The Leap

Abstract

In this chapter, we describe the shift from doing research in philosophy and the cognitive sciences that explores the embodied grounding of thinking, to practising being an embodied thinker in our researching, teaching, and learning. We survey the intellectual traditions that support the embodied turn, and focus particularly on the work of three researchers whose work supports enacting it, in practice: Eugene Gendlin’s philosophy of the implicit, Francisco Varela’s enactivist approach, and Petitmengin’s micro-phenomenology. These have shaped our process of changing our practices. We indicate what we mean by body, and how an embodied orientation towards ourselves re-situates human thinking within the vulnerable living fabric of the more-than-human world. We discuss the kind of transformativity involved in embodied thinking. Finally, we address the societal needs that this interdisciplinary shift in practice responds to.