Cultivating the Philosophical Imagination: Experiencing the Limits of Language with Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Habermas

In this essay we present three arts-based and game-like participatory simulations that are designed to promote inquiry, curiosity, and play as students embody and enact otherwise opaque philosophical concepts. These three simulations invite students to experientially participate in the philosophical insights of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Michel Foucault, and Jurgen Habermas regarding a deep but essential philosophical issue: the limits of language in expressing meaning, truth, and experience. Each thinker offers a unique perspective on the limitations of understanding through language, and thus each participatory simulation yields a unique experiential encounter of these perspectives for students. These experiences are supplemented by a curriculum of philosophical imagination in which students also deliberatively discuss their experiences and pragmatically design their own participatory simulations to convey relevant perspectives on the limits of language from other philosophers or from their own perspective. These participatory simulations are based on the premise that philosophical imagination works best with encounters that link concepts and experience. In other words, the cultivation of philosophical imagination is connecting the enactment of the concept while simultaneously learning it. To describe the concept of philosophical imagination, first we define participatory simulations and philosophically ground the concept in an experiential aesthetic attitude. This provides the groundwork to then briefly describe previous attempts to shift philosophy away from pure textual analysis to a more experience based style of production. Finally we reveal three participatory simulations that are designed to evoke and demonstrate the cultivation of philosophical imagination within the milieu of an aesthetically minded, experience-based performance of philosophy.