Embodied Critical Thinking - A Conversation with Donata Schoeller and Sigridur (Sigga) Thorgeirsdottir

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

What we as teachers are supposed to do is to teach our students to think independently, and that means being able to use what they bring to the table, and then they have a connection to their own thinking, which is a radical entry point that is forgotten in education.

Hi everyone, and welcome back to the podcast. My name's Tim Logan, and the podcast is produced by Good Impact Labs. There aren't many things that prompt widespread agreement from people on all sides of the various educational debates. But whatever your educational stripes, young people becoming better critical thinkers usually gets unanimous support. And arguably, it's being recognized as increasingly important in a world full of AI-generated content, and chatbots pretending to be your friend. So I was completely fascinated when I discovered the work of my guests this week, who, as university professors, are exploring the often overlooked embodied process of what it feels like to engage in critical thinking and how that process gets shaped by our experiences and inspirations. The fact that thinking comes from somewhere is very often forgotten in the encouragement of our students to develop their analytical, rational, and logical skills in pursuit of objectivity. This applies as much in sciences and maths as it does in other humanities subjects like philosophy. And I think it has major implications for how we teach critical thinking in sophisticated ways aligned with the latest cognitive science, rather than perpetuating the narrow idea that it is simply a dispassionate, logical set of computations, which clearly we're seeing that the LLMs are much better at than us. Donatas Šola is the research professor of philosophy at the University of Iceland. And the Associate Professor at the University of Koblenz. Sigurður Geirsdóttir is also a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Iceland. And together they are the principal investigators on the Freedom to Make Sense: Embodied Experiential Inquiry and Research project. And they lead the Training in Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding training program. At the end of the conversation, you'll hear Sigurður and Donata talk about the training that they're currently offering, and there's still some time to apply for it. So I'll put the link in the show notes if you'd like to find out more.

So for the purposes of sharing your work, what I'd love to do if possible is kind of really go into the basics of what embodied critical thinking is and why in the context of AI, why it is so resonant now.

Can I ask you, Tim, where you come from, why you are interested in embodiment?

Good question. Because I have a body. Oh, well, I would, I suppose I would answer that in two ways. One is a personal way of being very, I, I would say more academically inclined, very interested in the academic research and the, you know, the thinking. And, you know, my wife will tell me I'm here but not here sometimes, you know, when I'm kind of lost in my head. So there's a personal angle for me of like, why and how there's more integration to be found on a personal level. But there's also, I think, a really interesting growing recognition. For example, I'm very interested in kind of 4E cognitive science stuff, apparently still cringe cognitive science, but the fact that formal education has been so lost in a, a propositional rationalist cognitivist version of what it means to know and what it means to be a functional, smart, intelligent person in the world, whatever all those definitions. And therefore, as the science maybe grows to back that up, but also there's people are kind of feeling that there is just something lacking in the experience of young people learning in schools. I mean, so many young people are so disengaged, they're like the mental health crisis, all of this stuff. And so the bigger question for me is, how to bring these kind of embodied, embedded, extended ways of thinking about how learning can become more meaningful for young people into formal systems that we have to inhabit. So, I mean, that's really what the podcast is about, is the different kinds of institutions that might develop and emerge out of some of these kinds of provocations. And it's happening. That's what's exciting about it, actually.

But then, you know, there are challenges. Doing it. Also, we primarily have experiences with the college university level. So we have not been working with like primary schools or high school level. So we are introducing it at a stage where people are older. And we have been doing it on two levels. On the one hand, in introductory courses in philosophy and in seminars in philosophy. And on the other hand, we've been doing it through our European training program, which invites graduate students and researchers. So it's more experienced people with academic research, people who are more mature personally, and people who are open to this. So we usually have there a very welcoming crowd to introduce these methods to.

Can I ask, why are they welcoming?

They, because they, they apply for it, they apply for it and it's, and it's hard to get in. Like 100 people apply every year and we admit like 30 people.

Okay.

And they see it as part of their graduate work, which helps them with their research, or if they're in research and even in professional context, they can use these methods very productively.

And is it because they're already on a trajectory towards phenomenology and, and these things, like, are they already. Kind of searching in that space and then looking for more practical methods to work with, or are they—

In most cases they are. And sometimes they've also had, like Donata, when we made these stages of critical thinking, how you go through phases where you understand what you have learned, the tools of the trade, but you feel you don't have a voice. You haven't found your voice. You have not been supported in finding your own kind of confidence in what you want to say.

Yeah. Interesting.

Too narrow academic parameters, just like, you know, playing with concepts like one is playing with cards.

Yeah. And I think the, often the students that we get for the Erasmus training are people who have some kind of strange mixes, like they study artificial intelligence, but they're deeply into yoga. Yes. Or they are, or they do cognitive science, but then they also have some kind of somatic practice. It's very often people who, who have several different paths and that they feel the tension and they can't get it under one umbrella. And then they are open because they, oh, what are they doing? They're trying to expand, you know, the academic space. And very often we get this resonance that they say the whole of my interests and the whole of me fits into this approach. Yeah. But as Sigga says, it's way more difficult to just bring it into a classroom setting. Yeah, that is kind of expecting the normal academic thing. And that's a different situation then.

Absolutely. No, I hear you, but I would also say, wouldn't it be nice if all of education developed young people towards finding their own voice and finding themselves as a multidimensional human in a way that they can be successful, you know, rather than saying, oh, I've fitted myself into this narrow box and now I'm struggling because I've got more things that I love and I want to, you know, It's unfortunately, that is often what the formal schooling process and higher education promotes, right?

I think also when you enter the, you know, when you are teaching a university course, at least in Iceland, they start here at 19 or 20. In philosophy, you usually have sort of roughly two types, a rather logical analytical mindset, and then a more kind of diversified mindset that is open to social issues, et cetera. And more experiential-based thinking. So, I mean, just having a classroom of roughly two approaches like this, you have to sort of be aware that there can be certain resistances among people who only want to think from their head or from a rationalistic perspective to suddenly be confronted with, wow, has this something to do with me?

And may, if I may add something to this, I always find it so touching and also so disturbing, you know, how students have internalized the boxes.

Yeah.

That they really think it's just not academic and it's not scientific to touch this more personal level, which, you know, contains all the reasons why they're sitting there, why they have the interests. They kind of have this internalized wall. Yeah. And if they're invited to go, they're just like, we have all these, we just don't, we don't only talk about this turn to embodiment. What we really care about is to introducing methods and approaches that help students experience what it means to think more bodily. Then they almost encounter a kind of, you know, inner barrier. Am I allowed to go there? What is this now? You know, is this still science? Is this still objective? All these huge questions come up. Is this not just subjective? Or is this even therapeutic? Because now I'm listened to, just being listened to is already therapeutic. Yeah. Or is this now just artistic? So, you know, we've so much programmed these silos into the minds of the students and we kind of have to deconstruct all these barriers so that they can understand the kind of this holistic base of real thinking. And that's something that we need to do also as philosophers. Yeah.

I recently had a student in an introductory class in philosophy. It was a person who was retired and doing it out of interest, joining a philosophy class. He had been teaching physics and mathematics his whole life. At the same time, he had been doing for the last 20 years yoga and engaging with yogic philosophy. It was very difficult for this person to combine kind of these two worlds. They were totally separated for him. He had a very hard time understanding that thinking itself is a certain experience and that you can get into an experiential mode when you're thinking. He was so used to just doing mathematical exercises. About something and not connecting with more experiential-based way of thinking from a felt sense. We use this word from Eugene Gendlin, the felt sense, thinking with a felt sense, thinking from a felt sense. And just learning to allow a felt sense to emerge can be challenging and a process for certain people. But this was a rather extreme case.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds fascinating, but I would also say it really resonates with a lot of the things we've kind of been exploring on the podcast about where these things have come from. And that's why it's quite interesting that you're doing this from the discipline of philosophy, because clearly Western philosophy is part of the story of creating these disciplines and these separations and these, you know, and that's some of the things I think the really big questions that are being asked now, you know, talking about the age of relationality and all of these kinds of interdisciplinarity and this, this, this kind of fluidity that's coming in that I think many, many people, particularly in Western academic traditions, are struggling with because they've been deeply kind of indoctrinated into those boxes. Those boxes are themselves a cultural construct, right?

Yes. And I also have the feeling that at the moment we are experiencing a rise of very helpful new concept. So it's not just about overcoming dualism. Now we can have, we have all these words, all the symptoms that dualism, you know, has led to, you know, like lack of relationality and a crisis of attention, a polarization. I think it's not difficult to say how it all interconnects. And I think what we especially find very helpful is this term of a crisis of meaning. As a consequence of this dualism, because I think for meaning, you know, body and mind belongs together and, you know, abstraction and conceptuality and the vulnerability of the experiential fleshy realm, it just belongs together. Yeah. And so to overcome this crisis of meaning, we really need totally different approaches of engagement. Think meaning again.

100%. But what I find so interesting about the work you're doing is that sometimes, quite often actually, I would say, there is a tendency towards, because the polarization, the dualism has gone so deep in us, particularly in Western context, many people tend to flip right to the other side. You know, the pendulum swings right to the other side, and then there is a vilification of the rationalist and the abstracted and the so-called objective as though that's somehow the evil twin of the thing that we're trying to get back to. And there's something, I, but I think something really important in that. That's what, again, Stig, that's why I loved your coin metaphor, because how do we hold all of it to say that there is some real value for abstracted simulation mentalizing that humans do? I mean, there's a deep, I was listening to an evolutionary neuroscientist guy recently. There's like, it feels like there's a deep aspect of that is part of how humans have built capability and then built complex societies. Therefore, how do we value that as well as coming back towards that kind of meaningful fleshy realm that you just talked about?

I, I recently spoke to a person who's trained in phenomenology and a very experiential thinker in practice. Yet I was telling her about our approach. And she said, but philosophy, it's about ideas. Why are you just talking about thinking? We should be talking about ideas. So there is like a blockage, you know, like we don't need to talk about the practice of thinking, the how we think. It's like, you know, we just assume it. It just happened like a river flows. And, you know, we don't notice it. We just notice what comes out of it or what we are thinking about, but not how we are thinking about it, how we figure something out, how we ponder on something. I spoke to a scholar yesterday. He is working on a book and he said, I'm so stuck, you know, because he didn't, you know, he said, you know, I just, I'm stuck with this project. And I said, perhaps you need to go where the blockage is because that's where it's interesting. That's where you will have the problem and potentially the solutions. And it's like we overstep this. We think we have to come with the products so intently that we forget that there's a big process that precedes it and that goes along with it. And that the process is fuzzy, messy, deeply personal. Yes.

And I think this is what helps us so much. That also in the last decades, maybe even the last 100 years, philosophers began to, you know, describe or explicate or kind of uncover these tacit dimensions of thinking, as Zyga said, that are so processual, that are so much in the background, that are always in everything that we say or do, and, but we are so intentionally directed to the outputs. But we don't notice this. And I'm really personally, I'm always again, so excited about philosophers who open the eyes for this so self-evident tacit dimensions of thinking, like William James, who said that there's this constant process going on, but we don't notice it because it's almost the water in which we swim. And the messiness about it, which was described by people like Francesco Varela, but also Donna Haraway, the staying with the trouble. But thinking has always this affective dimension of, you know, we are concerned about something. We feel the problem, we feel the discomfort, we feel the tension, we feel the stuckness, but we are then so happy about the solution or the insight that we really discard the process.

Yeah.

And so embodied thinking is really just kind of shifting the attention to this processual dimension. And giving it more space and giving it a much bigger recognition and acknowledgement, which then, you know, reflects in different ways of listening to each other, to attending to this process that has always been neglected for the sake of the fantastic outcomes it has produced. So embodiment is not now we discard the mind, we just shift the intention to this processual fuzzy, messy, super creative underground, which is always effective. And that can be very subtle embodied, but it can also be very clearly embodied. We can almost feel a pressure if we deal with a problem. Yeah, we can feel it in the stomach, we can feel it in the heart, or it can become very, a very subtle situated feeling where we feel a whole situation.

Yeah.

And so what embodiment means is really a very wide and complex and intricate realm.

In extreme cases, there is also a big denial going on. I was reading an article yesterday by somebody who is working on animal cognition and animal consciousness. He used the word consciousness. And he only wants to explore consciousness as a kind of a unit, qualia, and totally denying that when we explore or philosophize consciousness, We are not only gathering information from the outside on the brain or on thinking, thought processes. We also have a privileged access to consciousness ourselves in the experience of consciousness, in awareness. And it's like a denial of this realm, like it's non-objective, it's mere subjective experience, it doesn't count.

Exactly. And that's what I find so interesting, Sigurd, what you said, maybe when, before we started recording, I'm not sure, but what you said about AI being a doorway through which some of this stuff is kind of being invited back in because it feels so evident when you, well, I hope, to me it feels so evident when you interact with a large language model, it's easy to forget in the way that it uses some of its emotive language, but it doesn't care to your point, Dan-Arthur, like about this idea of process that we are, this messy, buzzy process that's coming from a place of care that we want to persist, you know, as organisms, as people, as humans, we want to continue to find into the future other things we care about. And so there's this deep place of care about the things we're thinking about that seems, maybe, I hope, is somehow being highlighted, the lack of that when you interact with this mechanic intelligence that's pretending to be human in the way that it tells you how amazing you are and all of its responses. I don't know, there's something there that it feels, I hope people are feeling a kind of something missing in that interaction with large language models that highlights maybe how important the things you're talking about are.

Yeah. I would like to come in here because I think this is really a tricky place, especially for education. Because in our educational systems, we are, and that also has to do with everything we said, we are so emphasizing output. Students in secondary education and higher education have to produce so much output, papers and exams and so on and so on, at the cost of maybe this process. So in that way, large language models, you know, come in to really ease this constant pressure of creating outputs. And that of course touches the nerve of education. Yeah. And on the other hand, it could be a chance, but I think now this really, this must be held in the educational discourse and it is beginning to be held, but I think more on the margins, you know, that we are, we are so much always focusing on the question, well, what can AI do and what can it not do? And so on. We must become more and more literate. But I think this question, how do we strengthen the human process of thinking, should really become center stage in an educational agenda. And I think this is what we are trying with our Embodied Critical Thinking initiative, to really make space for this process that we don't want to outsource to AI. And that slowly, maybe again, our eyes open up for this most evident that How valuable and meaningful is effort? How valuable and meaningful are mistakes? Yeah. How valuable and meaningful is it to experience stuckness and to experience a process of carrying forward, to use a Genlinian term, to come to an insight that has really transformed us? It's totally different than just downloading papers and information or interesting questions. This process, this transformational process, It's just something that we really need to care for much more now.

I agree with this, Tonatta, but also take a step back. What's happening in schools? I mean, we are opening doors in schools and education through mindfulness-based processes to attention to the body, because teachers know students need to relax a little in order to learn better. It's good to teach them relaxing exercises, even listening exercises. Attending to the body, et cetera. And this is all great and necessary work. Learning to sort of understand that your body is thinking along with you. What I think is special to our methods that are very influenced by the methodology and the philosophy behind it developed by Eugene Gendlin, for one, is that we built on these mindfulness entry points and body work. And we take it further into language and into languaging, into articulation. So we work very much by accessing somehow inner experience or lived experience. And we most often talk about it as assessing a felt sense notion of an issue that we are working with or of a problem and find words to articulate it. And this is a step into language, which is so important for us. I think I am maybe a typical, maybe philosophy type that comes into this. I had been doing some meditation for a long time, but what was frustrating for me there was that I really wanted to articulate something. And then I found the focusing method of Eugene Gendlin. Which emerges at the intersection of psychology and philosophy, phenomenology and pragmatism more specifically, as a way to get in touch with dimensions of thinking that I am able to articulate with words. First, perhaps with an image, then with a concept, and then I can develop it further into my own theory. So that was a real breakthrough.

Amazing. The other thing I notice about it as an opportunity is that in my world, it feels like the phrase critical thinking is kind of, it's almost universally accepted that that is a valuable thing that education is doing. So, you know, you obviously you've got all these different camps and culture wars and, you know, polarization of all sorts of different ways. But pretty, I would say pretty universally, if you ask an educator of a more traditional type or wherever they're coming from philosophically, ideologically, they will agree that critical thinking is a valuable practice and part of what, what we are trying to enable young people to do. And so as a vehicle into the work of perhaps finally overcoming the mind-body split or, you know, whatever, not to be too grand, but it feels like a really interesting vehicle through which to do that. You know, I noticed, for example, exploring one's own bias and helpful perspectives from becoming more aware of the experiential backgrounds partaking in one's approach is a phrase you use on the website. So that idea of recognizing our own biases in our critical thinking process, not to become this robotic, cold, rational delivery mechanism of propositions, but to say, We care about some things and of course we are gonna have some biases, but let's explore those. But those show up in language, but they also show up in how it feels when I talk about some of these topics, bringing the emotional dimension, that's the affective dimension back in. So I don't know, there's, it just feels like a really useful frame.

Yes. And you know, maybe we even start a little bit more foundational than with the biases. Because if you look at, you know, books on methods of critical thinking, they very often start on the explicit level, you know, that you learn to take the perspective of different approaches, you know, that you start with propositions that are sound and logical, that you can see the flaws in others' arguments, that you can use different arguments. But we start earlier and thus You know, we also kind of lean into a little bit a different meaning of criticality, which goes back to the word discernment. So if you think, how does thinking begin? Even, you know, as children, it always begins, we experience situations and questions come up, vexing questions. And very often we don't even exactly know how to put these questions. So it really begins with, as Sigrid said before, finding words, you know, for what matters in this experiential realm. And this is a kind of very basic skill of discernment. What is exactly the question? What is exactly the problem? And finding words for that. Thomas Nagel so beautifully said, we must feel the question before we can find words that don't reduce it. So I think that in that way we kind of think about criticality in a little bit more fundamental way. Is it what are the relevant questions? How, what is the word for an intuition that students bring that really matter? Yeah. And then we are below the positional field, which is already there, you know, and then one has to say, well, is it this or do I, do I like this position or do I defend that one or do I attack that one? We are below that. And again, I call this, this pre-argumentative field of thinking. And if you are going so deep in this way to allow students and researchers to find words for what matters, then they are in quite an ocean because so many situations are kind of interlinked and they must become aware of these situations and they must find words for, for something that is, that maybe has never yet been put into words. They have just experienced it. And then what they experience is a movement of thinking. They think, what is this? And then they formulate it and then they realize, no, no, no, that doesn't, that's, that's not enough. And all of a sudden they realize they say something completely different, but it's much more, it rings so much more true. And they realize that their own thinking is a movement and they become open to this movement, which is tough, sometimes difficult to bear because you realize, wow. In my thinking, I also must grapple with a paradox that almost tears everything apart. But if I allow to go through this, then it becomes a very surprising affair, one's own thinking. And then if one experiences that, one is also much more open to witness or to allow this radical movement of thinking in others. And that's what we call critical thinking. Yeah. And at the end, to come up with a language that they really say, yes, this is it. This is why, what I think is important. This, I think there is the problem. Yeah. This is really the question, or this is what is wrong with my lab. Yeah. And then they have a standpoint with many, many rules. And it's not just about, you know, defending or attacking positions.

Maybe I can add a little bit to this because we have certain steps to create this type of practice. I start any class now, any course, with listening exercises. Listening is really the basic entry point. Slowing down is also useful, you know, just to empty space, create conditions, but teach students how to listen. And so we do certain listening exercises, like one person speaks for 3 minutes, the other person only listens and then resonates back. With the words of the other student, not using their own words, not interfering. And then they take turns. What happens when they listen to another person intently for 3 minutes is that they become aware of their own inner voices, their own, oh, I would like to say this better. Oh, I do not agree. So they start listening to themselves. Therefore, they have created a channel to notice that they listen to themselves, that there are voices inside themselves. And then they have a connection to their own thinking, which is a radical entry point that is forgotten in education, that is implicitly acknowledged, presumed, but not cultivated and nurtured. What also is important for a step like this is a certain type of self-empathy. You learn to take yourself seriously. Wow, I am thinking this. I don't agree with this person. Perhaps I dislike this. And at the further level, you may start to listen so intently, you also, wow, I can maybe understand why I disagree with this person. I can maybe understand why this person thinks in a way that I find not good, but maybe there is something in their experience that makes them think this way. Then you have created a space of understanding. And what happens through these methods, which I call cognitive empathy, using a term from Edith Stein, coworker of Edmund Husserl, is that you have an empathic understanding level, which is more intricate, more open, more complex, and more rich. So this is opening up kind of the basement of the house of thinking that has lots of good stuff.

Absolutely. Oh my goodness. I've got so many. Oh wow. So many things from that. I wanna say this with, with love being a teacher myself, but it feels like teachers need this almost more than the students do initially. Because of the, so much of what you were talk, both talking about. And Donato, as you were saying about that kind of, you know, the being comfortable with the idea of thinking as movement. Again, it's, it's just not culturally valued in an educational or formal educational setting that that's part of what we're doing. And Sigrid, the way you modeled that kind of inner monologue, that just feels like the core of what education should be about. From my perspective, but again, this outputs focus that you've both talked about just absolutely defines the training, let's say, the indoctrination of, you know, early-stage teachers into what this thing we're doing together is about. Quick, you've got to get to the outcomes as quickly as possible. It's not about a moving alive process. And again, that, you know, as soon as you start using those words, it can sound all a bit hand-wavy and a bit You know, wouldn't it be nice if everything was like that? Some kind of utopian magical thinking, but actually this is the really deep kind of, as you say, it's like the basement of the house of this rigorous thing that we do as humans, which is critically reflecting and trying to find our way together. It just, yeah, it feels like it's something that teachers actually would really benefit from, not just the philosophy teachers, per se.

Yeah, that's very true. And you know, I mean, in my book, Close Talking, I kind of found so many places where, you know, renowned thinkers in marginal, you know, in footnotes or so addressed this long process, how long it took until finally, you know, all the material got together, you know, so it was possible to say what one meant, but But this trying to say what one means is a process sometimes that takes, uh, 10 years, 5 years, 1 hour, or in a conversation. But, but this process, and the, the word implicit is so important, that the process is so implicit that we can just so easily ignore it and skip it. And then we, we skip really the source of creativity of our whole history of ideas. It's never just, we are not machines that just go bang. Yeah. And I want to take up something that Sigga said with the empathy. I think if one allows again for this situated processional origins of questions and thinking, you know, of the human process, and if we put the attention more on this always again surprising process and it copes with so much materials and with so many registries of meanings and affections and situations and people and constellations and things that happened and, and value system. You know, it's so rich, the material of real life situations. You can spread it out and spread out. Authors can write books about the thickness of the situation. So if we go there, then it is very clear that a different attitude is needed. We can be critical towards positions that are already distanced from ourselves. But if we want to cultivate this very process, which is so close to us, and that doesn't mean it's subjective, that just means it's so close to the entanglements and interactions that we embody, then all of this is, of course, fully felt meaning and vulnerable. So for this level of critical thinking, we need to learn a stance of empathy and care. Yeah, this is the condition for this more, for embodied critical thinking. The condition is, and that's, we coined the term reflexive care, and it's an ethical know-how. You not need to, if you're too critical with your own process, it just wouldn't move. It's just scared and afraid. Yeah. And we all know if we have to speak and make sense towards people who just listen to us in a very, very critical way, it's difficult to make sense. And we have to learn this attitude towards ourself, that our processes dare to move and unfold. And then we also must allow generously this attitude towards others. But that's not an external value. We learn this in relation to our own processes. We learn this, how, what a fruitful atmosphere for thinking this is. And so I think also we kind of reduce critical thinking to a kind of critical stance. I remember in my own university, and I know it from other, you know, after a colloquium of PhD students, maybe 30% you found crying in the bathrooms. Silently. So afraid of, so afraid. It is just, you know, you go in there, you really have to arm and then you'll shut. Oh, there is something that is a weak part.

Exactly.

And, and that's just really treating ourselves in a very unskillful way and, and then making thinking so boring. And the outcome so boring.

Yeah, no, absolutely. It reminds me, Sigrid, of your colleague that you were talking about who was blocked, you know, like so much emotion bound up in just that blocking of like maybe, yeah, there's fear and all sorts of things. Yeah, it's so interesting.

And that's where the interesting stuff is waiting to come and thrust forward. And what is happening here? What Donata is saying about this competitive atmosphere that we know so well, we who were trained in the '80s and '90s in philosophy, it was so competitive. Who has the best arguments? And I'm really going to shoot you down with this argument. One of the best compliments I got as a young scholar was, wow, that was really a massacre that you offered with your arguments.

Wow.

And it's, you know, this bloodshed type of, you know, as being something interesting and good. And I mean, of course there's there's always a kind of what we say in philosophy, an agonal character. Often, you know, we battle for arguments, but we are not lawyers. We are also Socratic, trying to birth new ideas, trying to help each other in a midwifery way to kind of formulate a thought or an unclear idea. And we need to give attention to this and care to this. Because what we as philosophy teachers are supposed to do is to teach our students to think independently. And that means trusting their own thinking, being able to use what they bring to the table in a classroom. Because they are not only supposed to look for ideas and read and gather ideas. That's what AI can do.

Yeah, exactly.

They need to foster kind of the ground of thinking, their own motivation for thinking, their own, what they can bring. And I love to think of what Simone Weil, a French philosopher, talks about where she says the goal of education is training attention. Training attention that students give attention to what they're trying to understand, And how they open themselves up to it, and it's kind of an open space, and she likens it to prayer. You know, it's a certain, you know, meditative prayer, contemplative prayer. It's not like a prayer, like reciting a verse or something. No, it's an open space to open something to come to you and let go kind of of the other stuff. And many other philosophers have noticed this because there is and has always been a contemplative tradition of philosophy. Philosophy is a certain practice, is a meditative kind of way of being and thinking. Iris Murdoch took this up from Simone Weil and talked about this, that philosophy is this form of attention. So it's not only that we are taking inspiration by bringing in mindfulness entry points from Eastern thought, from Buddhist thought, No, we have a whole tradition of this in Western thought. And that's why I find Eugene Gendlin, this American philosopher who died in 2017, based in pragmatism, in logic, in psychology, so interesting because he is using the resources in our own traditions. And I think this is a real breakthrough in philosophy. In Western philosophy. Eastern tradition philosophers understand it intuitively, and we just have neglected this. And I think there were certain reasons. In the 20th century, we had a very technological, scientific age. Philosophy felt a little intimidated and thought it had to become rigorous in a very analytical sense. And that was all good. That was all good. But at the same time, we kind of forgot the other thing. Which is so interesting about philosophy, the care we have in really cultivating a certain type of open thinking. And this is so wonderful. And that's why I say any good thinking in any field, in any trade, in any profession is at its base philosophical. I noticed that we were teaching at a business school, at a management department some years ago, Donata and I. And talking with people who are studying management, public management, business management. And they are kind of, and they feel like they don't believe in their models anymore. We have all these models that we are taught and they don't work anymore. And, but we don't have any new models. So they contacted Lars and said, can you help us be in this not knowing? And we said yes.

Hervé.

Because that's where philosophy starts, with the not knowing, with the discomfort, with like being stuck. And that's the midwifery, that's the contemplative tradition of philosophy. And that's basic to all fields, to all education insofar that critical thinking is in a sense auch a creative endeavor. Because we use what we have ourselves. And that is also fostering individuality. You are interesting. You come with your own perspective. Every person in the class comes with their own perspective and the world needs different perspectives.

Exactly. I love that. And it makes me think, so that grounding you talk about, and I love Simone Biles and her book, The Need for Roots, like something about this deep grounding of where I am standing is having value. It has value because I think from, you know, all of the things you're saying, like this view from nowhere idea has been, it runs so, so deep in our, in our understandings of what it means to be a smart, intelligent, quick-thinking, whatever it's like. And to your point about this massacring of this, I'm gonna find some weakness. And the weakness is often, oh, you said something that is subjective or grounded in your own lived experience. That's not valid in this view from nowhere obsession. And I don't know, it feels like everything you're doing is just so exciting to me because it's just a confirmation of the things we kind of, hopefully we know somewhere in ourselves that my perspective on the world has value because it's where I'm standing and no one else is standing where I'm standing. And if we could only allow other people to feel that through an educational process, that would feel quite important.

Yeah. And you know, I mean, you know, the view from nowhere perspective is also, you know, a great cultural discipline, but it kind of makes us forget that even scientific ideas grow from roots.

Yeah.

And there's so many stories how scientific ideas came, you know, in a very specific constellation. Immersed in context. Yeah, this particular scientist's even dreams played a role, you know, or coincidences. And that from this experiential realm, an idea was distilled that through a lot of work became objective. And then it has this position. It can be looked at from many perspectives and many different experiments and so on. But they will grow, yeah, indifferently. And what I still want to say is that this emphasis on not knowing, which was this really daring starting point from Socrates, he really embraced this not knowing as a philosophical starting point of openness. And I think this not knowing, and today also the word uncertainty has become such a major word in so many contexts. And of course, It's almost unbearable if we exclude the embodied resources, because if we exclude the embodied resources, we, if we don't know and if we answer, we have to kind of control and we have to bring more concepts and more agendas, you know, and we have to, the only thing is more control, which I think is also now we also see this kind of happening in political and economical realms. But if you include the embodied experiential dimensions of solving problems, we have different resources. It's a different kind of process. I just heard your interview also with Aradhana Hayashi, and I think this is the same that we experience, you know, from the focusing processes or thinking at the edge process, but also, you know, we also work with methods that come from the Francesco Varela School of Microphenomenology, you know, that experiential embodied resources or lived experience, they unfold in a way that we cannot control, you know, that have their very own way of sensemaking. And a very good example is the healing process. Yeah, we cannot control a healing process. It is a very embodied kind of know-how. And I think All of these phenomenons have not been thought through enough in their interconnectedness, you know, a healing process, a creative process, a thinking process that comes up with really a new kind of insight that is like a next step that takes along so much. And these processes, they don't come through more control. You know, we cannot like this beautiful thing, we cannot pull the grass. For it to grow. So uncertainty and not knowing becomes a very fruitful stance if we attend to the process grappling with all of that, you know, and stay in close contact. And there all of a sudden, you know, like modes of intimacy, of contact, of touch become epistemologically relevant stances for creative thinking. And that's, that's these kinds of methods, you know, the skill of coming into contact with this felt dimension and felt process of thinking. This is what we experiment with. This is, we are kind of lab for these methods and how they play out to open up creative critical thinking.

Yeah, that's beautiful. Maybe if I could just ask you to just at the end, just to give people a practical, where could they look to find out more about this? Obviously I'll share links, et cetera, in the show notes for any, any books and Gendlin and all of the things you've talked about. But yeah, if there's anything practically that people could do or trainings that are coming up that if people are interested, they could look at, would be great.

Yes, we have a European training project. It's starting now. We've been running it. It's running, it's in its 6th year now. And we have a grant from the European Union, an Erasmus grant, and we cooperate with 6 universities. So it is a 15 ECT credit study. They do a webinar, a summer school, and then they do an independent project. And that is called Training Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding. You can look it up on the website, trainingect.com. Then we have a book out. It's, it's open access. It was published by Routledge in 2024. Practicing Embodied Thinking in Research and Learning, edited by Schöller, Donata Schöller, Siri Thorkistadter, and Greg Walkerton. So that's open access. And then we've been mentioning Gendlin. I think Gendlin's work, he started developing focusing as a kind of a self-help therapy type, but he was as a philosophy professor and philosopher, he always wanted to make it fruitful for philosophy, for theory construction. So he developed, along with some other people, Mary Hendricks and Kai Nelson, a methodology of theoretical philosophical thinking called Thinking at the Edge. That is all on the focusing.org website. Thinking at the Edge, focusing. You can start there. Something else you would add to that?

Yes. And of course, the microphenomenology method is really important for us too. And there's a wonderful, you know, created by Claire Petit-Majeur on the on the basis of Francesco Varela's work. And there is a website, microphenomenology.com. And also to say that the application for the training in embodied critical thinking is open now. And we also accept professionals. We accept teachers. You know, we— it's not just for students. So what we didn't mention was our excellent research project running now, which is also relevant, you know, for people that they can also get engaged. Which we call Freedom to Make Sense, experiential, mindful, and artistic research. And there's a website which is just called makesense.hi.is.

Perfect.

Yeah.

Well, I'll definitely, yeah, I'll share all of that in the show notes. That'd be absolutely amazing. Oh, this is beautiful. Thank you so much. I'm just, I'm so excited by it all and I wanna do the training myself.

That would be wonderful to see you there.

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