There is something significant about welcoming Kélina Gotman into the Sensing Earth programme. She is our first philosopher.
In May 2026, I had the pleasure of attending Kélina’s Inaugural Professorial Lecture at King’s College London. It was moving to listen to her wayfinding and to feel the sense of achievement and rich philosophical deciphering.
Kélina asks how thought happens through bodies, movement, risk, memory, and political life. This connects directly to the line I am following: how to return thought to the body, and the body to the landscape.
Joseph Campbell once described consciousness as a “secondary organ,” one that must serve the whole human being rather than place itself in command. The mind can separate us from the living world, but the body remains in contact with it, carrying a deeper intelligence.
Kélina’s workshop, To think slow when the world is burning, arrives so that we may consider the next act while standing in the midst of the “illusion of limitless freedom.” It offers a space to slow down, to think carefully, and to ask what kind of freedom remains possible when the world around us demands speed, performance, and extraction.
Her new book, What is a Thoughtful Life?, is also being published this year. The workshop offers a rare chance to meet Kélina at this moment and ask her questions about the book, her work, and what it means to think slowly when everything around us demands speed.
For the Centre of Ecological Philosophy, this feels like a vital step closer to forging an ecological philosophy for the 21st century.
I hope you can join us for this occasion.
We are delighted to welcome her.
Daisy Green Holland Park
Sunday 28 June
12 to 2pm
To coincide with the publication of Kélina Gotman’s What is a thoughtful life?, this workshop will engage with thinking about how we do the work, the play, the swerving, the climbing around and falling off cliffs’ edges labour of thinking, when everything around calls us to action, to speed. Is thinking slowly an act of resistance of a sort? What does it entail? What histories of thinking about thought might we rest with, rest upon, move through, hang out with for a while?
How do we do thinking as a sort of ‘action of contemplation’ (in Hannah Arendt’s terms), aligned with meditation practices though distinct in ways, and as a practice of living, an arts of life (in the terms of Greco-Roman philosophers and many more in their wake). Participants will be invited to come to the workshop equipped with an image, an object, a practice that always allows them to pause, or sometimes; that gives permission, or so it feels, to take it easy, to step away, or step into whatever it is that they are wrestling with – because this is no easy task, this wrangling with thought as it moves; but it is a necessary and an urgent one also – it will equip us better, more fully, to remain alert, to cut through, to craft another future. - K.G.
No posts
Comments
Nothing yet. Say the first thing.
Sign in to join the conversation.