This groundbreaking work speaks from the frontiers of philosophy. In Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning, Eugene Gendlin examines the edge of awareness, where language emerges from nonlanguage. In moving back and forth between what is already verbalized and what is as yet unarticulated, he shows how experiencing functions in the transitions between one formulation and the next. A whole array of more than logical "characteristics" enables us to examine as well as to employ this new kind of thinking, which is not merely conceptual because it begins from the intricacy of felt meaning and returns to it again and again.

Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning addressed the unavoidable variety of conceptual formulations and other questions that have now become central.

Eugene Gendlin's contribution to the theory of language is the focus of this collection of essays edited by David Michael Levin. This compilation of critical studies—each followed by a comment from Gendlin himself—investigates how concepts grow out of experience, and explores relations between Gendlin's philosophy of language and experience and the philosophies of Wittgenstein, Dilthey, and Heidegger.

Eugene T. Gendlin (1926–2017) is increasingly recognized as one of the seminal thinkers of our era. Carrying forward the projects of American pragmatism and continental philosophy, Gendlin created an original form of philosophical psychology that brings new understandings of human experience and the life-world, including the “hard problem of consciousness.”
A Process Model, Gendlin’s magnum opus, offers no less than a new alternative to the dualism of mind and body. Beginning with living process, the body’s simultaneous interaction and identity with its environment, Gendlin systematically derives nonreductive concepts that offer novel and rigorous ways to think from within lived precision. In this way terms such as body, environment, time, space, behavior, language, culture, situation, and more can be understood with both great force and great subtlety.

Gendlin’s project is relevant to discussions not only in philosophy but in other fields in which life process is central—including biology, environmental management, environmental humanities, and ecopsychology. It provides a genuinely new philosophical approach to complex societal challenges and environmental issues.

The first collection of Eugene T. Gendlin’s groundbreaking essays in philosophical psychology, Saying What We Mean casts familiar areas of human experience, such as language and feeling, in a radically different light. Instead of the familiar scientific emphasis on what is conceptually explicit, Gendlin shows that the implicit also comprises a structure that can be made available for recognition and analysis.

Developing the traditions of phenomenology, existentialism, and pragmatism, Gendlin forges a new path that synthesizes contemporary evolutionary theory, cognitive psychology, and philosophical linguistics.