Participatory Literature

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From DAVID HILES, Department of Psychology, De Montfort University, Leicester, UK

"What I am calling the participatory turn isn’t very recent at all. Its origins go back to ancient tradition, and is at the centre of much of Eastern philosophy. In Western thought it can be traced through the writings of Pascal and Nietzsche, and is clearly central to a nondualistic position that emerges from the work of Husserl and Heidegger, and has been gathering momentum ever since. Table 1 below sketches out the emergence and progress of this turn."

A Selection of the Participatory Literature (Table 1)

• Ancient tradition • Blaise Pascal (1670) (esprit de finesse) • Friedrich Nietzsche (1882) (earth; spirit/body) • Edmund Husserl (1913) (phenomenology) • Martin Heidegger (1927/1962) (dwelling; readiness-to-hand) • Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1945/1962) (embodiment) • Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) (meaning as practice) • Paul Tillich (1955) (participation and knowledge) • Michael Polanyi (1958) (indwelling; participative realism) • Marjorie Grene (1966) (the knower and the known) • Hubert Dreyfus (1972) (coping, development of a practice) • J. J. Gibson (1976) (affordances) • Morris Berman (1981) (participatory consciousness) • John Searle (1983) (background of know-how, intentionality) • William Poteat (1985) (“mindbodily grounded in the world”)