Chapter 5: Embodied Philosophy: My Ontological and Epistemological Grounding

Reflexivity lies at the heart of this thesis: I seek to understand to have knowledge of a particular way of knowing. There are echoes of this reflexivity in my literature review of embodied cognition, where I discussed attempts to think about how we think. This reflexive circle need not be 'vicious', in the sense of tying me into a knot of self-reference, if I apply the tools of phenomenology and hermeneutics. Phenomenology is fundamental to much of the work on embodied cognition (see, inter alia Gendlin, Varela, and Merleau-Ponty) and as I explain later, hermeneutics takes a central role in my methodology.