Arno Böhler/Susanne Valerie Granzer (Eds), The Flavor of Thinking: Philosophy in Artistic Research – Artistic Research in Philosophy, mdwPress, Vienna, 2026, 292 pages
Arno Böhler and Susanne Valerie Granzer’s collection entitled The Flavor of Thinking is a 21st-century engagement with one of Western philosophy’s oldest problems: the (perceived) tension between “thinking” and “feeling”. European thought since Plato has been defined by an opposition between poetry and philosophy—Mythos and Logos—and Böhler frames this volume’s nine contributions by leading thinkers spanning philosophy, the arts, and the physical sciences as responses to this problematic. A unifying theme is that philosophy, for all its aspiration to objective truth, remains constrained by the concepts and metaphors (which Böhler calls “images-of-thought”) of its practitioners. The true work of philosophy includes and requires the techniques of art, which revitalise Logos and expand our image-of-thought beyond what we can already say. As Soumyabrata Choudhary puts it in his chapter, poetry in particular (and Mythos more broadly) is about saying the “unthinkable.” One would be mistaken to think that this is only an abstract problem. Tanja Traxler, in her essay with the renowned quantum physicist Reinhold Bertlmann, argues that our very encounter with reality “evades intuition” but is shaped by the images and concepts through which we understand it. Art, philosophy, and science therefore co-evolve by providing each other with different ways of seeing the world in which we are embedded. Arts-based philosophy, however, is not merely descriptive; it is also generative. Violetta Waibel explores the parallels between Kant and Hölderlin as each sought to “sing a new world” of perpetual peace. Avital Ronell argues that philosophy’s value lies not in the precision of its propositions but in how we apply it to the “living struggle” to make sense of our lives. Veronika Reichl illustrates this struggle through a series of vignettes of artists reading philosophers, showing philosophy as a praxis in which meaning is not “found” but rather made through the effort of transforming ideas into action. As Böhler says with a nod to Deleuze, artistic research “does not just duplicate reality…. It releases virtual possibilities” that were already latent in the background of our “hearts.” To Valerie Granzer, the artist-philosopher is a “wise fool” who departs from convention in order to speak the truth that others cannot (yet) hear. In the same spirit, this volume can be viewed as nine rich attempts to think the unthinkable—not just to understand, but to create the world in which we move.
