Knowing our Ways About in the World

This anthology focuses on "practical" forms and expressions of knowledge, like thinking through artistic media or by crafting things out of materials. The ten chapters follow and review various tracks in conceptions of contemporary knowledge, exploring human knowledge and experience from the perspective of human activities or practices, professional, artistic, domestic, or whatever. A guiding idea is that human knowledge seldom, perhaps never, fits into the traditional dualism between thinking and doing.

The chapters are written by philosophers and musicians - some with a double experience as artists and theoreticians. The themes are philosophical, but above all, they touch on questions that are essential for how we understand ourselves as thinking and playing bodies, indeed as parts of nature. The book does not propose one single "theory of knowledge" but steps towards a more diverse and open attitude to the meaning of knowledge.

We hope that the texts will be of interest and useful in both discipline-based and professional education: in philosophy, art schools, teacher education, and in other programmes where tacit and practical knowledge are essential for the (future) practitioners. It is possible to independently read, and profit from, most of the chapters.