Practices: listening and cognitive empathy

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 recognised 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 professors of Philosophy, 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 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 we're clearly seeing the LLMs are much better at than us squishy humans who care about stuff!).

Donata Schoeller - https://www.donataschoeller.com/ - is Research Professor, Philosophy, at the University of Iceland, Iceland and Associate Professor at the University of Koblenz. She is a Principal Investigator, and Conceptual Director of “Freedom to make sense: Embodied, experiential Inquiry and Research,” and the Academic Director of the European Erasmus programmes Training Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding. She has researched and published extensively on embodied thinking, while developing international and interdisciplinary research and training cooperations on the topic. Recent publications: “Thinking at the edge in the context of embodied critical thinking: Finding words for the felt dimension of thinking within research,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2022, Close Talking: Erleben zu Sprache bringen, 2019, Saying What We Mean, with Ed Casey, 2017, Thinking Thinking, with Vera Saller, 2016.

Sigríður (Sigga) Þorgeirsdóttir - https://english.hi.is/staff/sigrthor - is a professor of philosophy at the University of Iceland. She is Principal Investigator of the “Freedom to make sense: Embodied, experiential Inquiry and Research” project, and one of the leaders of the “Training Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding” training programme. She specialises in the philosophy of the body, the philosophy of the environment, the philosophy of Nietzsche, feminist philosophy, and women in the history of philosophy. She is Chair of the Committee on gender issues of International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP) that sponsors the World Congress of Philosophy.

Useful Links:

Training Embodied Critical Thinking and Understanding (TECTU) 2024-2026: https://www.trainingect.com/

Freedom to Make Sense - Center of embodied, experiential and mindful research and education: https://makesense.hi.is/

Practicing Embodied Thinking in Research and Learning

Edited By Donata Schoeller, Sigridur Thorgeirsdottir, Greg Walkerden: 

https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-edit/10.4324/9781003397939/practicing-embodied-thinking-research-learning-donata-schoeller-sigridur-thorgeirsdottir-greg-walkerden