The Affective, Social and Bodily Situation

Abstract

This chapter deals with the affective, social and bodily situation of learning and teaching philosophy, starting with a discussion of the views articulated by both students and professional philosophers in the interviews and answers to the questionnaire on attitudes to studying philosophy. The discussions of women students’ “love” or “passion” for philosophy and of the dynamics of alienation from philosophy lead to an examination of the alienation related to students’ social class, raceand sexual orientation. As we saw earlier, feminist pedagogy has typically tried to surpass the idea of reason that operates as separate from the feeling, sensing and moving body. In this chapter, I discuss the aspect of the senses and how they are and could be integrated in processes of learning more comprehensively. At the end of the chapter, I describe two summer schools. The first of these is the Icelandic one, Philosophy of the Body, which examined the possibility of teaching philosophy “through the body”. The second is the Danish summer school titled Feminist Political Philosophy.