Editorial: Body as a Performing Experiment: Steps Towards Practical Knowledge as a Philosophical Issue

Abstract

This thematic dossier contains a selection of lectures given by teaching participants at Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj during the Blended Intensive Program “Practical Knowledge in Philosophy: Affectivity, Skills, and Knowing-How,” which took place in April and May 2023 and 2024.

The program aimed to highlight a kind of philosophy that, beyond its theoretical impulses, is born out of the need to respond to immediate problems before reflecting on complex structures of reality; it prefers to describe concrete relations to things and everyday activities before theorizing about the validity of some universal laws. Practical knowledge is nonetheless a type of knowledge that can account for its foundation and relate to theoretical discourse. But at its core, practical knowledge remains a mystery of the body situated in the world. The irreducibility of practical knowledge situates the agent in the world, illuminating its embodied dimensions and coordinates. Understanding practical knowledge requires combining different approaches: phenomenological, analytical, and historical-philosophical.