Hugur - 01.01.2015, Page 80
80 Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir
Abstract
Philosophy of the body, philosophy in the body and why thinking is not
neuter
The body is one of the grand discoveries of 19th and 20th century philosophy.
The acknowledgement of embodiment changes in the first place philosophical
conceptions of “man” and yields (a) a richer notion of the moral, epistemic and
political subject by undermining traditional dualistic schemes of body and soul
that such subject-conceptions have traditionally been based on. The body (b)
makes the human subject relational, contextual and embedded. With the body
(c) it becomes evident that “man” comes in two main types, male and female,
and trans, non-binary, etc. The acknowledgement of embodiment changes in
the second place our ideas about philosophical thinking. Philosophical think-
ing is embodied and therefore not neuter but “sexuate” (Irigaray), undermin-
ing philosophical conceptions of the subject that were traditionally considered
to be neuter although they were based on an image of the male and hence on
ideas about sexual difference. It therefore makes sense to ask what it means
to think philosophically as a man or as a woman without making essentialist
assumptions. What implications does the acknowledgement of embodied, sexu-
ate being have for our understanding of ourselves as philosophizing embodied
beings? In the third and final part of this article, Eugene Gendlin’s methood of
embodided thinking as “focusing” and the method of “Thinking at the Edge” as a
philosophical way of focusing will be introduced. These methods aid in assessing
the implicit knowledge and wisdom we have as embodied beings.
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