something very specific one is trying to get at. The process of finding an accurate language entails a risk that one cannot make sense of what one is trying to say. . If, however, the language one uses touches what one means, there is a transformation happening that rewards our efforts. This transformation challenges representational or constructive models of language and opens up fascinating perspectives on meaning deeply connected to our embodied and interactional being-in-the-world.
Focusing, Thinking at the Edge (TAE)
and Micro-Phenomenology
Exploring and thinking with experiential intricacy
The turn to embodiment in philosophy and the cognitive sciences goes hand in hand with the development of novel methods of thinking and research that foster attentive skills that teach you how to not disconnect from lived experience in the description of phenomena.
Humility
Meister Eckhart, Jakob Böhme, Friedrich Nietzsche
In my Ph.D. I explored the notion of humility in medieval philosophy, in the renaissance and in modern times. I demonstrate that this notion conceives of a highly dynamic understanding of self. Humility, according to Meister Eckhart, does not mean a humble position in comparison to a superior power. Humility means to be able to internalize the fact that humans do not create their being. Humility is the manifestation of understanding that human beingness depends on the givenness of one’s being.