Exploring lived experience
Cognitive science from the first-person perspective

Online Course (5 ECT)

The program begins with an online course which consists of 12 webinars, taking place from March to May 2022. Each webinar provides lecture, inputs, audio-visual information, plus an interactive part with an international TECT expert, including discussions and/or exercises. Practices and working in groups and pairs will allow to experience a very learning-community. Teachers/trainers are come from all TECT partner universities and the Micro-phenomenology Lab.

​Interdisciplinary foundations of Embodied Critical Thinking:

• Introducing approaches to embodied cognition in philosophy and cognitive science
• The challenge of the first-person perspective and lived experience in the understanding of consciousness
• Mindfulness and Brain Modeling
• Artificial Intelligence and Embodied Thinking
• Environmental immersion and design thinking
• Introducing the Methods of TECT with a special emphasis on situated thinking in environmental context: “Focusing”, “Thinking-at-the-Edge”, “Reflexive Care”, “Close Talking”, “radical listening”, “Environmental Immersion”.

Schedule: The online course will take place on Tuesdays, 13:30-16:00 Central Time, from March 8th to June 7th. Brake 19th and 26th of April.   

Summer School (5 ECT)

… a call for transforming the style and values of the research community itself. Unless we accept that at this point in intellectual and scientific history some radical re-learning is necessary, we cannot hope to move forward and break the historic cycle rejection-fascination with consciousness in philosophy of mind and cognitive science. My proposal implies that every good student of cognitive science who is also interested in issues at the level of mental experience, must inescapably attain a level of mastery in phenomenological examination in order to work seriously with first-person accounts.” (Varela, 1996, pp. 346-347)

The summer school will address the question: What is it like to be conscious? We will examine the human mind from the first-person perspective – the perspective that is most common, most intimate, yet quite unfamiliar.
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Hands-on exploration of our experiential landscapes will be in the focus of the summer school:  We will learn about and apply various approaches of gathering and reporting on lived experience, such as micro-phenomenology, thinking at the edge and meditative self-inquiry.
 
The accompanying lectures will illustrate current efforts of positioning the contemplative practices and first-person research methodologies within the mosaic of the broader scope of cognitive science. The lectures will cover aspects of embodied, embedded, and affective cognition, as well as the neuroscience of consciousness, phenomenology, and epistemology. 

The the summer school, the programs second part, will take place June 13th to 18th, 2021, Center for Cognitive Science, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia (most likely). 

After the summer school, the students will

• be able to understand the place of contemplative and experiential first-person approaches within the broader scope of cognitive science,
• become more familiar with their own experiential landscapes,
• be able to understand the basics of a chosen first-person approach as a way of exploring consciousness. 

Summer School Teachers 

Prof. Urban Kordes - University of Ljubljana

Assist. Prof. Toma Strle - University of Ljubljana

Prof. Claire Petitmengin - The Micro-phenomenology Laboratory

Prof. Mike Sandbothe - University of Applied Science Jena

Prof. Donata Schoeller

Prof. Sigríður Þorgeirsdóttir - University of Iceland

Assist. prof. Ram Eisenberg - Technion Isreal Institute of Technology

Independent Project (5 ECT)

The independent projects are the final step in the TECT program and take place following the summer schools. They are pursued across the field of environment, design and/or philosophy and are supervised by a TECT teacher of the students / researcher’s choice. The projects are due in October 2021. ​