but how we understand knowledge - and how we understand (and deepen and extend) who "we" are. I find her description of her project as "philosophical fieldwork" very congenial - it describes much of what I do in reading and teaching, and why. I especially like that she explicitly links and likens it to non-academic practices:[P]hilosophical fieldwork - thinking with others out and about in the agora and then reflecting in solitude with them in mind - is not about learning philosophical systems and applying them, nor is it about trying to derive a theory from experience. It is neither deductive nor inductive, nor is it held within any other single logic. ... In Simone Weil's sense, it is about being attentive. Such attentiveness is philosophical also because it entails listening for meanings and, as philosophers do, for moves - for what is being done conceptually, as well as for what someone is wanting to mean.
As in reading philosophy, one is then trying to comprehend a (re)framing of available meanings, a task that requires attention to each word, each line, each section within the context of the entire work, itself read within its multiple contexts. In this process of reading, listening, opening to take in what is going on here, philosophical readers, like effective political actors, attentive parents, good teachers, artful psychological and pastoral counselors, listen for how what is said coheres, and does not; how it is familiar, and strange; how it invokes and suggests, and suppresses things not directly said. They listen for recurring images and for what sorts of relations those images privilege (mechanical? organic? rigid? fluid? oppositional? transactional?). They pick up on language use and what it suggests: why the colloquialism here, the technical term there? Why that rhythm in those sentences, another in these? ...
There is nothing trivial or 'only' theoretical about how people in their daily lives make sense together, and this ongoing process is particularly significant when we are trying to make sense of who and what "we" are, of who and what "they" are. ... (5)
Gives me goosebumps, not just as an educator but even more as an ongoing student of life! I heard Minnich speak at a conference of the Association for Integrative Studies a few years ago and came out energized. Glad I'm finally reading her book!
