General presentation (what is this about?)
Thinking While Walking: The Living Legacy of the Peripatetic School
The Peripatetic school, founded by Aristotle in the 4th century BCE, was one of the major philosophical traditions of the ancient world. Its name comes from the Greek word peripatētikós (περιπατητικός), meaning “walking about,” and refers to Aristotle’s practice of teaching while walking with his students in the shaded walkways of the Lyceum, the school he established in Athens around 336 BCE. More than a mere anecdote, this embodied gesture expresses a view of philosophy as something that unfolds in movement, in rhythm with the body and the world around it.The Lyceum emphasized empirical observation, systematic classification, and a broad scope of inquiry: Aristotle and his students collected plants, animals, and data; they wrote on logic, ethics, biology, politics, metaphysics, and more. It was a vision of knowledge as diverse, interconnected, and grounded in lived experience.
By the 6th century CE, with the suppression of pagan philosophical schools under the Christianized Roman Empire, the institution disappeared. Beyond its intellectual content (that survived some more centuries and up to today somehow), however, the Peripatetic tradition left behind a subtler, less formal but deeply enduring legacy: the idea that thought is not purely mental—it is kinetic, bodily, and spatial. The image of Aristotle teaching while walking is more than symbolic. It points to a conception of thinking as movement in the world, not isolation from it. At the PCP, we are more interested in this heritage, the “soft” one, the symbolic one, traceable, among others, in:
- Jean-Jacques Rousseau claimed that he could only think when walking. In his Reveries of the Solitary Walker, the act of walking becomes a method for reflection and self-exploration.
- Immanuel Kant, known for his systematic rigor, took daily walks so punctual that his neighbors were said to set their clocks by his passing.
- Friedrich Nietzsche, a fierce critic of sedentary philosophy, wrote many of his works while hiking through the Alps. For him, “only thoughts reached by walking have value.” In his book The Wanderer and His Shadow, he explores the figure of the thinking wanderer—restless, unsheltered, alive to the world.
- Walter Benjamin, in his writings on the flâneur, turned this idea toward the modern city. The flâneur is a solitary walker through urban space, a philosopher-observer drifting through the flows and textures of everyday life. The walk, in this context, becomes a way of reading the world—an encounter with time, history, and social structures unfolding in the street.
- Michel Serres wrote about the body as a vessel of knowledge.
- Frédéric Gros, in A Philosophy of Walking, shows how walking opens a space of slowness and attention that resists the acceleration of modern life.
- Tim Ingold has argued that walking is not simply a means of locomotion but a mode of engagement with the environment, a form of dwelling and understanding.
The Peripatetic school may no longer exist as an institution, but its deepest lesson—that thinking is a living, moving, embodied activity—still walks with us.
The Peripatetic Philosophy and the PCP
At the PCP, we are particularly drawn to this other kind of inheritance—the “soft” legacy of the Peripatetic tradition: not the institutional or doctrinal core, but the symbolic and embodied gesture of thinking in motion. We find it both vital and generative, especially in a time when philosophy risks becoming overly textual, sedentary, and individualistic.
This is why we are exploring alternative philosophical practices that embrace movement, collectivity, and inclusion—not just as themes but as modes of doing philosophy. One such experiment involves a collective reading exercise conducted while walking: Peripatetic readings is a shared reading aloud, where the group walks together, allowing the rhythm of the body and the text to guide each other. The group pauses whenever the text does—at punctuation marks, at silences—and resumes movement with the flow of language. The reading stops as well, whenever the group stops walking (traffic light, intersection, ambiental interruptions…).
This performative gesture is not merely symbolic. It invites us to engage with thinking in a peripatetic sense: embodied, relational, and dynamic. It resists the habitual reliance on note-taking or seated discussion, and instead opens space for another kind of attention, one rooted in presence, pace, and shared breath. We are not walking to “illustrate” a philosophical idea—we are letting walking become part of the thinking itself.
In doing so, we hope to renew an ancient intuition: that thought moves, and that when we move with it, together, something else becomes possible.
This is why we are exploring alternative philosophical practices that embrace movement, collectivity, and inclusion—not just as themes but as modes of doing philosophy. One such experiment involves a collective reading exercise conducted while walking: Peripatetic readings is a shared reading aloud, where the group walks together, allowing the rhythm of the body and the text to guide each other. The group pauses whenever the text does—at punctuation marks, at silences—and resumes movement with the flow of language. The reading stops as well, whenever the group stops walking (traffic light, intersection, ambiental interruptions…).
This performative gesture is not merely symbolic. It invites us to engage with thinking in a peripatetic sense: embodied, relational, and dynamic. It resists the habitual reliance on note-taking or seated discussion, and instead opens space for another kind of attention, one rooted in presence, pace, and shared breath. We are not walking to “illustrate” a philosophical idea—we are letting walking become part of the thinking itself.
In doing so, we hope to renew an ancient intuition: that thought moves, and that when we move with it, together, something else becomes possible.