Experiments and Forms

Abstract

These three studies make different cases for what they more or less explicitly regard as the experimental nature of thinking, roughly defined as the human mind’s endless attempt to make sense of the world and its place within it. Anchored in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, they aim to demonstrate that how we think matters far more than what we think. Hence their focus on method, process, becoming, and relationality, and their rather extreme rejection of all things “fixed”: truth claims, argumentative and narrative structures, philosophical systems, forms, and subsequently formalism in general. Correspondingly, these scholars prefer a form of writing that is experimental, or always open for revision. Harvey, Grimstad, and LaRocca alike admirably put themselves to the test – in very different ways and to different degrees – as they attempt to express the dynamic movement of thinking with the written word.